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Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

There are lots of reasons why people don't do it today, I didn't list all of them because it's easy to come up with them as indeed you've done here.

But again, note there's nothing fundamental about this problem. People routinely download and run arbitrary code on their desktops, laptops and smartphones, and most servers don't ever do that. If servers are less secure than web browsers it's a matter of effort put into the implementations, not something fundamental about human nature or computers.

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>But again, note there's nothing fundamental about this problem. People routinely download and run arbitrary code on their desktops, laptops and smartphones...

But isn't that in fact the fundamental problem we're talking about? You get security without knowledge exactly if you give up all control over the device. What's the point of "running" your own server if all control you have left is that you can physically smash it to pieces?

Yes you can take control, but only to the degree to which you acquire the knowledge to keep it secure. I think this is a very fundamental trade-off.

I don't think giving up control is necessary to achieve security. Modern web browsers are pretty secure (even if web apps themselves aren't) and yet I can browse to whatever websites I want. There's a competitive marketplace of browsers to ensure that if one provider goes nuts I can switch to another.

There are lots of different angles through which to make progress here. I don't think we should be defeatist about it.

> There's a competitive marketplace of browsers

There isn't. There are exactly three independent browser vendors:

- Google with Chrome. Chrome dominates the market to such an extent that Google pushes through its internal APIs as "standards"

- Apple with Safari. They flat out refuse to implement many of Chrome's shenanigans, and also have issues with priorities and funding

- Mozilla with Firefox. Much like Safari, they are increasingly refusing to implement Chrome's shenanigans. But Firefox is rapidly declining in relevance, and will be on the brink of extinction within a few years (it already has at best ~150-199 million users)

Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Brave. At least 5. Also, whipping together a simple browser is quite easy given the embedding APIs available. It's good enough to make the point.

> Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Brave. At least 5.

Chrome, Edge and Brave are the same engine

> whipping together a simple browser is quite easy

Slapping lipstick on a pig doesn't make it a different animal.

Yes, there are superficial differences like watching ads in Brave to earn their "coin", but it doesn't make them a truly different/competitive browser.

Similarity of the code base doesn't matter, because we're talking about what sort of things a browser maker who "goes nuts" might do, like trying to switch off SSL or upload everything you type to their servers. In which case it's easy to patch that stuff out and/or just build a new shell around the underlying (fixed) rendering engine.

That's the reason browser makers open sourced their renderers in the first place - exactly to help the web be more decentralized. And it works. If tomorrow Chrome blocks a website because it mis-gendered someone, OK, I'll switch to Safari. And if they do the same thing I'll switch to Edge. Etc. In extremis, I'll make my own browser based on the open code and sell it to people who really hate censorship. There are lots of ways to respond to this type of 'attack' but they don't rely on cryptography (I can't think of a cryptographic algorithm that could stop such a thing). Instead it's decentralization that fixes it. That's my point.

Ah. Now I got you. Agreed

> Instead it's decentralization that fixes it.

That's FOSS. You can have FOSS using centralized, federated or decentralized protocols, I don't see a direct connection between the two.

To go back a little, Moxie's main point has always been about the advantages of centralized protocols vs decentralized ones, not about FOSS vs proprietary software. In practice, he seems to favor (at least for Signal) centralized protocols and FOSS.

It doesn't have to be open source. The same argument applied when most browsers were proprietary, it was just less strong because it was so much harder to create a competitor. There was still competition though, and a decentralized network of servers (you can think of links as edges in a p2p network).

Browsers based on chromium like brave also refuse to enable chrome shenanigans.

Servers are directly attackable over the internet, unlike browsers :) Browsers are a very well hardened target at this point after decades of attacks. The fact that browsers still see exploitation, despite the money spent on their security by large well funded teams like those at google and Microsoft, shows the difficulty of securing applications.

Where servers have a direct correlation to money (e.g. if they are involved in processing crypto payments), there's a direct financial gain to exploitation, increasing the likelihood of attack.

(IMHO) After the first wave of worms compromising home users web3 servers, it would be pretty hard to convince people that it was a good idea to do it again

> Servers are directly attackable over the internet, unlike browsers :) Browsers are a very well hardened target at this point after decades of attacks.

OTOH, browsers are expected to have an ever-expanding array of capabilities on behalf of the end user, which leads to ever-increasing code complexity and size. Moreover, breaking into any individual browser instances nets you almost nothing, so the interesting security issues are the ones that apply across the board (allowing you to do really large-scale blackhat stuff).

Servers, on the other hand, can be relatively static targets in terms of functionality and code, can use modular code design in a way that is harder for browsers to pull off, and have been much more hardened than browsers over time for the simple reason that even a single server break in has way more implications than a single browser break in.

I don't know how much money I'd put on this wager, but I'd bet that getting into a random nginx install is much, much harder than getting into a random browser instance.

oh I'd absolutely agree that a random nginx install is likely to be better than many browsers, but nginx has had years and years of attacks directed at it, so will be a very well hardened target.

What I was thinking of, when looking back at the article is that the web3 space will need new servers with new likely novel protocols to support it. when the code is written and released to be run in user's homes, would I expect that to be better than a browser like chrome or firefox.... no, I would not :)

> oh I'd absolutely agree that a random nginx install is likely to be better than many browsers, but nginx has had years and years of attacks directed at it, so will be a very well hardened target.

That would seem to be an existence proof that servers in the home is just a matter of design priorities then, no?

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