"and the evidence suggests that it is to that that we owe the collapse of oppressive regimes throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa"
Never mind that those oppressive regimes got replaced by...new oppressive regimes.
I beg to differ that is Internet what makes a regime fall in North Africa. What makes regimes fall is people who can't buy food going from 30% to 75% because of inflation of commodities(created by OUR WESTERN central banks).
Probably you think revolution is great, but I have been in Libya and Syria, before and in the wars and it is horrible. A civil war is the worst thing that could happen to a country, Americans could idealize it as they have forgotten what a real war is(fighting against non developed enemies 8000 miles away is not alike seeing your home in flames, your daughter raped or your brothers killed).
I would love to use decentralized tools, but they are so bad. They have lots of features, but they are incredible hard to use.
People will start using decentralized products when they are as easy to configure and install like a mac. Only centralized tools like facebook or Google provide easy of use that my grandpa could use.
In 2011 the new oppressive regimes had not risen yet. Even today the one in Tunisia seems better than the old one. If you are interested in more detail in what I thought about the revolution in Egypt, http://canonical.org/~kragen/egypt-massacre-sotu.html goes into more detail from January 2011, just after #Jan25. The situation in in Egypt is terrible today.
Violent revolutions have a tendency to submerge their revolution in their violence, because violence leads to rule by the most effectively violent. Those are not the people whose rule I want to live under.
I tweeted about this in May 2011, a few months before the decentralization post we're discussing, when the Syrian opposition was still mostly nonviolent:
"@shadihamid Well, it [violent rebellion] hasn't worked out so well for the movement to overthrow Gaddafi so far, has it? Lots more dead than Bahrain or Syria."
>"and the evidence suggests that it is to that that we owe the collapse of oppressive regimes throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa"
Yeah, this is BS. That was just a Western media "human interest" story.
For one, those heavily into blogging and twitter and the like in a place like Libya or Tunisia, or invariably more affluent than the rest and more westernized (including more friendly to western BS interests). So they make a good subject to showcase as "the voice of country X", when in reality they are nothing like that statistically speaking.
Second, the "middle east and nothern africa" had tons of revolutions and collapses of oppressive regimes, leftist movements, anti-colonial movements and what have you, all throughtout the 20th century without twitter and blogging.
Just because some place like Egypt is the first time a 20-something guy in S.F. heard of revolution in those countries, doesn't mean it's due to "twitter".
> Americans could idealize it as they have forgotten what a real war is(fighting against non developed enemies 8000 miles away is not alike seeing your home in flames, your daughter raped or your brothers killed).
Southerners remember what that was like: 150 years ago Yankees were raping and killing their way across the Confederacy. Young folks nowadays have forgotten, but there are plenty of folks still alive who heard about it from their elders. It really wasn't that long ago.
The problem is, all of those guys who were so free in the nineties failed to create any noteworthy online services so Facebook, Google, etc. took up the space.
I'm gonna get down voted for that, but maybe if there were less nerd-wars in FOSS community and more thinking about real users the Internet would look differently nowadays.
I don't think it's true that we failed to create any noteworthy online services.
We built the internet. Maybe you've heard of it. We also created TCP, UDP, IP, DNS, email, the Web, Usenet, IRC, Git, BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin, and Wikipedia. We killed AOL, CompuServe, Encyclopedia Britannica, Solaris, the Information Superhighway, and the Advanced Intelligent Network. We were only unable to do smartphones because the carriers ruthlessly shut us out, demanding insane amounts of control over handset software and using their regulatory capture of the FCC as leverage, until Apple forced the doors open for us — but on Apple's terms. And we built most of the software that runs Apple, Facebook, and Google, too.
But how can we build new services to replace Facebook and Google on a decentralized basis, like email and the Web? That's a problem with both technical aspects — how can you build a distributed full-text query processor that runs on the machines of volunteers? — and social/business aspects — how can the people who benefit from these services effectively collaborate to get them created and improved? (Kickstarter and the like show a very promising direction for this.)
Those are the problems I want to be working on, not how to persuade Google Drive users to entrust a well-intentioned but unaccountable central authority with all of their family photos.
It's a question of timing. We did have social networks in the 90s, but the devices at the edge weren't strong enough to make them compelling, particularly as regards photos.
If you rolled back to the 90s you'd also notice AOL were regarded as a giant invincible behemoth in a similar position to Facebook or Google today.
> Apple wants to relegate websites to second-class status on their popular computers, and exercises viewpoint censorship on what “apps” they allow in their “app store”.
I don't remember it that way all. Does anyone else? From what I remember, there was a very heavy consumer demand for the App store, meanwhile Apple was telling everyone just to make web apps. They actively developed WebKit into a cutting-edge, standards-oriented, developer-friendly browser. I don't see how you could say they wanted to "relegate websites to second-class status".
Originally Apple did tell everyone just to make web apps. Renegade hackers made native apps for iOS anyway, creating consumer demand, and Apple relented. All this happened before I wrote that message in 2011. By 2011 webapps were already second-class. (Not as second-class as they are on Android, though!)
That seems to me now like it was just a ruse to buy them time. They went on to hamstrung the browser from attaining native performance and never added all the direct hardware features you could get at with apps - which is what they would have done if they really intended the browser to be an app platform.
Yeah that was when the Iphone was first released in 2007, continued for a while. But by 2011, the app store was already becoming a behemoth, a huge source of profits for Apple, an effective content-curating tool and a close Apple-unique marketplace that they could compare to the Playstore and say 'we've got more and better content, get an iOS device'.
In other words, by 2011 nobody at Apple was telling developers 'web apps instead of native please'.
Meanwhile, in the past years they did effectively cut things like WebGL on iOS because it was a threat to native app performance in the browser. (iOS 8 finally, long overdue, changed this, now that the app store is there to stay.) Or say blocking Nitro on anything but Safari, say Chrome, not a problem for regular websites, but a problem for JS heavy web apps.
When Electric Minds was running under my administration, I had a policy that we would delete any account from someone we knew to be under 13, just because the requirements for dealing with the personal information of children under 13 were way too onerous and resource-intensive for the operation we were running. Our policy explicitly stated, "This is a consequence of the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and Electric Minds is not responsible for this law or its effects." (In other words, "This may be bullcrap, and we may even believe it's bullcrap, but we've got to follow it anyway, so life sucks like that.")
Keeping your account on somebody else's server is mostly responsible, because that makes it vulnerable to nonsense like this. Google is very much oriented toward everyone keeping their accounts on somebody else's servers, ideally Google's. That's what I object to.
Hardly. Google could simply ask the children to fax in signed permission statements from their parents, as websites that actually make an effort to support child users do. Neopets had this figured out 15 years ago. Google chooses not to do that despite having the resources, and they are responsible for the consequences of that decision.
> and the evidence suggests that it is to that that we owe the collapse of oppressive regimes throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa
actually happen? I mean to say: Sure, oppressive regimes collapsed, but to be replaced with what? Take the 'Arab Spring' countries Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen - are they better off for having traded security and stability for (attempted) democracy.
> Google, of course, wants to solve these problems too. But it has a different, less-democratic approach in mind.
No company is a Democracy in the sense of dēmos 'the people' + kratia 'power, rule', where 'the people' are you, me and the next person. Maybe companies are democracies where 'the people' are the shareholders, at least to some extent, for some definitions of 'shareholder'.
Often we see "The Democratisation of x" bandied about as though it has to be a good thing, but I'm left wondering what the term actually means if the consequences are typically a tradeoff between security + stability vs. democracy.
From what I've seen the media has portrayed Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (etc.) as playing a role in the Arab Spring demonstrations, yet these are exactly the sort of 'unaccountable intermediary' you're railing against.
I think the reference to the Arab Spring without qualifying the consequences of the whole scenario from the vantage point of history is dishonest.
Democracy isn't synonymous with Security and Stability, and we should all probably have a long hard think about Security and Stability before we promote disruption.
(Edit: fixed a thing where I'd written the opposite of what I meant).
I wrote the article you're calling "dishonest" in 2011. The Syrian civil war was still mostly Assad bombing his citizens. It would not have been possible for me to "qualify[] the consequences of the whole scenario from the vantage point of history" in a document written before that history happened. I agree that Egypt, Libya, and Yemen (and also Syria and Bahrain) are worse off now than before the Arab Spring.
I agree that companies aren't democratic. I think that's a good reason not to hand our government to companies.
Historically I don't think there is a tradeoff between security and stability versus democracy. http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa... goes into some detail about the unstable, insecure history of undemocratic governments, specifically to rebut neoreactionaries who are calling for an end to democracy in order to return to an illusory imagined past of security and stability.
Democracies usually don't make very good decisions. They do seem to make many fewer catastrophic decisions than non-democracies, though.
My startup has been trying to make decentralized computing easy, but I'm just not sure there's a huge market for it. We took OpenStack and made it so you could connect nodes from anywhere on the net and rent them out, whether it was a server in a datacenter or even someone's desktop machine.
I'm just not sure there's a huge demand for it though; originally we were thinking that people would care about price, but it turns out most companies don't care that they're being fleeced by AWS. If they do care, they're probably using DO.
Anyway, here's a demo of everything working: http://youtu.be/998IYD_WomY It connects a bunch of desktop machines around the Bay Area on different networks (Comcast, Sonic.net) and blends them in with a "dataceter grade" cloud server.
The real problem with decentralization though is that the asymmetric nature of the first (last?) mile makes it really hard to do anything useful with individual nodes. If we all had symmetrical gigE FttH/FttP everything would be a lot more rosy, but so far that's really only been happening in a few places.
I'm not sure that's "decentralization" in the sense that I mean. A "decentralized" system, to me, is one where no single person or group of people can deny others access to it, for example by deleting their accounts or turning the system off. Decentralized systems allow distributed innovation more robustly than centralized or merely distributed systems, and so they tend to outcompete centralized and distributed systems when they clash economically.
(Full disclosure: I work for Google. My opinion does not necessarily represent my employer's opinion, yadi yada.)
This guy's rant is really about the need for decentralization. I fully agree with him. But I disagree that decentralization is incompatible with Google's primary business model (regardless if the Internet is decentralized, there will always be ways to do advertising.) In fact Google Wave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave) was a fantastic and radical attempt at decentralizing common use cases such as email, instant messaging, social networking, etc. Unfortunately this project failed to gain traction due to various reasons.
To return to a more decentralized Internet, we need software and network protocols that let people easily host their mail and blog, publish their social pages, and share their vacation pictures, etc, without relying on the cloud but doing it via a device that runs at home. An ideal place to run this software would be your Internet router, as it really is a full-blown computer that is always on, always connected. And, as the router, it conveniently bypasses the issue of masquerading/NATing which is the one reason why non-technical people do not run server software more often. Another advantage is that uploading stuff to your Internet router (eg. sharing pictures) is much, much faster than uploading them to a cloud service (Wifi or Ethernet bandwidth can be 50x-1000x faster than the typical upload bandwidth of a home Internet connection.)
It should all work out of the box with zero configuration. That is the only way the idea can gain traction. Not everybody is a sysadmin, so your grandmother should be able to make it work. Want to enable your mailbox? Just tick the appropriate checkbox on your Internet router as easily as you would sign up for some mail provider. Want to follow the social lives of your friends? Your browser can render your custom Facebook-style wall by pulling posts and pictures feeds directly from your friends' Internet routers.
We already have most of the technologies needed to implement such decentralized features: HTTP with cross-origin resource sharing, SMTP, automatic registration of DNS names to make you discoverable on the net, OpenID authentication, etc. Maybe some other needed bits can be pulled from the Wave protocol.
But the sad thing is that I am not aware of any attempt to implement any of what I described above. Perhaps it is a vision too ahead of its time. Or perhaps it is because there are 2 important problems that are very hard to solve in a fully decentralized way: (1) search, and (2) spam. You can easily search for and find your friend's blog via Google web search because it has an index of the entire web, but how do you provide this level of quality if the search engine is your Internet router? As to spam, you can easily filter email if you are the Gmail team running sophisticated analysis on the billions of emails processed daily because the more data you have the easier you can classify it, but how do you implement this filtering quality on an Internet router that does not have access to such a data set?
Perhaps the solution is to run most of the services in a decentralized way (email, instant messaging, social networking, etc) while at the same time relying on a few central services for some features like search and spam filtering.
Edit: thanks for the pointers to FreedomBox and Sandstorm, I will look into them.
> In fact Google Wave was a fantastic and radical attempt at decentralizing common use cases such as email, instant messaging, social networking, etc. Unfortunately this project failed to gain traction due to various reasons.
That’s a pretty weak summary. The product didn’t “fail to gain traction”. It pretty much failed to work in a basic way, at all.
It was the broken technical design decisions and broken technical implementation of Google Wave that doomed it to death, not any problem on the users’ side.
Also, anyone who says that Google Wave was decentralized, as implemented, is kidding themselves. That was Google’s marketing hype (and possibly even their eventual goal), but in practice none of the parts that would allow any kind of server support outside of Google were ever actually delivered.
There was an incredible amount of hype for Wave from Google, and initially there was a great deal of excitement from users and developers outside of Google, when it was first announced and when the first users started on it. And then as they let more people in and as time passed, the technical infrastructure was completely unable to scale (either with number of users or with size of individual conversations), and it became apparent that the web client was a buggy mess that would only work with small conversations involving a small number of people, and the servers couldn’t handle rapid adoption.
The semi-technical marketing documents described how it would be open and federated, with an open protocol implementable by anyone, and would use fancy modern algorithms (operational transforms) to handle multi-party updates to documents in real time. As delivered though, the protocol was big proprietary binary blobs wrapped inside the incredibly verbose XML of Jabber/XMPP protocol (most of the features of Jabber were ignored; as far as I can tell it was only chosen as a wrapper to give the protocol an illusion of openness, rather than for any particular technical merits), and instead of doing any kind of fancy diffs or sophisticated operational transforms, instead the entire content of a message was re-sent to every listening client for every keystroke. The Wave web client software was a big ball of spaghetti Java/GWT code which was closed source (maybe they eventually opened it?), and so it was effectively impossible for someone outside of Google to make an interoperable server or client.
Did he say decentralization was incompatible with Google's primary business model? What I read was this:
> Google is not institutionally opposed to this;
I think he's exactly right. Google does not oppose decentralization, but at the same time, the entire raison d'etre of a company is to centralize something in the form of a profit center. As far as companies go, Google is pretty good, they are not the threat to traditional internet values, but neither can they be its savior.
It's about centralization's bad effects. If there was a way for the bad affects to disappear, there wouldn't be a reason to rant. All things being equal, people prefer centralized utilities like electricity, water, and gas.
Just as it's possible to decentralize the Internet, I don't see why it's impossible to fight the bad effects of centralization. If you see insoluble problems, please feel free to list them here.
There are actually a great many efforts in this regard. You mention Freedom box and Sandstorm, which are only two of them. I'm working on http://nymote.org and it'll be built using Unikernels (specifically, Mirage OS - http://openmirage.org). Targeting the home router is something we've been working on for some time but the work stretches from deep tech to human-computer interaction.
Most of this work is in academia for now but as soon as there are business models that work, we expect to see real deployments (beyond the hobbyists).
we [would] need software and network protocols that let people easily host their mail and blog, publish their social pages, and share their vacation pictures, etc, without relying on the cloud but doing it via a device that runs at home.
Git provides most of the infrastructure answers. I think the idea that someone would host a personal website in future is slightly backwards. Just clone their website's public repo and browse locally. This could be extended to social news feeds, where if you just put new content in your repo then other people that subscribe could see those updates mashed together into a single feed.
The problem here is the economic incentives to do it are low, but the technical barriers to solving this are genuinely getting lower and lower all the time, so at some point it will happen.
Sending mail the old fashioned way requires a complicated header verification process.Anybody that has tried to send mail from a PHD script knows this. There is a secret layer of trust that home routers are incompatible with!
One reason why companies would rather get fleeced by aws etc. is that hosting your own server is both troublesome and expensive. This isnt much of a problem if you live in the temperate region but it is a HUGE problem if you live near the equator. Temperator can easily rise up to 33 degrees centigrade and beyond and maintaining a server without round-the-clock cooling in an air-conditioned room is close to impossible(unless your server is a single raspberry pi). That's why people would rather pay for Iaas services, sometimes it is simply cheaper for someone else to host it.
A serious point here: warehouse scale computing beats p2p in a dsl (or even feasible fttp) environments. Essentially the model of the internet we have is broadcast with decoration from the upstream channel.
To change this services using upstream that make money for the pipe providers are required. Otherwise, no upstream.
Freeloading cannot work. Repeat CANNOT. Because you need fellas with highschool educations to look after the fibre and the boxes.
Downstream will remove the boxes and put them into warehouse scale facilities.
So - Haxxors, get yourselves to the internet of things if you wish to see democracy preserved.
Summarized as, "Peer-to-peer overlay networks are inefficient on ADSL networks. ADSL networks are almost twice as efficient as SDSL networks. Better alternatives require redesigning the physical layer."
Actually the game is lost already because cellular modems are being embedded in products directly, skipping any ability you have to firewall them, all in the name of convenience.
The fact is we rely too much on the cloud to connect two adjacent devices anyway. The whole notion that much of this data has to go upstream at all is the problem.
Why do you think that for FTTP? I do see the problem with ADSL as it is currently implemented (as analyzed very well by kragen in the mail linked to in a sibling post to this), but why would the same problem apply to FTTP?
Also, I don't get how you get to freeloading - upstream bandwidth is as much part of the product that the customer is paying for as the downstream bandwidth is.
Maybe if Google actually open-sourced as much software as they consume, that would offer a way out. Some people would still want to run the centralized as-a-service tools because it's on a huge professionally-run infrastructure and because of network effects. Others might want to run the same services locally, to support privacy/decentralization goals like the OP's. Google's main revenue stream (ads) shouldn't be affected, and they'd even benefit from outside contributions.
So why don't they do this? Because of the difference between "shouldn't" and "wouldn't" at the end of the last paragraph. What if code to support ads - or other invasions of privacy - were embedded into every other thing they might open source? Then the sheer difficulty of refactoring to "sanitize" everything else would probably create a sufficient barrier to opening it up, and revealing how all of that ad infrastructure really works might hurt their business in other ways.
When Google continues to run as the new AOL (closed source, walled garden) I don't think it's part of a deliberate philosophy. Nor is it an accident. It's because their continued uber-prosperity, if not their actual survival, depends on it.
No, back in the nineties, you could not do any of the things he talks about. Not unless you were a high-status employee of a handful of major corporations or universities. Most people couldn't get online at all, and those who could were lucky to have client-only access to e-mail and the web.
Nowadays, anyone with a credit card and an Amazon account can set up an always-online server running pretty much any software they choose. The Internet is far more decentralized, by the criteria he invokes, then it was back then.
Your experience may have been limited, although I am not going to claim that mine was typical.
As I explained in the article, I did the things I talked about (running online services, including email and web pages, accessible from the entire internet) with a US$20/month dialup internet account on an ISP run by a group of MUDders who ran the ISP as a way to play MUDs, starting in 1997. I installed my first web server (from EIT's Webmaster's Starter Kit) temporarily on an IRIX workstation in a university computer lab, in 1994. I was an undergraduate student at UNM, a state university in the second-poorest state in the US, although I admit UNM was unusually progressive. The year before, I was an unpaid student system administration intern, with a user account on all the Suns at the math department, assigned tasks like "please get tvtwm to compile on SunOS 4.1.4; Prof X wants to use it".
I agree that it's pretty awesome that anyone who wants to pay Amazon or DigitalOcean US$5 a month (and can get access to a credit card they'll accept) can run any internet-facing server software they want. Unless they're WikiLeaks, say. Or infringing on an invalid Amazon software patent. Or just want to not have random employees have hardware access to their machine for reasons of security and privacy.
So I don't think the internet is far more decentralized. It's bigger, which is pretty great, and it's a lot cheaper, which is even better, but it's also more centralized.
He never said it was cheap and accessible, what he said was that it was decentralized. In other words, no one could stop you from doing any of those things, the fact that it was harder to get online is beside the point. The vast majority of services were running open protocols, and there were really no gatekeepers except for DNS I suppose, but even that is a decentralized protocol even if the registry is centralized by necessity.
> My friends Len Sassaman (who committed suicide in the first few days of July), Bram Cohen, Jacob Appelbaum, and Zooko O’Whielacronx have made substantial contributions.
One of these things is not like the others. Three of these people have made significant contributions, in code. One of them has talked a lot and claimed the work of others as their own.
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|11 years ago|reply
Never mind that those oppressive regimes got replaced by...new oppressive regimes.
I beg to differ that is Internet what makes a regime fall in North Africa. What makes regimes fall is people who can't buy food going from 30% to 75% because of inflation of commodities(created by OUR WESTERN central banks).
Probably you think revolution is great, but I have been in Libya and Syria, before and in the wars and it is horrible. A civil war is the worst thing that could happen to a country, Americans could idealize it as they have forgotten what a real war is(fighting against non developed enemies 8000 miles away is not alike seeing your home in flames, your daughter raped or your brothers killed).
I would love to use decentralized tools, but they are so bad. They have lots of features, but they are incredible hard to use.
People will start using decentralized products when they are as easy to configure and install like a mac. Only centralized tools like facebook or Google provide easy of use that my grandpa could use.
[+] [-] kragen|11 years ago|reply
In 2011 the new oppressive regimes had not risen yet. Even today the one in Tunisia seems better than the old one. If you are interested in more detail in what I thought about the revolution in Egypt, http://canonical.org/~kragen/egypt-massacre-sotu.html goes into more detail from January 2011, just after #Jan25. The situation in in Egypt is terrible today.
Violent revolutions have a tendency to submerge their revolution in their violence, because violence leads to rule by the most effectively violent. Those are not the people whose rule I want to live under.
I tweeted about this in May 2011, a few months before the decentralization post we're discussing, when the Syrian opposition was still mostly nonviolent:
https://twitter.com/kragen/status/65789586269421568
"@shadihamid Well, it [violent rebellion] hasn't worked out so well for the movement to overthrow Gaddafi so far, has it? Lots more dead than Bahrain or Syria."
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
Yeah, this is BS. That was just a Western media "human interest" story.
For one, those heavily into blogging and twitter and the like in a place like Libya or Tunisia, or invariably more affluent than the rest and more westernized (including more friendly to western BS interests). So they make a good subject to showcase as "the voice of country X", when in reality they are nothing like that statistically speaking.
Second, the "middle east and nothern africa" had tons of revolutions and collapses of oppressive regimes, leftist movements, anti-colonial movements and what have you, all throughtout the 20th century without twitter and blogging.
Just because some place like Egypt is the first time a 20-something guy in S.F. heard of revolution in those countries, doesn't mean it's due to "twitter".
[+] [-] wtbob|11 years ago|reply
Southerners remember what that was like: 150 years ago Yankees were raping and killing their way across the Confederacy. Young folks nowadays have forgotten, but there are plenty of folks still alive who heard about it from their elders. It really wasn't that long ago.
[+] [-] laxatives|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mszyndel|11 years ago|reply
I'm gonna get down voted for that, but maybe if there were less nerd-wars in FOSS community and more thinking about real users the Internet would look differently nowadays.
[+] [-] kragen|11 years ago|reply
We built the internet. Maybe you've heard of it. We also created TCP, UDP, IP, DNS, email, the Web, Usenet, IRC, Git, BitTorrent, Tor, Bitcoin, and Wikipedia. We killed AOL, CompuServe, Encyclopedia Britannica, Solaris, the Information Superhighway, and the Advanced Intelligent Network. We were only unable to do smartphones because the carriers ruthlessly shut us out, demanding insane amounts of control over handset software and using their regulatory capture of the FCC as leverage, until Apple forced the doors open for us — but on Apple's terms. And we built most of the software that runs Apple, Facebook, and Google, too.
But how can we build new services to replace Facebook and Google on a decentralized basis, like email and the Web? That's a problem with both technical aspects — how can you build a distributed full-text query processor that runs on the machines of volunteers? — and social/business aspects — how can the people who benefit from these services effectively collaborate to get them created and improved? (Kickstarter and the like show a very promising direction for this.)
Those are the problems I want to be working on, not how to persuade Google Drive users to entrust a well-intentioned but unaccountable central authority with all of their family photos.
[+] [-] fidotron|11 years ago|reply
If you rolled back to the 90s you'd also notice AOL were regarded as a giant invincible behemoth in a similar position to Facebook or Google today.
[+] [-] userbinator|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joev_|11 years ago|reply
I don't remember it that way all. Does anyone else? From what I remember, there was a very heavy consumer demand for the App store, meanwhile Apple was telling everyone just to make web apps. They actively developed WebKit into a cutting-edge, standards-oriented, developer-friendly browser. I don't see how you could say they wanted to "relegate websites to second-class status".
[+] [-] kragen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmmmmm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|11 years ago|reply
In other words, by 2011 nobody at Apple was telling developers 'web apps instead of native please'.
Meanwhile, in the past years they did effectively cut things like WebGL on iOS because it was a threat to native app performance in the browser. (iOS 8 finally, long overdue, changed this, now that the app store is there to stay.) Or say blocking Nitro on anything but Safari, say Chrome, not a problem for regular websites, but a problem for JS heavy web apps.
[+] [-] sneak|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] byoogle|11 years ago|reply
The US gov is mostly responsible here, not Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pro...
[+] [-] erbo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pekk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etha|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justicezyx|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|11 years ago|reply
> and the evidence suggests that it is to that that we owe the collapse of oppressive regimes throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa
actually happen? I mean to say: Sure, oppressive regimes collapsed, but to be replaced with what? Take the 'Arab Spring' countries Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen - are they better off for having traded security and stability for (attempted) democracy.
> Google, of course, wants to solve these problems too. But it has a different, less-democratic approach in mind.
No company is a Democracy in the sense of dēmos 'the people' + kratia 'power, rule', where 'the people' are you, me and the next person. Maybe companies are democracies where 'the people' are the shareholders, at least to some extent, for some definitions of 'shareholder'.
Often we see "The Democratisation of x" bandied about as though it has to be a good thing, but I'm left wondering what the term actually means if the consequences are typically a tradeoff between security + stability vs. democracy.
From what I've seen the media has portrayed Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (etc.) as playing a role in the Arab Spring demonstrations, yet these are exactly the sort of 'unaccountable intermediary' you're railing against.
I think the reference to the Arab Spring without qualifying the consequences of the whole scenario from the vantage point of history is dishonest.
Democracy isn't synonymous with Security and Stability, and we should all probably have a long hard think about Security and Stability before we promote disruption.
(Edit: fixed a thing where I'd written the opposite of what I meant).
[+] [-] kragen|11 years ago|reply
I agree that companies aren't democratic. I think that's a good reason not to hand our government to companies.
Historically I don't think there is a tradeoff between security and stability versus democracy. http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-fa... goes into some detail about the unstable, insecure history of undemocratic governments, specifically to rebut neoreactionaries who are calling for an end to democracy in order to return to an illusory imagined past of security and stability.
Democracies usually don't make very good decisions. They do seem to make many fewer catastrophic decisions than non-democracies, though.
[+] [-] nowarninglabel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Patrick_Devine|11 years ago|reply
I'm just not sure there's a huge demand for it though; originally we were thinking that people would care about price, but it turns out most companies don't care that they're being fleeced by AWS. If they do care, they're probably using DO.
Anyway, here's a demo of everything working: http://youtu.be/998IYD_WomY It connects a bunch of desktop machines around the Bay Area on different networks (Comcast, Sonic.net) and blends them in with a "dataceter grade" cloud server.
The real problem with decentralization though is that the asymmetric nature of the first (last?) mile makes it really hard to do anything useful with individual nodes. If we all had symmetrical gigE FttH/FttP everything would be a lot more rosy, but so far that's really only been happening in a few places.
[+] [-] kragen|11 years ago|reply
I haven't watched your video, though.
[+] [-] mrb|11 years ago|reply
This guy's rant is really about the need for decentralization. I fully agree with him. But I disagree that decentralization is incompatible with Google's primary business model (regardless if the Internet is decentralized, there will always be ways to do advertising.) In fact Google Wave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave) was a fantastic and radical attempt at decentralizing common use cases such as email, instant messaging, social networking, etc. Unfortunately this project failed to gain traction due to various reasons.
To return to a more decentralized Internet, we need software and network protocols that let people easily host their mail and blog, publish their social pages, and share their vacation pictures, etc, without relying on the cloud but doing it via a device that runs at home. An ideal place to run this software would be your Internet router, as it really is a full-blown computer that is always on, always connected. And, as the router, it conveniently bypasses the issue of masquerading/NATing which is the one reason why non-technical people do not run server software more often. Another advantage is that uploading stuff to your Internet router (eg. sharing pictures) is much, much faster than uploading them to a cloud service (Wifi or Ethernet bandwidth can be 50x-1000x faster than the typical upload bandwidth of a home Internet connection.)
It should all work out of the box with zero configuration. That is the only way the idea can gain traction. Not everybody is a sysadmin, so your grandmother should be able to make it work. Want to enable your mailbox? Just tick the appropriate checkbox on your Internet router as easily as you would sign up for some mail provider. Want to follow the social lives of your friends? Your browser can render your custom Facebook-style wall by pulling posts and pictures feeds directly from your friends' Internet routers.
We already have most of the technologies needed to implement such decentralized features: HTTP with cross-origin resource sharing, SMTP, automatic registration of DNS names to make you discoverable on the net, OpenID authentication, etc. Maybe some other needed bits can be pulled from the Wave protocol.
But the sad thing is that I am not aware of any attempt to implement any of what I described above. Perhaps it is a vision too ahead of its time. Or perhaps it is because there are 2 important problems that are very hard to solve in a fully decentralized way: (1) search, and (2) spam. You can easily search for and find your friend's blog via Google web search because it has an index of the entire web, but how do you provide this level of quality if the search engine is your Internet router? As to spam, you can easily filter email if you are the Gmail team running sophisticated analysis on the billions of emails processed daily because the more data you have the easier you can classify it, but how do you implement this filtering quality on an Internet router that does not have access to such a data set?
Perhaps the solution is to run most of the services in a decentralized way (email, instant messaging, social networking, etc) while at the same time relying on a few central services for some features like search and spam filtering.
Edit: thanks for the pointers to FreedomBox and Sandstorm, I will look into them.
[+] [-] jacobolus|11 years ago|reply
That’s a pretty weak summary. The product didn’t “fail to gain traction”. It pretty much failed to work in a basic way, at all.
It was the broken technical design decisions and broken technical implementation of Google Wave that doomed it to death, not any problem on the users’ side.
Also, anyone who says that Google Wave was decentralized, as implemented, is kidding themselves. That was Google’s marketing hype (and possibly even their eventual goal), but in practice none of the parts that would allow any kind of server support outside of Google were ever actually delivered.
There was an incredible amount of hype for Wave from Google, and initially there was a great deal of excitement from users and developers outside of Google, when it was first announced and when the first users started on it. And then as they let more people in and as time passed, the technical infrastructure was completely unable to scale (either with number of users or with size of individual conversations), and it became apparent that the web client was a buggy mess that would only work with small conversations involving a small number of people, and the servers couldn’t handle rapid adoption.
The semi-technical marketing documents described how it would be open and federated, with an open protocol implementable by anyone, and would use fancy modern algorithms (operational transforms) to handle multi-party updates to documents in real time. As delivered though, the protocol was big proprietary binary blobs wrapped inside the incredibly verbose XML of Jabber/XMPP protocol (most of the features of Jabber were ignored; as far as I can tell it was only chosen as a wrapper to give the protocol an illusion of openness, rather than for any particular technical merits), and instead of doing any kind of fancy diffs or sophisticated operational transforms, instead the entire content of a message was re-sent to every listening client for every keystroke. The Wave web client software was a big ball of spaghetti Java/GWT code which was closed source (maybe they eventually opened it?), and so it was effectively impossible for someone outside of Google to make an interoperable server or client.
[+] [-] dasil003|11 years ago|reply
> Google is not institutionally opposed to this;
I think he's exactly right. Google does not oppose decentralization, but at the same time, the entire raison d'etre of a company is to centralize something in the form of a profit center. As far as companies go, Google is pretty good, they are not the threat to traditional internet values, but neither can they be its savior.
[+] [-] schoen|11 years ago|reply
https://freedomboxfoundation.org/
I haven't followed their progress recently, but apparently they had a release back in March.
[+] [-] arebop|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] read|11 years ago|reply
It's about centralization's bad effects. If there was a way for the bad affects to disappear, there wouldn't be a reason to rant. All things being equal, people prefer centralized utilities like electricity, water, and gas.
Just as it's possible to decentralize the Internet, I don't see why it's impossible to fight the bad effects of centralization. If you see insoluble problems, please feel free to list them here.
[+] [-] amirmc|11 years ago|reply
Most of this work is in academia for now but as soon as there are business models that work, we expect to see real deployments (beyond the hobbyists).
[+] [-] specialist|11 years ago|reply
Like Xanadu? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
If so, how would this new initiative succeed where prior attempts failed?
Perhaps the feature set envisioned for Xanadu (e.g. two-way linking, transclusion) was just 54 years too early.
[+] [-] fidotron|11 years ago|reply
The problem here is the economic incentives to do it are low, but the technical barriers to solving this are genuinely getting lower and lower all the time, so at some point it will happen.
[+] [-] frozenport|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayaway|11 years ago|reply
http://freedombone.uk.to/
[+] [-] Immortalin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgt101|11 years ago|reply
To change this services using upstream that make money for the pipe providers are required. Otherwise, no upstream.
Freeloading cannot work. Repeat CANNOT. Because you need fellas with highschool educations to look after the fibre and the boxes.
Downstream will remove the boxes and put them into warehouse scale facilities.
So - Haxxors, get yourselves to the internet of things if you wish to see democracy preserved.
Freedom is in peril.
Defend it with all your might.
[+] [-] kragen|11 years ago|reply
Summarized as, "Peer-to-peer overlay networks are inefficient on ADSL networks. ADSL networks are almost twice as efficient as SDSL networks. Better alternatives require redesigning the physical layer."
[+] [-] fidotron|11 years ago|reply
The fact is we rely too much on the cloud to connect two adjacent devices anyway. The whole notion that much of this data has to go upstream at all is the problem.
(Shameless plug) This is what led me to write this: http://montrealrampage.com/king-ludd-19-manifesto-for-a-frie...
[+] [-] zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC|11 years ago|reply
Also, I don't get how you get to freeloading - upstream bandwidth is as much part of the product that the customer is paying for as the downstream bandwidth is.
[+] [-] notacoward|11 years ago|reply
So why don't they do this? Because of the difference between "shouldn't" and "wouldn't" at the end of the last paragraph. What if code to support ads - or other invasions of privacy - were embedded into every other thing they might open source? Then the sheer difficulty of refactoring to "sanitize" everything else would probably create a sufficient barrier to opening it up, and revealing how all of that ad infrastructure really works might hurt their business in other ways.
When Google continues to run as the new AOL (closed source, walled garden) I don't think it's part of a deliberate philosophy. Nor is it an accident. It's because their continued uber-prosperity, if not their actual survival, depends on it.
[+] [-] steven777400|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rwallace|11 years ago|reply
No, back in the nineties, you could not do any of the things he talks about. Not unless you were a high-status employee of a handful of major corporations or universities. Most people couldn't get online at all, and those who could were lucky to have client-only access to e-mail and the web.
Nowadays, anyone with a credit card and an Amazon account can set up an always-online server running pretty much any software they choose. The Internet is far more decentralized, by the criteria he invokes, then it was back then.
[+] [-] kragen|11 years ago|reply
As I explained in the article, I did the things I talked about (running online services, including email and web pages, accessible from the entire internet) with a US$20/month dialup internet account on an ISP run by a group of MUDders who ran the ISP as a way to play MUDs, starting in 1997. I installed my first web server (from EIT's Webmaster's Starter Kit) temporarily on an IRIX workstation in a university computer lab, in 1994. I was an undergraduate student at UNM, a state university in the second-poorest state in the US, although I admit UNM was unusually progressive. The year before, I was an unpaid student system administration intern, with a user account on all the Suns at the math department, assigned tasks like "please get tvtwm to compile on SunOS 4.1.4; Prof X wants to use it".
I agree that it's pretty awesome that anyone who wants to pay Amazon or DigitalOcean US$5 a month (and can get access to a credit card they'll accept) can run any internet-facing server software they want. Unless they're WikiLeaks, say. Or infringing on an invalid Amazon software patent. Or just want to not have random employees have hardware access to their machine for reasons of security and privacy.
So I don't think the internet is far more decentralized. It's bigger, which is pretty great, and it's a lot cheaper, which is even better, but it's also more centralized.
[+] [-] dasil003|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|11 years ago|reply
It's also an advertising company, which means it brainwashes and deceives people in to buying garbage.
Both activities are unethical, and I wouldn't want anything to do with ether.
[+] [-] freedom123|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] spiritplumber|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sneak|11 years ago|reply
One of these things is not like the others. Three of these people have made significant contributions, in code. One of them has talked a lot and claimed the work of others as their own.