Distributed Everything
medium.com
medium.com
No, damnit. IRC is logged, double logged, and then has all of the logs shipped offsite to be engraved in bedrock. IRC servers, because of their history in pirated content, are very heavily controlled by law enforcement. A huge number of raids have been carried out around the world based off what people have said on IRC.
IRC is very much not the solution to the widespread monitoring of facebook.
End-to-end encryption is a requirement for secure communication. Anything less is the same as scribbling on paper and tossing it to the recipient, and hoping nobody catches it on the way.
To take it a step further, end to end encryption is only good when you can protect your private key and passphrase... All you have to do is take a look at Rakshasha (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRpilXPv8pU) for a practical example of how compromised we all really are.
For example, if you want to convince someone to become a vegan, which path is more likely to succeed:
Omnivore => Vegan
Omnivore => Vegetarian => Vegan
Omnivore => No red meat => Only fish => Vegetarian => VeganD(Omnivore => Vegan) > D(Omnivore => No red meat) + D(No red meat => Only fish) + D(Only fish => Vegetarian) + D(Vegetarian => Vegan)
Often intermediate steps are significantly easier to implement than just implementing the end result. It's the same reason for which people tend to break big scary tasks into sequence of many easier ones.
They hadn't thought about the ethics of meat before, when they did, they chose to be vegan.
So it turns out (in my experience) telling rational people "do the thing that makes sense, even if it's a little extreme" is much more likely to result in the most extreme change of behavior. But we're deep into anecdotal/psychological theory land here, so I claim no authority beyond N=30 vegans.
The beauty of this is that if it were developed as a unified system, minimal tinkering would be necessary for a layman user. A preinstalled, auto-updating OS would do the heavy lifting - we're aiming for a situation where a bare minimum of configuration becomes necessary. Once configuration is done, all the user needs to know to reach _all_ of their data is a URL and a password. The server itself can (ultimately) become the identity service for all remote accounts.
It has a straightforward progression of development and adoption, too. Create a web app that kludges together some messaging, identity, and storage solutions - the stuff needed to do this at an 80% level already exists, for the most part. Package it into an image installable on a VPS. Subsequently, make native apps for the client devices, or adapt existing ones, to match the experience of Dropbox/GTalk/etc. Last, build a hosting service or sell hardware tailored around simplifying the configuration process, providing backups, etc. As you get further into the adoption process, more and more possibilities to reclaim data open up, since you'll hit the critical masses necessary to push new protocols into the system.
My viewpoint is that to do this properly, we need to think through things from the ground up with privacy and security built in, otherwise I don't see it as that much better than current systems (you'd just be getting the illusion of security/ownership/etc). It's really not the kind of system that lends itself to the mantra of 'move fast and break things'. Such software would also have to be open-source (to a large extent) so that others can verify security or people can deploy it to their own machines (I'd personally prefer a hosted version, knowing that I can migrate off if I want to).
The question is what kinds of business model can one build around such a product. Would you be willing to pay for such a service? If so, how much and what features would you expect from an early version? Would an app-store model make sense to you?
In any case, if you or anyone else is interested in finding out more about the work (esp alpha releases), feel free to drop me an email (in my profile).
> from the ground up with privacy and security built in
> I'm finding that other folks are thinking along similar lines
> (but taking different approaches)
* ArkOS [https://arkos.io]
* FreedomBox [https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/]
Seems to me that something like this can be built faster if resources were combined in some way. I guess the tough thing here is that people seem to have different visions as to what the end product would look like. Perhaps effort would be best expended by collaborating on a solid, secure "base" image which could then be forked as needed.
---
My ideal system would:
* Be open source.
* Be built with a security mindset from the ground up.
* Have some sort of full system/drive encryption.
* Run on something like a Raspberry Pi with local storage attached.
* Have one identity per-person for social use (public/private blog, private chat, private audio/video calling, private email, private sharing of photos, videos, private VRM [1])
* Have the ability to spawn off anonymous identities that would not be traceable back to your IP/device for anonymous publishing/chat/email where required.
* Be easy enough that I can give one to my parents, create accounts for them, show them once how to use it and then forget about it.
* Have all of this backed up through some distributed, encrypted system like SpaceMonkey [2].
* A possible late addition for mass adoption - the software could "trick" users into doing things they shouldn't (in a controlled way) and then after they've done this, tell them that what could have happened would have been quite serious (such as giving some . This would lead to more careful behaviour in general by all that use the software, which could only be a good thing.
Anyone know of such a system in the works? I'd love to contribute.
[1] VRM - Vendor Relationship Management. Keeps track of who you've shared your personal details with, generates a unique email for each "connection" (where connections can be you telling someone to flick you an email or you signing up to a site) in order to cut off communication at your convenience, not theirs. Sharing of personal details (such as name, birthday etc.) for sites that require it would initially be done directly, eventually moving to a system where this software IS the proxy by which third parties communicate with you (physical mail, messages, phone calls etc.). No more spam!
Email File sync Identity provision (e.g. BrowserID) Quassel IRC (or equivalent or better two-tier chat/IM) Bitcoin wallet
And of those, I think the most pressing is the identity provision, because it's a "too many accounts" solution that doesn't necessarily disrupt existing workflows. But adding more of those quickly turns it into a compelling offering.
Initially, this could look like any other cloud-based service and even be freemium, while keeping the code open; Wordpress got the model for this pretty much exactly right(albeit the code itself was never very secure).
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FederatedVoIP
Work in Fedora 19 has gone into making federation work out of the box - it's always existed for SIP and XMPP but generally required extra configuration because it was possible to run your own server yet still basically be beholden to a provider, which is very much not the default with SMTP.
(Of course, that's why SMTP is so horribly broken with regard to spam, so the pendulum swings both ways)
Anyway … While there is certainly excitement in the world of the distributed and it's very much worth encouraging, writing an article which essentially calls 90 percent of the public stupid for not knowing HTML seems counterproductive to your ultimate goals.
Also: "If you want to use the Internet in 2013, you need to pick up some tech skills." That sounds like wishful thinking and assumes that the internet is made up of Hacker News or Reddit users. This is a great community, but I'll let you know right now that the wider internet is nothing like this.
If I'm trying to talk to my grandfather online, there's a good chance that he doesn't know a thing about putting together a VPS. But there's a great chance he knows email—a fully distributed system that isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
You want to encourage the world to go distributed? Meet them halfway. Offer up solutions like email, which actually offer up some helpful things for the button-pressers. Because being hostile to the users of the world is counterproductive and will get you nowhere.
IRC was full of non-technical people in the 90s. #teenchat was consistently the most popular channel on a number of networks! IRC used to be filled with the sort of inane chatter that seams to be the bread-and-butter of services like Twitter and Facebook. :)
Farmers, teachers, tech workers, school kids, housewives, single mums, people living on poxy islands with nothing to do but with dial up and office workers whiling away the working day.
I think it's mostly due to a different communication culture, not technical ineptitude.
Is Facebook really that much easier to understand than e-mail, usenet, and IRC? Or is Facebook just better at marketing?
When my Mom wanted to get on to Facebook there was definitely a learning curve. She had to be shown by my sister and myself how to do everything... sign up, post photos, learn about what a "comment" was, how to add people, manage things... Facebook is quite a complex piece of software. I don't necessarily think that Facebook requires less technical skills than decentralized services.
In my opinion, the reason Facebook is popular across all demographics is because it is based on real identities. Real names, real faces. Before Facebook the Internet fully embraced anonymity and this requirement to partake in role playing, having an avatar that was separate from yourself, was confusing and a little bit terrifying to older people. My mom would always wonder WHO I was talking to on the Internet. They could have been a murderer, or a kidnapper! If you can't see their face or know their name, she thought, how could they be trusted? My parents are NOT on Twitter and will probably never be for similar reasons. It is too weird for them to think about having a separate personality. They weren't stage actors or used to the public eye because they were raised in a very different media environment. The distributed Internet turns us all in to celebrities. Facebook keeps things the way they were but allows people to benefit from the same abilities to publish, just to a seemingly private group of close friends and family.
Facebook, in my opinion, is a nice little service to hold your hand while introducing you to this very different new world that is emerging.
On the topic of marketing and technology... I'm just going to use Sun and Java as an example because I was recently talking about this and it's fresh on my mind. Sun did an amazing job of marketing Java on the Internet. In the mid 90s every other web page had that little Java mascot on it. They took the Internet and ran with it, big time. There were much better and much easier tools around but their creators didn't do enough to evangelize their benefits. You gotta get out there and sell this stuff to people.
It took open source software a LONG time to realize this. Products will wither and die without proper marketing and advertising, no matter how much better they are.
"Great marketing and decent technology gives you a better bandwagon than great technology and decent marketing", as said by Ralph Johnson at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JavaVsSmalltalk - which BTW, is a great little wiki full of interesting conversations from a bunch of old timers and academics.
I could spend time learning how to make a good latte or mocha at home, but right now I don't want to; I have better things to do. And in the short term, what I could manage by myself probably won't be as good what I get poured at the small shop down the street.
Similarly, everyone who wants to write online could learn all the web tech, but using Medium is, yes, easier, but also probably results in a higher quality product (in both presentation and especially distribution) than what they will manage on their own in the short term. There is expertise that's gone into Medium that many writers don't have or want to acquire (yet).
Sure censorship can be an issue, but I don't believe that these skills are becoming impossible to pick up when they become needed, as he seems to imply. Use Medium or Svbtle or whatever while they work and move off when they actually become a problem, or simple when your time and interests change enough that you actually want to pick up web development (or espresso brewing) expertise.
I don't understand why the author thinks Medium is already Starbucks just cause of its pedigree -- if Jerry Baldwin or Gordon Bowker (Ev Williams) started a new coffee shop, partially cause they were dissatisfied with what Starbucks (Blogger) had become, I think I'd be willing to give it a try at least. But maybe that makes me foolish.
if you use a centralized service, your choice of service impacts your readers. you are making decisions for your whole network, not just for yourself. the problem isn't htat some services suck, the problem is that when you choose a service that sucks, you are implicitly promoting that shittiness through the network effect. decentralization solves this.
Poogle Glus, F*book, Shitter are tools for managing attention. Who is paying attention to you? Random visitors or people from your address/contact book? How easy is it to get? On Facebook everyone can get a few likes. On old websites you dig through analytics to figure out if someone liked it.
It seems hopeless to spread new tools for publishing and uncensored networks when there's little commercial advantage to them. They'll be used by furry porn enthusiasts and freedom fighters. But you still have to fix the problems of discoverability and attention for regular users to adopt them en masse.
A distributed web that would be used by enough people still has to have all the features people came to love in FB/Poogle+/Twitter/Google Search Bubble. Many freedom fighters ignore this reality and seem nostalgic for the bare bones sites of the 90's but easier to publish.
Today's centralized networks are hacks that exist because the fundamental design of the web was ill conceived in the 90's.
* Businesses. Well, when I want to contact a business, I type its-name-dot-com and get there, usually without fail. Such sites get indexed pretty well, too, so googling for a relevant thing shows them.
* "Top bloggers". They usually maintain their own websites anyway. If not, services like blogger.com and medium.com are OK for them, unless what they post is highly controversial. I suppose they don't get most of their traffic from search engines, but rather from links posted by other people.
* Small-time bloggers aspiring to become top bloggers. I think the reasoning above holds for them.
* People wanting to socialize. Well, yes, they'd like some attention, but probably not from random people who found them on 5th page of search results by a keyword. Here "friend of a friend" contacts usually shine; a P2P network can easily provide them, as social sites try to do (but only friendfeed.com and nightweb.net seem to do enough of that). Otherwise you usually just give a link to your feed to friends and/or relatives.
Commercial advantage is not the only possible engine of creation. E.g. Linux had little commercial advantage in its early years. Eventually, of course, an open technology might be embraced and used for commercial advantage, which is good (lower prices, more openness).
But many people will and do use it for their own advantage and enjoyment of non-commercial nature. Talking with friends (securely and without fear of censorship) may be one of such things.
Quite a common theme on HN.
Also having to know the name of a business to search for them biases everything towards big players. Good luck remembering these http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_500.pn... when you need them.
Impossible to remember app/startup names are one of the failures of the web's design. And the design of computers in general. When I need contacts or video chat I shouldn't have to memorize brands like Facetwitter or Skype, only contacts and video chat. New players that improve on those services can live under those tags.
Top bloggers and news services are adopting content farm tactics because that's the model that fits the web. So journalism/news that the web was supposed to liberate from censorship and centralization are declining in quality and usefulness because of the current web's design pays them through ad impressions.
Commercial advantage of a new model for the web has to be significant and decentralization could be a feature but I don't think THE feature. For Linux customization, price reduction and feature parity were THE feature. In the early days it didn't have feature parity. A new model getting feature parity with the current web seems like a harder task.
Plus, using names like 'Shitter' and 'F*book' made me discredit your argument rather quick, personally. What's next, is 'Micro$oft' also keeping you down? Or would you rather everyone create their own OS?
On another note, IRC is a safe-haven? That's fascinating news.
(Ratified in 1913 during the heyday of the Progressives, popular election of the Senator, turning it into a stuffy mini-House instead of representing the states by virtue of being elected by state legislatures.)
See http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/06/a-little-story-a... for verification. And note that while he was obvious and egregious, he was not alone. Look up William Lorimer for another example.
Are you happy with what our now nearly all powerful central government is doing and what everyone can easily extrapolate for the future? (Well, until it runs out of money, then the real fun begins.)
At which point in the process did this happen? The Civil War and Reconstruction, when the federal government took power from the states and abolished slavery? Or the Civil Rights Act, when the federal government took power from the states and abolished Jim Crow?
So far it seems like a pretty democratic system, and the laws tend to be much better, and with a lot more common sense than the ones being passed in US right now. But I'd be really wary about making it anymore centralized than it is.
Centralized rule is usually less beneficial, to say the least. Besides adding another layer of bureaucrats that need to be fed, it removes diversity. If, for instance, you think that legalization of marijuana in Netherlands is a good thing, imagine a EC directive that overrlues this decision.
The most historically successful of surviving democracies, Switzerland (850 years of largely uninterrupted democracy) is hugely decentralized, with most decisions made by voting or referenda on municipal or cantonal level. Not coincidentally, it sports huge differences in local laws: e.g. such a basic thing as women suffrage took 25 years to be gradually accepted in all cantons.
If you want a strongly centralized, standardized government, take a look at USSR (late) or China (quite alive).
Don't get caught up with the grass always being greener, we can both be doing better.
- Much of our legal system is now amended in Brussels, rather than London. This should be fairly obvious but the UK != Belgium != Finland != Lithuania, and making sweeping laws across all of the above can/has caused some serious issues.
- We were lucky not to have moved over to the Euro, as currently France and Germany are being lumbered with the task of keeping the currency afloat amid financial meltdowns in Greece, Italy, and Spain. France and Germany caught the short straws here.
- It costs a lot of money to stay in the EU - it's difficult to get exact numbers but between 6 and 14 billion GBP per year are the figures I've seen.
- The European legal system can block the UK government from making rulings, which has both practical and political implications. In the widely-publicised extradition case of Abu Hamza (a known islamic fundamentalist, supporter of Al-Qaeda and general dick), the UK moved to extradite him to the USA to face trial but this was blocked by the European court (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/08/abu-hamza-human-rig...).
Now the EU has its benefits too which should be weighed against, but let me just emphasise that it's not all rosy.
[full disclosure: voted liberal democrats]
[edit: formatting list]
The internet was more distributed and protocols were way more flexible. Needed something weird? Write your own protocol. Who cares? It's all just TCP/IP.
The beginnings of this problem was people started viewing websites as "locations". They are not. They are simply addressable computers that return html data. They're no more a location than the ether is a location.
An entire commerce system was built around rent-taking of folks as they showed up at your location. This means: game over. The internet is a content game played over http and you or somebody else pays for the content. The rest is just wiring. If you're not paying for the content, you're getting milked of every possible other piece of information you provide to the rent-takers.
Standardization is awesome, but the more we try to centralize and standardize all of the internet, the more really powerful interests are going to take advantage of us. Maybe in a nice way, and I'm sure they're really great folks and all, but I freaking don't want my entire life on display at 27 different spy agencies simply because I wanted to keep up with my high school friends on Facebook. A healthy amount of creative destruction and the ensuing chaos is desperately needed on the net. You want to know why startups are thriving off making iFart apps? Because standardization has killed true innovation and left us with the only thing to do is optimize the little stuff. In Henry Ford's words, all we're doing now is continuing to make a faster horse.
But I do take issue with the constant FB bashing, even though I consider their marketing and growth machine devilishly designed. Facebook is a symptom of the problem. It is not the problem.
Why doesn't Ven Portman / Ev Bogue mention PGP? I don't see his public key anywhere, why talk about emailing people what you are working on openly if you want to "evolve beyond reach"? Hard to take seriously.
Nightweb connects your Android device or PC to an anonymous, peer-to-peer social network. You can write posts and share photos, and your followers will retrieve them using BitTorrent running over the I2P anonymous network. It is still experimental and not well-tested, but the goal is to have uncensorable, untraceable communication and file-sharing on mobile devices and PCs.
Also, posting this on Independence Day just feels right.
I don't understand the logical link between those sentences. What does he mean when he writes "[I] saw how free it is down there." and why did it lead him to sell his iPhone ?
But make no mistake, when the Internet will start a trend towards fully decentralized/more anonymous services, they will become our enemy, because that will endanger their very way of making a revenue.
If I were a Google boss I'd try to start making money from other business models besides ads as soon as possible, possibly from hardware, like Apple. I think they're already planning this to some extent with Motorola, Google Glass, and even Google Fiber. But they need to hurry up. That trend might arrive sooner than they expect (within 5 years).
Facebook is already dead. They just don't know it yet (it takes a while for the market inertia to stop).
Additionally, I'm not sure decentralized/anonymous services are necessarily a bad thing for Google. At the moment they have alot of competition from site like Facebook, and online shops and such. However, they are still the gateway to the internet, and are probably in the best posistion to continue to provide targeted advertising in the new age of anonymous internet. Consider the value of having your shop get a prefered listing everytime someone searches for shoes. The value of this would go up when your ability to do directed advertising through other means goes down.
Also, even with anonymous services, information still leaks, and the larger you are the better you can take advantage of it.
The first thing anyone does when they want to use a darknet-style web is bookmark a directory service. If decentralization ever becomes popular enough, that's just reason to create "google tor search".
Sure, that's a good first step. But then how do we get our families on board?
We know they know more about us than we know they know. We need to truncate their abilities before they have mind penetrating radar.
I don't have any answers here, but we can abstract away the scary parts, throw some memes and pictures that timeout on top, then take over the world.
> You know the sources. You’re all on them. [...] Shitter.
> When you use these services, you’re not even a button
> pushing Starbucks at Barista. You’re just ordering a
> free latte at hypothetical ad-sponsored Starbucks of the
> future. You’re not even pushing the button.You’re just a
> user.
> So, being that I wanted to continue to send more emails,
> I stopped using the word Bitcoin in emails.
1. You need to be a big guy to make any head-way with making sure your emails are blacklisted by the 'big guys' (e.g. Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail).
2. Email is hard because of the cat-and-mouse game that email admins must play with spammers. If email was a centralized service, spammers would probably be easier to block. Decentralization is also a double-edged sword.
This leads to less competition in the email market because it's a hassle that few people want to deal with when deciding to start a new business.
> So as more and more people started using these services,
> I noticed the level of the conversations around me
> dropping closer to the kind of conversations people have
> in kindergarten.
> You don’t accidentally end up inside someone’s public
> furry porn collection
(1) I'm not talking about signing up for a centralized service. Just 'signing up' as in joining in.
> You have no idea how to type HTML anymore. You have no
> idea how to deploy a Node.js application. You have no
> idea how to create a link to another website.
> Don’t just log out. Delete your accounts. This will
> force you to learn how to use the Internet the hard way.
> Host your own web server. Get your own VPS (Digital
> Ocean is only $5 a month) and host your own web server.
It's made it harder for the government to get access to your data because data is now in lots of little silos rather than a handful of huge ones, but it's still not the panacea that it's presented as here.
To hook into the coffee shop analogy, Starbucks is like Facebook, centralized. The stovetop expresso maker is more like P2P in being decentralized. Hosting your own server? That's more like renting an expresso maker at a community-center. Technically you don't own the expresso maker, even though you are renting/leasing it. At any time, the expresso maker could be used be someone else if that's what your lease agreement allows (e.g. hosting agreements that are pretty open-ended with respect to cooperation with law enforcement).
> Deploy using Node.js using Bitters.
> Duckduckgo. The search engine that gets you out of your
> filter bubble, and respects your privacy.
1. Duckduckgo is dependent on Yahoo! for its search data. Sure, they aren't sending usage statistics back to Yahoo! (so far as I know), but how free are we really from the giant data silos when we are still connected to them for things like search data. If usage of Duckduckgo ever got to the point that it would be severely cutting into Google or Yahoo!'s bottom-line, then the program would probably be terminated.
2. Duckduckgo is good, but not at the same level of functionality as the big players. Many people have attempted to switch to DDG over the recent NSA revelations, only to switch back to Google.
3. DDG doesn't scale. The 'solution' here seems to be to have everyone switch from Bing/Google/Yahoo! to DDG. Then DDG becomes the big silo and the NSA targets them instead. What have we really won, then?
The only thing that DDG really does is increase competition in the web search market, but if we are to attempt to hold the web search engine market to the distributed ideal we are discussing, then what we really need is something else.
Maybe it has to do with selling his "Deploy Node" product for $37.
> "When you send a message, your client must first compute a Proof of Work (POW). This POW helps mitigate spam on the network. Nodes and other clients will not process your message if it does not show sufficient POW. After the POW is complete, your message is shared to all of your connections which in turn share it with all of their connections."
Also, Startpage.com may be a better alternative to DDG then. It uses Google, but without all the tracking.
https://bitmessage.org/wiki/FAQ
Interesting effect: Use Yacy as your web proxy and it indexes everything (non-SSL) you visit. Better history search than any browser offers you.
That's right. Most people don't, and they pay for eliminating that possibility by living in walled gardens where everything you wouldn't say at a child's birthday party is either already banned or always on the verge of getting banned as soon someone oversteps the mark and it causes negative publicity, i.e potential lost profit.
[Edit] And it's not just about online services, it's also politics. The principle is this: Everything bad that happens has to be prevented from happening again in the future at all cost. No exceptions. No grey areas. That's the principle that leads us straight into a suffocating, prude, totalitarian society.
I don't actually think that's the case, or at least it's not the sole reason, there are many features that facebook has that linked pages crawled by google or whatever don't: A social reward structure, reduction of potential meaningful criticism, content aggregation - that last one's a big one by the way, there hasn't been content aggregation through an even vaguely visually pleasing interface before.
The best push-based content aggregation outside of the social networks is still RSS - a fact so sad it almost makes me want to weep.
And then there's the problem with reputation metrics still being totally screwed to hell to the point where your friends list is still a reasonable shot at people you'll trust. Which is just >_> Yeahhhh.
Don't get me wrong. I think that centralised publication systems constitute a serious threat to freedom of speech, and perhaps more importantly to the likely level of speech - facebook et al tend to be set up to discourage discussion - but I think there are non-trivial technical and social issues that feed into its popularity beyond people not knowing how to set up their own websites.
"If you have nothing to say, say nothing."
The current state of the internet is quite far from this: we are all encouraged to say something, anything. Here on HN it is quite far from this, but most on the traffic on the social networks I believe can be related to "dumb shit".
Lots of people say that technological solutions to social problems don't tend to work. However, things like the size of textboxes, the granularity and orientation of rating systems, the way that threads get created for comments, the efficacy of ignore options and so on... you do have to wonder, I think, how much of an effect these have on the ability of people seeking better conversations to find them and be nurtured by them.
Especially when you consider how that sort of thing's going to interact with search engines as a fairly standard point of entry. If you can't sort for a desired quality then ... oh dear. :/
You know? I was talking to my father a few months back now and he said that there's nothing on the internet. Now you and I know that's not necessarily true - but equally actually finding something like Gwern's site or Hacker News, unless you were looking for it, unless you were moving in certain circles already....
The state of dialogue on the internet looks a lot like the result of a really horrible sorting problem interacting with a bunch of weird incentive structures to me.
> start by learning some Internet basics. HTML5 and CSS3
Isn't this a bright future? People all around saving the world by typing HTML tags and CSS rules. Let me clarify something: HTML is a DOM serialization. It's editing by hands is as stupid as typing UTF-8 byte by byte.
Our tools are weak. Consuming and publishing are disconnected. To publish information one has to convert it and push on server. Now it's copy, not original document. Modern web tries to solve this problem by making web the only place. Sure it requires resources and for sure it's centralized.
I'd like to have all hypertext goodness on local computer. Make interconnected notes, publish them by clicking button and don't worry about synchronization or file name. Interconnect with web, know that every page I'm interested in is cached locally, edit these pages in place.
It would be nice to use 320MHz 16MB RAM wireless router as always present server.
> You have no idea how to type HTML anymore Can you write HTML WYSIWYG editor? Can you write tooling to query interconnected data?
Maybe at least some users would not need to store data outside
That said, cjdns and pump.io were interesting to read about. I don't see any practical benefit to using them now, but they look like fun hobby projects.
I think we need at least one competent web hosting provider operating in every state of the US, and more for the large states.
End users, readers = coffee consumers
Bloggers = baristas, either working in their own store or a Starbucks.
Mixing the two up doesn't make sense. Well, there are a couple of bloggers that are their only readers - hopefully less guys than the ones that brew their own coffee though ;).
Bloggers typically benefit from their activity, wether they blog on a platform or have their own blog. In both cases, they have an audience.
As your main point is about fully controlling the tools you'd use for their work, maybe something like racing drivers building their own cars would work better...
First of all, there is no such thing as a requirement for a blogging licence. I can blog, my friends can blog - and we all don't have to get a blogging licence. It is irresponsible, given that the author claims to have "read an article", that he decided to summarise it in two words - a "blogging license". This shows that either he doesn't understand it, or he is deliberately trying to mislead people.
Next, I'm tired of people saying that free speech is limited in Singapore. It is not. There are rules in place to prevent over-zealous extremists (of any kind or nature). I urge anyone who feels otherwise to take a look at Singapore's short national history - about mass inter-racial riots that caused massive turmoil in the country. This is why the laws have been enacted. These laws simply say that we aren't allowed to publicly denounce another religion, or another race. And before you start jumping up and down saying "that's limiting my freedom to speak!", let me clarify. It's not what you think. It's not that I can't complain or even speak badly about someone else's race or religion in public. I can. But the moment I start shouting these insults, that's when the authorities would take action against me. It's only civilised, and the government has formalised this civility. On one hand, people ignorant to historical events in Singapore can simply surmise that they are tools by the government to inhibit freedom of speech. On the other hand, however, and this is what I personally feel, these laws exist to keep the peace. Think about it. Singapore is a small island filled with people of different races and religions. Yet we don't have religious wars and we certainly don't have racial riots.
And finally, the claim of, "I suspect at some point the Singapore intelligence agency may have hacked into my email while I was there (another IP was registering on my Gmail account). Also I believe I was interviewed by a Singaporean spy." I seriously doubt it. Do you really think that if a highly trained spy wanted to covertly interview you, a technical writer and web developer, that you would know? And if they did want you to know, you would have known that you're being interviewed. I doubt (and here I'm assuming) that spending hours reading conspiracy theories online would make one an expert in counter-intelligence. Again, like what I said, this ill-constructed idea that the author has is probably due to the lack of understanding of the so-called "blogging license". And again, I repeat: one DOES NOT require a licence to blog.
Over the last couple of years, I've seen an increase in the number of people (mostly foreigners) writing articles about Singapore, saying that citizens' liberties are curtailed and limited. Again, as a citizen, this isn't true. Just like how Americans value their "freedoms", sometimes till the point of absurdity (absurd at least to foreigners like myself, and with regards to "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"), we Singaporeans value the peace and harmony within our tiny island-state. We put this, sometimes, even above our own personal liberty - like the freedom to shout racist remarks in a coffeeshop. Is that wrong? Only someone who has seen the bloody effects of racial and religious unrest would be qualified to answer the question.
First of all, there is no such thing as a requirement for a blogging licence. I can blog, my friends can blog - and we all don't have to get a blogging licence. It is irresponsible, given that the author claims to have "read an article", that he decided to summarise it in two words - a "blogging license". This shows that either he doesn't understand it, or he is deliberately trying to mislead people.
So if you have a puny little blog with a couple dozen, or hundred readers then, yeah, you don't need a license. But if you run an even semi successful blog you damn well need to be licensed.
In my view it's really self evident that such a law is rife for abuse if a site doesn't toe the governments line.
I quote Human Rights Watch on the issue :
On May 28, 2013, the Media Development Authority, which is controlled by the Ministry of Communications and Information and is responsible for regulation of Singapore’s media and publishing industry, announced that all “online news sites” that reach 50,000 unique viewers per month over a two-month period must secure a license to operate. The licensing regime took effect on June 1, and the Media Development Authority released a list of 10 websites that will initially be impacted, including AsiaOne.com, Business Times Singapore, and Yahoo! News Singapore.
(http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/07/singapore-licensing-regim...)
I'm not saying I agree with it. But at the same time I think that as long as it is not abused (to be addressed below), it is intended to prevent the new class of "independent journalists" from writing baseless stories without getting their facts right.
> In my view it's really self evident that such a law is rife for abuse if a site doesn't toe the governments line.
Exactly. Contrary to what many may think, if or when the government does begin to abuse this right, I can assure you that we, the citizens, will be up in arms and take them to task.
Who decides which facts are right and how does paying $50,000 prevent someone from publishing false information?
> From the linked fact sheet: The new Licence provides greater clarity on prevailing requirements within the Class Licence and Internet Code of Practice, and explains what MDA would consider “prohibited content” in the existing Internet Code of Practice, e.g. content that undermines racial or religious harmony.
Literally everything said by US civil rights leaders during the 20th century could be construed as "undermining racial harmony" (in the US). Why is preventing this kind of thing important?
I went there last week for the first time in twelve years, and it was shocking. I told them as much.
No sooner had I got off the plane and acquired some local cash than I was herded in to a long line for taxis. Walking down the demarcated isle toward the rest of the well-established queue, I mused "Would you like efficiency with your totalitarianism? Apparently not!" As I approached the queue, a functionary suddenly changed the demarcation belt between myself and the queue, causing me to have to walk for miles in one direction then double-back. It was so ridiculous, so Kafka, I burst out laughing.
Two days later at my hotel, I mentioned my eagerness to depart to an employee who was from the Philippines... his eyes darted aside, then looked me in the eyes briefly, turned around and mumbled loud enough for me to hear but nobody else "I hate this place too", while pacing off down a corridor.
The claim to multiculturalism is laughable. Wealthy Singaporeans clearly look down on neighbouring Indonesians, Malays and Philippinos, possibly also the Indians, and are largely ethnic Chinese, often living off the profits of dynastic capital accrued running businesses in those very same neighbouring countries. I did meet some Indians who were born in Singapore - but alas - had never been to India, and appeared to be basically culturally relegated to a sort of mid level service sector niche. It seemed to me that they'd never built up the courage or economic platform to leave.
I even met a wealthy Chinese Singaporean who smugly quipped that his family grew rich running palm oil plantations in neighbouring Indonesia - the same sector causing the smog in Singapore - but that of course they burned theirs far away and clearly had nothing to do with the recent air quality problems!
Sitting in the airport departure lounge, waiting to fly out, a state-sponsored television channel blared feel-good pro-state propaganda to weary travelers. Suddenly, the national anthem came on. Interspersed with its antiquated, politically-populist, Malay-pattois verbiage (you wouldn't catch the rich speaking the common language) were smoothly integrated, carefully contrived scenes of the Singaporean miracle: a multicultural table of youth happily consuming artificial foods, a laughing young man in uniform (doing his compulsory military service), and a couple of friendly, smiling police. That was just the icing on the cake.
Won't be back in a hurry. Sorry, Singapore.
>I did meet some Indians who were born in Singapore - but alas - had never been to India, and appeared to be basically culturally relegated to a sort of mid level service sector niche. It seemed to me that they'd never built up the courage or economic platform to leave.
Are you saying that all Indians in Singapore are working in mid-level service sectors? Is that really what you're saying?
> Sitting in the airport departure lounge, waiting to fly out, a state-sponsored television channel blared feel-good pro-state propaganda to weary travelers. Suddenly, the national anthem came on. Interspersed with its antiquated, politically-populist, Malay-pattois verbiage were smoothly integrated, carefully contrived scenes of the Singaporean miracle: a multicultural table of youth happily consuming artificial foods, a laughing young man in uniform (doing his compulsory military service), and a couple of friendly, similing police. That was just the icing on the cake.
I'm sorry you don't feel the same way about Singapore. I wouldn't expect you to. Yet patriotism exists in every country at different levels, and if you're saying that this is propaganda, then I have nothing else left to add, because to each, his own.
Oh, but I would like to add that while there are many people like yourself who can seem to turn every good into a bad, there are, thankfully, a good number of people who are more perceptive.
Are you saying you can't read? I commented that the Indians I met were from those sectors, and that generally Indians in Singapore did seem to be over-represented in those sectors. (For example, driving taxis, cleaning, physical security, etc.)
> turn every good into a bad
Perhaps I missed the former, since the fruits of a nanny-state (cleanliness, safety except from the government and their cronies, subsidised identical high-density aircon-free ghetto-housing for low income earners, etc.) don't necessarily seem 'good' to me. Each to their own. I prefer mainland China over Singapore, any day. At least, for all their problems, they have some real freedom and diversity, and a mostly intellectually honest history.
> In other words, you can get in big trouble in Singapore just for saying or writing something.
whoa... sounds like my country.
FTFY. DNS is a centralized service.
Hawaii? :)
In this particular context, centralized vs distributed have to do with control over both storage and propagation of your data more so than its architecture. Or at least, the concerns over how to better control storage/propagation drive decisions about architecture. Twitter, Facebook, etc are centralized in this case. Your data goes to them, they propagate it, you have little to no control. Their system is designed around that. Identi.ca, rstat.us, diaspora are distributed. You control the software that holds the data and distributes it to others. Many designs are possible, even that which you design yourself.
Do these distributed platforms still have centralized components? Yes. There are lots of centralized pieces. Doesn't matter. Minimizing them is still the goal. Less is progress. It's not perfect; it's better.
What's stopping distributed platforms from overtaking centralized ones? The typical things: politics, lack of resources, high barrier of entry for non-tech folks.
Can distributed platforms do X? Yes. For example, the very usual: "But they can't handle spam!" Sure they can. Distributed platforms exist to share information. They can share blacklists. Share training data for spam filters. Ultimately, if they can distribute content, then they can distribute metadata. The only thing a centralized platform can do that a distributed one cannot is provide immediate global consistency... but considering most centralized services grow to the scale where they are internally distributed anyway, they can't even do that.
What do we need to do to succeed? We need software that is light, easily understood, easily augmentable, modular. Something that can easily and freely be deployed with minimal effort from a city's public library. Deployment on hosted or publicly available servers... or packaged on cheap hardware to be used in the home or taken with you. Hardware and deployment services that don't really exist. But creating the software may be the motivation to create them.
Who will build it? I've published research on distributed systems and distributed databases. I founded rstat.us with some friends which has had over 60 diverse contributors from around the world. It got some good, albeit small press, but OStatus (the protocol that rstat.us sits upon) is being superseded. So I'm working on this:
- https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n - Support for social sentence generation for many languages/cultures
- https://github.com/hotsh/lotus - A discovery layer and data structures for distributed social graphs. It negotiates the protocol so many different distributed social systems can interact (which is the point, ya think?). (models)
- https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-mongodb - Small persistence layer. (models+db)
- https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus - Rack extension for interacting with the social graph and content generation as hypermedia over HTTP. (controllers)
- https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site - Example site (hoping to pull much of the view/presentation logic into a separate repo)
Modular. Easily modifiable. Released as closely to the public domain as is possible (CC0.) With these combined, you can build any number or variety of distributed social web systems (image sites, photo album sites, hosting of web comics, flash games, blogging, etc etc etc.) Hopefully they will share a common deployment strategy so if you build a new thing, however unique, it will be just as easy to deploy from the point-of-view of somebody not very well-versed in technology.
So... Me. I'll do it. With some help. If you care, here is my gittip (I only need $250/wk to squeak by): https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/