7 ms·

HTML ain't the problem; you can build websites without tracking. If you somehow managed to pull enough users to Gopher, they'd just write Gopher Chrome and star

HTML ain't the problem; you can build websites without tracking. If you somehow managed to pull enough users to Gopher, they'd just write Gopher Chrome and start adding new features that conveniently allow tracking into it, and gradually kill off the original protocol (see EEE). The problem is economic, and the solution must be too.

helij 8y ago
Indeed[1] You always have a choice! [1] https://artlists.org/privacy-policy/ https://artlists.org/privacy-policy/
petra 8y ago
Say we've built the system of economic incentives for privacy(opt-in). And managed to convince 10% of users and 50% of site owners to convert. Extremely hard. What do users get in the end ? half of the web is still tracking them. And many of the big guys still track them. Not enough if you ask me. That's what makes it so difficult. So let's solve that: let's build a search engine that let me filter sites according to privacy, Ah and be perceived as good as google - because in today's world, in many jobs, you cannot give up on an information advantage. That's kind of an impossible mission.
- m-p-3 8y ago
  DuckDuckGo should implement that, or at least put a privacy indicator.
  - mattkevan 8y ago
    They do. Their browser plugin grades sites both on the number of tracking scripts and the quality of their privacy policy. https://duck.co/help/desktop/adding-duckduckgo-to-your-browser https://duck.co/help/desktop/adding-duckduckgo-to-your-brows...
bunderbunder 8y ago
Moving to another protocol, like Gopher, seems like an economic solution to me. A parallel protocol and hypermedia format that's restricted enough to prevent tracking isn't going to attract everyone. It's going to attract the subset of users who care enough about stuff privacy to give up "rich Web" features like single page applications and animated HTML canvas elements in return. That's not a group that's likely to start immediately demanding to to build in the features needed to create infiniscrolling Pinterest feeds. And it's also going to be a much restricted group, meaning businesses won't stand to profit much by pushing for it. So there might not be any economic incentive to do it. At least, that's how it might be at first. If it remains a nice place to be for 5 years, I'd call it a decent run. 10, and I'd be ecstatic.
- tammer 8y ago
  Precisely. This is leveraging the “network effect” that has thus far mostly been a tool of corporate profit for mass benefit. I yearn for a future where knowledge is distributed in a practical, organizied way such as via Gopher or similar, along with tapping the full potential of email as a one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one communications medium where data is distributed and address ownership is maintained.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >I yearn for a future where knowledge is distributed in a practical, organizied way such as via Gopher or similar, along with tapping the full potential of email as a one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one communications medium where data is distributed and address ownership is maintained. We already have that, it's called the World Wide Web. You seem to be under the impression that the popularity of the web is due to centralization by and commercialization by corporate interests, but that isn't the case. It's still entirely feasible to distribute knowledge in a "practical, organized way" using HTML and HTTP, and people do use it for things besides the three social media sites people now mistakenly believe comprise the entire web.
    - adrianratnapala 8y ago
joering2 8y ago
> The problem is economic, and the solution must be too. FB for example is US-based company. Last time I checked you are not forced to accept outside money, get VC rounds or go IPO. Mark chosen to go the "American path" that is capitalism to the maximum so of course I will lose an argument over why he is trying to maximize profits. But nothing stopped him from building sponsorship agreements with i.e. fortune 500 corps, instead of building bidding platform ala Google. I'm pretty sure if you would signup fortune 500 and have for example 500 rotating banners, it would give you enough founds to run operations and pay every employee $150,000 salary. Plus having exactly ZERO tracking cookies and ZERO malicious following you JS script. Its quite possible given FB size and reach, but again "this is America, this is business."
lazyjones 8y ago
> The problem is economic, and the solution must be too. Alright, let's talk to our representatives and ask them to consider taxing tracking and data collection.
- jrmg 8y ago
  I think you speak in jest, but: http://mercurynews.ca.newsmemory.com/?publink=198a2aa45 http://mercurynews.ca.newsmemory.com/?publink=198a2aa45
TeMPOraL 8y ago
That's totally true. But then again, the harm of advertising and surveillance capitalism is a thing. So is the focus on data hoarding, vendor lock-in, favoring prettiness over utility. I really wish we could run a parallel web. One optimized for utility, where data and content is available in maximally useful form, where users are in control of their rendering, and are free to use whatever automation they want. Not a replacement web, just a for people who are willing to jump through some hoops in order to avoid the crap that's on the mainsteram one. I don't know much about Gopher yet (I'm starting to learn now), but maybe such a parallel web could be developed there?
- icebraining 8y ago
  Freenet is kind of that parallel web - decentralized, very hard to surveil, mostly made of simple HTML documents and pictures. And nobody uses it.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    How is Freenet different from Tor?
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Tor follows the traditional client/server model, it just uses a few connection layers to attempt to make it harder for the server (or any listener, of course) to identify the origin of the connection. That means someone must be running that server, which means it's possible to shut it down and punish the operators, and those operators can in turn identify the clients by any means except those directly prevented by the layering model. Freenet is a distributed content-addressed store, much like IPFS, except that rather than you directly fetching content from other users who have specifically "pinned" that content (outing you both as interested in the material), the request hops over multiple users, leaving it cached (in an encrypted form, for plausible deniability) over their machines, so that it's very hard to tell who actually requested it.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
rixrax 8y ago
I’m old enough to have used gopher on vt100 terminals as an undergrad in college to try and do some ‘work’. And when http/www arrived, it didn’t take long to switch to a better mousetrap. And this wasn’t just because you could now render a gif in NCSA Mosaic on indigo workstation. Everything was just better in this new http world. Let’s fast forward to today, yes, we’ve gone overboard all over, but then again, Gopher [i think] doesn’t come standard with TLS, it hasn’t gone through the evolution that http[s] has that makes it a robust and scalable backbone it is today. What I’m trying to say is that we should not casually float around pipe dreams about switching to ancient tech that wasn’t that good to begin with. Yes, electric cars were a thing already in early 1900s, and we maybe took a wrong turn with combustion engine, but with Gopher, I think we should let the sleeping dogs lie, and focus on improving next version of QUIC, or even inventing something entirely new that would address many of the concerns in the article without sacrificing years of innovation since we abandoned Gopher. Heck, this new thing might as well run on TCP/70, never mind UDP appears to be the thing now[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/3
- ethbro 8y ago
  Well said. The article conflates a content / rendering problem with a protocol solution. A lightweight HTTP/TLS subset that severely limits client-side execution expectations would seem to accomplish the same goals. While repurposing all the amazing tech we've built since the 1990s. Essentially, "just pass me the bare minimum of response to make Firefox Reader View work." ... but then we wouldn't be able to serve high-value targeted ads, would we?
  - redahs 8y ago
    If the desire is to make online content more readable, it might be worth starting with the assumption that all content downloaded from the network will be read on a black-and-white ereader device with no persistent internet connection. This assumption might require substantially reworking the hyperlink model of the internet, so that external references to content delivered by third-parties is sharply distinguished from internal references to other pages within the same work.
kleer001 8y ago
Pay people to use Gopher? Maybe state funded.
daxfohl 8y ago
Even the internet as a whole isn't the problem. Corporations can share your data just as easily if it's from a paper form that you gave to them. It's not going to be long until cameras, drones, microphones everywhere are spying on everybody. It'd be nice to have a quieter place like old gopher, but yeah the real increase in privacy it would bring is somewhat illusory.
pvarangot 8y ago
Using technology to kickstart the discussion about the economical solution is not a bad idea. It would be nice to have a neutral place to discuss technology and it's slowly stopping to be a thing.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> HTML ain't the problem; Gopher is an alternative to HTTP, not HTML. HTML can be used with gopher, and since documents served via gopher can be accessed by URLs, it's hypermedia features are usable over gopher. (But gopher is read only, unlike HTTP, so even with JS—since even though it uses URLs, HTML’s built-in form behavior presupposes HTTP and it's verbs—to do a gopher call for a form you'd only get the equivalent of GET forms.) In principal at least; other than Lynx and an extension for Firefox, I don't think any current browser has support for Gopher, anyway. > If you somehow managed to pull enough users to Gopher, they'd just write Gopher Chrome and start adding new features that conveniently allow tracking into it You can do IP based tracking on any TCP/IP protocol, and if the clients have JS (or other scripting, but if you make it alternate channel for HTML, JS is the obvious choice) support and aren't a monoculture, and have differences detectable with JS, you can do client fingerprinting on top of that. Yes, even with gopher protocol alone, as long as your server can treat certain crafted requests specially.
jrnichols 8y ago
just like RSS. text feeds weren't the problem - advertisers declaring it "stealing content" and trying to force advertisements everywhere are the problem. usenet was also great until spam went nuts.

helij 8y ago

Indeed[1] You always have a choice! [1] https://artlists.org/privacy-policy/ https://artlists.org/privacy-policy/

petra 8y ago

Say we've built the system of economic incentives for privacy(opt-in). And managed to convince 10% of users and 50% of site owners to convert. Extremely hard. What do users get in the end ? half of the web is still tracking them. And many of the big guys still track them. Not enough if you ask me. That's what makes it so difficult. So let's solve that: let's build a search engine that let me filter sites according to privacy, Ah and be perceived as good as google - because in today's world, in many jobs, you cannot give up on an information advantage. That's kind of an impossible mission.

m-p-3 8y ago
DuckDuckGo should implement that, or at least put a privacy indicator.
- mattkevan 8y ago
  They do. Their browser plugin grades sites both on the number of tracking scripts and the quality of their privacy policy. https://duck.co/help/desktop/adding-duckduckgo-to-your-browser https://duck.co/help/desktop/adding-duckduckgo-to-your-brows...

bunderbunder 8y ago

Moving to another protocol, like Gopher, seems like an economic solution to me. A parallel protocol and hypermedia format that's restricted enough to prevent tracking isn't going to attract everyone. It's going to attract the subset of users who care enough about stuff privacy to give up "rich Web" features like single page applications and animated HTML canvas elements in return. That's not a group that's likely to start immediately demanding to to build in the features needed to create infiniscrolling Pinterest feeds. And it's also going to be a much restricted group, meaning businesses won't stand to profit much by pushing for it. So there might not be any economic incentive to do it. At least, that's how it might be at first. If it remains a nice place to be for 5 years, I'd call it a decent run. 10, and I'd be ecstatic.

tammer 8y ago
Precisely. This is leveraging the “network effect” that has thus far mostly been a tool of corporate profit for mass benefit. I yearn for a future where knowledge is distributed in a practical, organizied way such as via Gopher or similar, along with tapping the full potential of email as a one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one communications medium where data is distributed and address ownership is maintained.
- krapp 8y ago
  >I yearn for a future where knowledge is distributed in a practical, organizied way such as via Gopher or similar, along with tapping the full potential of email as a one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one communications medium where data is distributed and address ownership is maintained. We already have that, it's called the World Wide Web. You seem to be under the impression that the popularity of the web is due to centralization by and commercialization by corporate interests, but that isn't the case. It's still entirely feasible to distribute knowledge in a "practical, organized way" using HTML and HTTP, and people do use it for things besides the three social media sites people now mistakenly believe comprise the entire web.
  - adrianratnapala 8y ago

joering2 8y ago

> The problem is economic, and the solution must be too. FB for example is US-based company. Last time I checked you are not forced to accept outside money, get VC rounds or go IPO. Mark chosen to go the "American path" that is capitalism to the maximum so of course I will lose an argument over why he is trying to maximize profits. But nothing stopped him from building sponsorship agreements with i.e. fortune 500 corps, instead of building bidding platform ala Google. I'm pretty sure if you would signup fortune 500 and have for example 500 rotating banners, it would give you enough founds to run operations and pay every employee $150,000 salary. Plus having exactly ZERO tracking cookies and ZERO malicious following you JS script. Its quite possible given FB size and reach, but again "this is America, this is business."

lazyjones 8y ago

> The problem is economic, and the solution must be too. Alright, let's talk to our representatives and ask them to consider taxing tracking and data collection.

jrmg 8y ago
I think you speak in jest, but: http://mercurynews.ca.newsmemory.com/?publink=198a2aa45 http://mercurynews.ca.newsmemory.com/?publink=198a2aa45

TeMPOraL 8y ago

That's totally true. But then again, the harm of advertising and surveillance capitalism is a thing. So is the focus on data hoarding, vendor lock-in, favoring prettiness over utility. I really wish we could run a parallel web. One optimized for utility, where data and content is available in maximally useful form, where users are in control of their rendering, and are free to use whatever automation they want. Not a replacement web, just a for people who are willing to jump through some hoops in order to avoid the crap that's on the mainsteram one. I don't know much about Gopher yet (I'm starting to learn now), but maybe such a parallel web could be developed there?

icebraining 8y ago
Freenet is kind of that parallel web - decentralized, very hard to surveil, mostly made of simple HTML documents and pictures. And nobody uses it.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  How is Freenet different from Tor?
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Tor follows the traditional client/server model, it just uses a few connection layers to attempt to make it harder for the server (or any listener, of course) to identify the origin of the connection. That means someone must be running that server, which means it's possible to shut it down and punish the operators, and those operators can in turn identify the clients by any means except those directly prevented by the layering model. Freenet is a distributed content-addressed store, much like IPFS, except that rather than you directly fetching content from other users who have specifically "pinned" that content (outing you both as interested in the material), the request hops over multiple users, leaving it cached (in an encrypted form, for plausible deniability) over their machines, so that it's very hard to tell who actually requested it.
ForHackernews 8y ago

rixrax 8y ago

I’m old enough to have used gopher on vt100 terminals as an undergrad in college to try and do some ‘work’. And when http/www arrived, it didn’t take long to switch to a better mousetrap. And this wasn’t just because you could now render a gif in NCSA Mosaic on indigo workstation. Everything was just better in this new http world. Let’s fast forward to today, yes, we’ve gone overboard all over, but then again, Gopher [i think] doesn’t come standard with TLS, it hasn’t gone through the evolution that http[s] has that makes it a robust and scalable backbone it is today. What I’m trying to say is that we should not casually float around pipe dreams about switching to ancient tech that wasn’t that good to begin with. Yes, electric cars were a thing already in early 1900s, and we maybe took a wrong turn with combustion engine, but with Gopher, I think we should let the sleeping dogs lie, and focus on improving next version of QUIC, or even inventing something entirely new that would address many of the concerns in the article without sacrificing years of innovation since we abandoned Gopher. Heck, this new thing might as well run on TCP/70, never mind UDP appears to be the thing now[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/3

ethbro 8y ago
Well said. The article conflates a content / rendering problem with a protocol solution. A lightweight HTTP/TLS subset that severely limits client-side execution expectations would seem to accomplish the same goals. While repurposing all the amazing tech we've built since the 1990s. Essentially, "just pass me the bare minimum of response to make Firefox Reader View work." ... but then we wouldn't be able to serve high-value targeted ads, would we?
- redahs 8y ago
  If the desire is to make online content more readable, it might be worth starting with the assumption that all content downloaded from the network will be read on a black-and-white ereader device with no persistent internet connection. This assumption might require substantially reworking the hyperlink model of the internet, so that external references to content delivered by third-parties is sharply distinguished from internal references to other pages within the same work.

kleer001 8y ago

Pay people to use Gopher? Maybe state funded.

daxfohl 8y ago

Even the internet as a whole isn't the problem. Corporations can share your data just as easily if it's from a paper form that you gave to them. It's not going to be long until cameras, drones, microphones everywhere are spying on everybody. It'd be nice to have a quieter place like old gopher, but yeah the real increase in privacy it would bring is somewhat illusory.

pvarangot 8y ago

Using technology to kickstart the discussion about the economical solution is not a bad idea. It would be nice to have a neutral place to discuss technology and it's slowly stopping to be a thing.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> HTML ain't the problem; Gopher is an alternative to HTTP, not HTML. HTML can be used with gopher, and since documents served via gopher can be accessed by URLs, it's hypermedia features are usable over gopher. (But gopher is read only, unlike HTTP, so even with JS—since even though it uses URLs, HTML’s built-in form behavior presupposes HTTP and it's verbs—to do a gopher call for a form you'd only get the equivalent of GET forms.) In principal at least; other than Lynx and an extension for Firefox, I don't think any current browser has support for Gopher, anyway. > If you somehow managed to pull enough users to Gopher, they'd just write Gopher Chrome and start adding new features that conveniently allow tracking into it You can do IP based tracking on any TCP/IP protocol, and if the clients have JS (or other scripting, but if you make it alternate channel for HTML, JS is the obvious choice) support and aren't a monoculture, and have differences detectable with JS, you can do client fingerprinting on top of that. Yes, even with gopher protocol alone, as long as your server can treat certain crafted requests specially.

jrnichols 8y ago

just like RSS. text feeds weren't the problem - advertisers declaring it "stealing content" and trying to force advertisements everywhere are the problem. usenet was also great until spam went nuts.