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> Somewhere you can browse hypertext documents with high performance, in safety, with no spying. How do you propose the no-spying part? With laws passed by cou

> Somewhere you can browse hypertext documents with high performance, in safety, with no spying. How do you propose the no-spying part? With laws passed by country? Nothing in your setup prevents spying, and spying is extremely lucrative in a capitalistic society, so people will still find a way to spy. You are putting all your trust in the server. But those servers are where the spying would move to if it needed to. You cannot create a technological system that prevents spying, since you have not removed the incentive to spy. Make it illegal to do targeted marketing and then you will have a dramatic reduction in spying. You'll also have a short-term dramatic drop in economic efficiency, something the HN crowd is likely to decry as equal to the end of the world. But I think it's much more likely that we build a sustainable society with good, long-term-growth economics if we put more limits on capitalism. Edit: Facebook doesn't care if you're reading those documents on some simple text-web. They'll find out anyway, either via your absence from the 'regular web' or any other clue they can find. The spying won't stop just because you're using some primitive technology.

asark 8y ago
Under what I propose you could only do stuff like recording a user's entire session, including mouse position and typing-in-progress in text fields, which is commonly and easily done on the modern web for "UX research", with the complicity of the browser itself. The point is that the server may log your requests, sure, but they can't gather tons of extra info without your seeing it (post previews) and they can't effectively stick a camera over your shoulder while you look a their pages. No more abusive, close session tracking. Best you can get is "the user, personally, made this request at this time". Which is way the hell better than where things are at now. I agree we also need to outlaw mass collection of info about people, or at least put in place such massive penalties for leaks that no sane company without a really compelling reason would dare store such things. Hopefully that'd end the damn credit card company and loyalty card and credit system spying, too, or at least force them to shape the eff up. I'd just also like a hypertext network that cannot constantly spy on me or eat an entire core because "programmer productivity". That's all.
- iguy 8y ago
  I don't know how perfectly you could do this. If there are going to be arbitrary mouseover effects then JS has to be able to see your mouse. If you want Jupyter notebooks to indent text & do tab completion then JS has to see text you haven't submitted. That said, I'd like my browser to be much more on my side -- by default disclose very little about my setup, by default partition cookies according to the headline site I visited, and delete them soon. I'd like JS completely off on most sites I visit, and more convenient ways to turn on as much of it as needed on some sites.
  - asark 8y ago
    > If there are going to be arbitrary mouseover effects then JS has to be able to see your mouse. If you want Jupyter notebooks to indent text & do tab completion then JS has to see text you haven't submitted. Just don't allow those things. Those aren't hypertext browsing, they're app-things. Wikipedia or Timmy's Ninja Turtle Fan Club or even banking and ordinary ecommerce sites don't really need those things, and having those things on the same platform as all these "apps" get them all mixed up in a spying and vulnerability nightmare for no good reason. I think hypertext browsing is distinct enough from what the current web is, and that it's still a useful enough idea, that it'd be nice to split that off from... whatever this has become.
    - iguy 8y ago
      Indeed. I guess you're picturing two apps, where I'm picturing one app with much easier per-site settings, with much the same goal. My current plan is to make lots of Fluid-app browsers, for certain sites, and then leave JS off most of the time. But there are enough sites which don't work at all, yet I want to visit, to make this a bit of a pain.
      - asark 8y ago
        One major benefit of a separate program and network (network of hypertext, that is, not IP network or whatever) is that if you can overcome an initial usage hurdle (big if, I know) it'd provide an audience incentive to get current websites that could work just fine on it (which is lots of them) to provide a second experience on it. The way they do now with web+mobile app, but it'd obviously be cheaper to provide than either of those, by a long shot. Gaining the ability to access, banking, ecommerce, and government resources in particular through a hypertext network that's not also a spyware and application delivery platform would be huge for security.

asark 8y ago

Under what I propose you could only do stuff like recording a user's entire session, including mouse position and typing-in-progress in text fields, which is commonly and easily done on the modern web for "UX research", with the complicity of the browser itself. The point is that the server may log your requests, sure, but they can't gather tons of extra info without your seeing it (post previews) and they can't effectively stick a camera over your shoulder while you look a their pages. No more abusive, close session tracking. Best you can get is "the user, personally, made this request at this time". Which is way the hell better than where things are at now. I agree we also need to outlaw mass collection of info about people, or at least put in place such massive penalties for leaks that no sane company without a really compelling reason would dare store such things. Hopefully that'd end the damn credit card company and loyalty card and credit system spying, too, or at least force them to shape the eff up. I'd just also like a hypertext network that cannot constantly spy on me or eat an entire core because "programmer productivity". That's all.

iguy 8y ago
I don't know how perfectly you could do this. If there are going to be arbitrary mouseover effects then JS has to be able to see your mouse. If you want Jupyter notebooks to indent text & do tab completion then JS has to see text you haven't submitted. That said, I'd like my browser to be much more on my side -- by default disclose very little about my setup, by default partition cookies according to the headline site I visited, and delete them soon. I'd like JS completely off on most sites I visit, and more convenient ways to turn on as much of it as needed on some sites.
- asark 8y ago
  > If there are going to be arbitrary mouseover effects then JS has to be able to see your mouse. If you want Jupyter notebooks to indent text & do tab completion then JS has to see text you haven't submitted. Just don't allow those things. Those aren't hypertext browsing, they're app-things. Wikipedia or Timmy's Ninja Turtle Fan Club or even banking and ordinary ecommerce sites don't really need those things, and having those things on the same platform as all these "apps" get them all mixed up in a spying and vulnerability nightmare for no good reason. I think hypertext browsing is distinct enough from what the current web is, and that it's still a useful enough idea, that it'd be nice to split that off from... whatever this has become.
  - iguy 8y ago
    Indeed. I guess you're picturing two apps, where I'm picturing one app with much easier per-site settings, with much the same goal. My current plan is to make lots of Fluid-app browsers, for certain sites, and then leave JS off most of the time. But there are enough sites which don't work at all, yet I want to visit, to make this a bit of a pain.
    - asark 8y ago
      One major benefit of a separate program and network (network of hypertext, that is, not IP network or whatever) is that if you can overcome an initial usage hurdle (big if, I know) it'd provide an audience incentive to get current websites that could work just fine on it (which is lots of them) to provide a second experience on it. The way they do now with web+mobile app, but it'd obviously be cheaper to provide than either of those, by a long shot. Gaining the ability to access, banking, ecommerce, and government resources in particular through a hypertext network that's not also a spyware and application delivery platform would be huge for security.