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I suspect we agree on more than we disagree on here, at least as far as the principles go, even if I might lack your flair for the dramatic. :-) That said, I r

I suspect we agree on more than we disagree on here, at least as far as the principles go, even if I might lack your flair for the dramatic. :-) That said, I really don't think developing standards for interoperability and federation is such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. After all, modern networking -- including the Internet -- is built on numerous such standards, carefully designed and documented, widely implemented and effective. If we can develop a stack of protocols for totally unrelated systems to talk to each other, from the lower levels of LANs up through things like TCP/IP and SSL to application level details like sending email between SMTP servers or requesting web pages using HTTP, surely we could standardise sharing content like messages and photos from friends without relying on some mysterious centralised service. I don't know whether most people do prefer to have only one source for their information; I'd like to see more data before forming any strong view on that one. But let's assume you're right for the sake of argument. Is that a problem? We've had systems that collected and combined multiple streams of data for ease of reference for a long time, from the earliest days of e-mail lists with digests and Usenet newsgroups and RSS feeds up to modern Web-based aggregators like Reddit, the Facebook news feed, and indeed the site you're reading right now. Modern smartphones already combine even these feeds from multiple sources into a single stream of news and communications for ease of access. Is it really so far-fetched that we could cut out the middle-man in some of these cases and move back to a more peer-to-peer, decentralised system with neutral infrastructure?

pdimitar 10y ago
> I don't know whether most people do prefer to have only one source for their information; I'd like to see more data before forming any strong view on that one. I admit I have no scientific sources. This is just a gut feeling birthed from my numerous interactions with people during my whole life. I also happen to believe that not everything can be measured scientifically and there are a lot of things "all people know but almost nobody will admit in an official survey" and that "almost everyone prefers buying only one newspaper" is one of them -- but that would go wildly off-topic and I'll stop right here. > Is that a problem? Of course it is a problem. If we assume there are malevolent people who would want to suppress certain kinds of news (and with Trump, Kim Jong-un et. al. in power I don't think anyone can doubt the existence of these people anymore) it's much easier for them to bribe or coerce a single entity to censor things. For a true free speech, we need a fully anonymous but attack-resilient immutable decentralized network (sorry to keep repeating myself but... like IPFS). Good luck DDoS-ing or bribing/coercing that. It's made to be resistant against planting fake data, man-in-the-middle attacks, and DDoS -- right from the get go. Admittedly IPFS isn't still there, for example it lacks automatic replication and the fact that there are already organizations whom you must pay so they "pin" (replicate) your content is telling me IPFS might eventually lose its credibility as well :( again though, off-topic. Sorry, you caught me in a very chatty mood. >Is it really so far-fetched that we could cut out the middle-man in some of these cases and move back to a more peer-to-peer, decentralised system with neutral infrastructure? In technical terms, it is not far-fetched at all. We're actually very close to it. Man, I'd love to work on that, only if that was my main source of income. I would pour a lot of energy and heart into such a work. In economical and general reality terms however, it's almost impossible. As I mentioned, I am convinced there will be a lot of resistance from agents who would be negatively impacted in the pockets or their data collection. But you know what, if I am wrong, I'll be the happiest little panda.
sly010 10y ago
> TCP/IP / SSL / SMTP / HTTP Were all invented long ago and were all first of their kind. Creating a new standard when there are no wide spread alternatives is easy, doing the same where everyone is already invested is hard. E.g. that's why payment systems suck universally.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  As someone who does a fair bit of work in networking fields, I think that's a pessimistic view. Most people don't see when the underlying infrastructure develops, in no small part because the standards and compatibility issues are so carefully considered, but that doesn't mean there aren't newer standards and protocols being developed all the time. We're now on something like the fifth mainstream WiFi standard, for example, and while someone buying a new laptop of getting a new box from their ISP might not know what all the 802.whatever markings mean, they still experience much faster speed and higher reliability compared to the earlier technology. An example from much further up the stack is that we're starting to see wider support for Web serving using HTTP/2, which is a big change from its predecessor. Even with payment systems, we've seen multiple contactless payment technologies become established very rapidly in recent years, and developments like Chip-and-PIN cards a few years before that. Of course online payment processing is also a much more developed and competitive industry today than it was even five years ago, which again is partly because both the technical and the regulatory frameworks have opened up in recent years. SEPA in Europe is a good example here.
  - pdimitar 10y ago
    I like optimistic people (no sarcasm). But I think you're overestimating the cooperative abilities of Homo Sapiens. Every bank, store and pet garage invents their mobile payments nowadays. This is very bad and leads to segmentation of efforts which shouldn't exist in the first place. Also, I'd argue HTTP/2 is not such a huge improvement as many make it out to be, but I can't deny it's some improvement compared to 1.0/1.1 -- that's a fact.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  I don't know about HTTP, but the first three were definitely not first of their kind, particularly when you take into account how they operate now compared to their original incarnations. GSSAPI and Kerberos, for example, both predate SSL (Kerberos by nearly a decade if I have my dates right). SMTP was originally intended only to transit mail protocols across networks, clearly evidencing that there were internal (incompatible) mail protocols before then. UUCP and FTP were commonly used before SMTP to transfer messages; it took over a decade after its invention for SMTP to finally see off UUCP, and a few more years for X.400 (invented more or less concurrently) to fade away as a potential competitor.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

pdimitar 10y ago

> I don't know whether most people do prefer to have only one source for their information; I'd like to see more data before forming any strong view on that one. I admit I have no scientific sources. This is just a gut feeling birthed from my numerous interactions with people during my whole life. I also happen to believe that not everything can be measured scientifically and there are a lot of things "all people know but almost nobody will admit in an official survey" and that "almost everyone prefers buying only one newspaper" is one of them -- but that would go wildly off-topic and I'll stop right here. > Is that a problem? Of course it is a problem. If we assume there are malevolent people who would want to suppress certain kinds of news (and with Trump, Kim Jong-un et. al. in power I don't think anyone can doubt the existence of these people anymore) it's much easier for them to bribe or coerce a single entity to censor things. For a true free speech, we need a fully anonymous but attack-resilient immutable decentralized network (sorry to keep repeating myself but... like IPFS). Good luck DDoS-ing or bribing/coercing that. It's made to be resistant against planting fake data, man-in-the-middle attacks, and DDoS -- right from the get go. Admittedly IPFS isn't still there, for example it lacks automatic replication and the fact that there are already organizations whom you must pay so they "pin" (replicate) your content is telling me IPFS might eventually lose its credibility as well :( again though, off-topic. Sorry, you caught me in a very chatty mood. >Is it really so far-fetched that we could cut out the middle-man in some of these cases and move back to a more peer-to-peer, decentralised system with neutral infrastructure? In technical terms, it is not far-fetched at all. We're actually very close to it. Man, I'd love to work on that, only if that was my main source of income. I would pour a lot of energy and heart into such a work. In economical and general reality terms however, it's almost impossible. As I mentioned, I am convinced there will be a lot of resistance from agents who would be negatively impacted in the pockets or their data collection. But you know what, if I am wrong, I'll be the happiest little panda.

sly010 10y ago

> TCP/IP / SSL / SMTP / HTTP Were all invented long ago and were all first of their kind. Creating a new standard when there are no wide spread alternatives is easy, doing the same where everyone is already invested is hard. E.g. that's why payment systems suck universally.

Silhouette 10y ago
As someone who does a fair bit of work in networking fields, I think that's a pessimistic view. Most people don't see when the underlying infrastructure develops, in no small part because the standards and compatibility issues are so carefully considered, but that doesn't mean there aren't newer standards and protocols being developed all the time. We're now on something like the fifth mainstream WiFi standard, for example, and while someone buying a new laptop of getting a new box from their ISP might not know what all the 802.whatever markings mean, they still experience much faster speed and higher reliability compared to the earlier technology. An example from much further up the stack is that we're starting to see wider support for Web serving using HTTP/2, which is a big change from its predecessor. Even with payment systems, we've seen multiple contactless payment technologies become established very rapidly in recent years, and developments like Chip-and-PIN cards a few years before that. Of course online payment processing is also a much more developed and competitive industry today than it was even five years ago, which again is partly because both the technical and the regulatory frameworks have opened up in recent years. SEPA in Europe is a good example here.
- pdimitar 10y ago
  I like optimistic people (no sarcasm). But I think you're overestimating the cooperative abilities of Homo Sapiens. Every bank, store and pet garage invents their mobile payments nowadays. This is very bad and leads to segmentation of efforts which shouldn't exist in the first place. Also, I'd argue HTTP/2 is not such a huge improvement as many make it out to be, but I can't deny it's some improvement compared to 1.0/1.1 -- that's a fact.
jcranmer 10y ago
I don't know about HTTP, but the first three were definitely not first of their kind, particularly when you take into account how they operate now compared to their original incarnations. GSSAPI and Kerberos, for example, both predate SSL (Kerberos by nearly a decade if I have my dates right). SMTP was originally intended only to transit mail protocols across networks, clearly evidencing that there were internal (incompatible) mail protocols before then. UUCP and FTP were commonly used before SMTP to transfer messages; it took over a decade after its invention for SMTP to finally see off UUCP, and a few more years for X.400 (invented more or less concurrently) to fade away as a potential competitor.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]