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The author talks about the web as "one of humanity's greatest inventions." which is now in crisis:
> And now, we the architects of the modern web — web designe
The author talks about the web as "one of humanity's greatest inventions." which is now in crisis:
> And now, we the architects of the modern web — web designers, UX designers, developers, creative directors, social media managers, data scientists, product managers, start-up people, strategists — are destroying it.
The interests of tech companies, investors and web professionals have not always aligned with the best interests of end-users and so there has been a gradual erosion of the freedoms embedded in the foundations of the web itself.
My favourite StarTrek moment is Captain Pike's statement "We are always in a fight for the future". Given the current state of the web, this feels truer than ever. Unlike the author, however, I don't think the answer is better web pages. Any chance of us winning the fight for user freedoms must be bigger and bolder than that.
There has been an entire generation of entrepreneurs and investors who have thought and planned strategically how to shape the web to work in their best interests. A meaningful counter has to be equally intentional and coordinated to stand a chance at shaping the course technology takes. We are in a fight for the future and we need to think bigger to stand a chance of winning that fight.
Agreed, but what are you personally going to do, very specifically, to fight back?
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Understand the user needs that are being fulfilled by the walled gardens,
Build and sell simple, useful and if not open then transparent services or products in order to foster variety in the face of anticompetitive or monopolistic entities,
Help resellers/repackagers/... to configure, integrate or adapt such services even if not my own.
Y'know, "do one thing and do it well"-style.
Personally, I run a website which I use to push my ideals of what the web should look like. I try to educate people on why I think that way and what I think is wrong what they might be doing. If you’re really devoted, you could try contributing to a browser engine to help reign (typo: rein) in the web.
Things I want to do this year to help reclaim the web:
1. Run my own personal web server. Starting on a cloud provider, but eventually from my flat.
2. Write my own blog on my own web server. Not using a platform. Not tracking users.
3. Push my side-project code to an open Gitlab repo
Way down on this list is "stop commenting on HN", so if you never hear from me again, be glad ;)
I'm currently working on a project which I hope to launch later this year that gives users the ability to run, view and modify software using visual tools.
There are too many meaningful problems technology could be solving and too few programmers interested in solving those problems. Giving more people the tools to build their own solutions or adapt others is something that could really change the game. There are a few companies exploring this space but we're looking to create open tools that don't enforce a vendor lock-in and tools that defend user freedoms. Viva la revolución!
Some friends and I are trying to built a new private web where tracking is impossible without user permission and users own their data:
https://book.peergos.org https://book.peergos.org
Replying to @all
What I was getting at was dead simpl,e: turn off JS and install a hostfile-based blocklist, or other. It really was that simple. I also enable cookies just for HN posting. Else no cookies of any kind ever accepted.
So are people doing that, because if you don't co-operate with their code, tracking you gets vastly harder. You can take back control of you machine - if you choose.
It's simple and you can do it now - if you choose.
@benjaminjosephw: can you give more detail? (glad you're not just all talk!)
@marcus_holmes, @zdkl, @saagarjha: you may need to get together with others to unify the idea of doing your own web servers. A collective not a commercial entity which you are trying to avoid being involved in. That gives you together much more power.
I think that's what @MaxBarraclough is suggesting looking at . I will to.
@saagarjha: writing your own browser engine seems totally pointless - it's the web at fault, not the browser that renders it. If you don't like bits of the browser, remove the code. Don't understand what you're trying to do.
What do you do when you need a website but it doesn't work without Js?
It's a huge pain to make phone calls, or go to the store
I use a VM for the few cases I really need to interact with a JS-ridden site, which reverts to a clean state when closed. This should be doable by most HN'ers, we're supposed to be technically savvy.
But another way when you need not have to use the site to put pressure on the site by not bothering with it if it breaks without JS. Enough people do it and they will get the hint.
Or actually talk to the site owners and ask them - I have done this with a small publisher.
Or if someone post a link to their JS-requiring blog/site on HN, ask them politely to make it usable without (I do occasionally).
If you want to fight back, you have to pay the price. It's a pretty small one for me.
JavaScript by itself isn't evil. A static web site that uses JavaScript to let the user do everything on the client provides more privacy than an old-school web site with CGI scripts and forms.
I've been playing with this idea recently. If you want to provide access to a database which is infrequently updated and no bigger than a few megabytes (like the catalogue of a library with 30 000 books), then provide the database with the web page and implement the search function in JavaScript. If you avoid using a JavaScript "framework" then you may find that the web page responds to your typing so instantaneously that you feel like you're back in the 1980s using a Z80-based machine. (You remember those Z80-based word processors that could keep up with a competent typist?)
- Support small/local/regional cyber organizations that respect users online and motivate them build dynamic online communities instead of mass aggregates of UIDs.
- Use open source softwares that respect my rights and privacy.
- Decentralize my financial and technological options.
- Randomly support a small but empowering online project that someone started.
- Wear an N95 mask when browsing online.
- Reconsider gopher as a healthy and viable way to access data :-)
I've been trying to build a Mastadon container for docker so that I can convince friends and family to try a smaller social network. First for pictures, then maybe later for more.
If, say 1 in every 1000 people knew how to maintain their own small Mastadon server, we could build a decentralized social network with federated identity.
I think that would be a noble first step and would not require too much moderation work for the admin: how hard would it be to moderate 200 of your friends and family? not very.
Not going to happen unless we get property rights to software. As long as software is "licensed", we no longer own our machines.
Battle.net DRM, Steam, EPIC, uplay, origin, are all bids to lock down software.
Without property rights to own software you can't prevent mass privacy invasion that's going on in windows 10. You need to beat back DRM completely and that mean's we need ownership rights and DRM systems need to be destroyed, they only came about because big media companies lobbied away the basic rights and freedoms to own our PC's and the software on it.
Without software property rights for the public, the madness will continue.
I watched for the last 23 years as the game industry client-servered every PC game and got away with it because "software is licensed", not owned, so they can technically sell you incomplete software where pieces of your game live on a remote server and die if it ever shuts off.
Shit is fraud plain and simple, that's why dedicated servers and level editors went away in the AAA space and how we got "software as a service (scam)".
I don't see anything good given the vast majority of people are too stupid politically to even approach the problem of property rights to software for end users.
You seem to be ignoring the other, more legitimate motivation for DRM schemes: rampant piracy meant that as many as 90% of copies of some games were illegal. With production costs today so much higher, a lot of modern games probably couldn't have been made in that environment.
Walled gardens and proprietary lock-in schemes are still undesirable from the user's perspective, and I suspect many of us might support stronger consumer rights in this area, but just switching off all protections without a change in culture so people do respect the rights of creators as well is unrealistic.
And the solution to piracy turned out to be "make legitimate stores more convenient than pirated ones". It's not that DRM got so good that I can't find a game on the Pirate Bay, it's that Steam is so convenient that I don't bother to.
Given that, DRM is entirely useless, and I prefer to buy things from GOG.com whenever I can.
If Pike and his crew represent users, then the tech industry are the Talosians?
Absolute favourite episode hands down, The Cage. According to Shatner's autobiography, NBC called the pilot "too cerebral" and "too intellectual".
In my opinion, this erosion of freedoms is closely related to marketing departments that are now established practice in every IT company. Technological interest becomes an interest in profit, or at least these two become entwined, and in an environment driven by competition, the marketing strategies become very aggressive.
For example, review sites are frequently manipulated by fake posts, and new products that are introduced into the market find it inevitable to do the same because otherwise, they won't get the required visibility to back-up the investment.
And there's an elaborate online tracking mechanism established to follow the user online to obtain his/her purchase history, interests and desires, to push ads to the face, and this is done (although not always) without users consent, limiting online freedom.
I think there are lots of lessons to learn from Cambridge Analytica scandal, or from the practices of ClearView AI that are cooperating with law enforcement providing them facial recognition technologies.
I agree, I think ads are a scourge on society and the source of a great number of problems we have today. The problem is that the incentives are very strong for selling ads, but I think it can be corrected through regulation or taxation. If you decrease the profit margins, the amount of effort being expelled to manipulating people's attention will decrease drastically and big tech might go back to creating new technology instead of manipulating people.
There's a line from The Simpsons Movie that has stuck with me for a long time. Springfield has become critically polluted, and the US government is going to erase it from the map. To sell this idea to the masses, they enlist Tom Hanks to produce an advertisement. The line goes, "Hello, I'm Tom Hanks. The US Government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine."
I see this as the fundamental problem. Advertising is, at its core, a transaction in which people with people with credibility and influence are paid to lie. It is a pollution of public discourse and intellect, and what we're seeing right now is the analog of runaway global warming.
Any chance of us winning the fight for user freedoms must be bigger and bolder than that.
Can you please take a look at the following URLs (so I don’t have to repeat it here) and let me know if this is along the lines of what you are thinking about:
https://qbix.com/business.pdf https://qbix.com/business.pdf
https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token
Can it work to retake control of the Web for users?
> A meaningful counter has to be equally intentional and coordinated to stand a chance at shaping the course technology takes.
A new TCP protocol which provides value (really great value) and discourages the kinds of futures you want to avoid could go a long way.
brave browser seems like an idea worth supporting, imo
No, this is not a problem that will be solved by "Entrepreneurs and investors" as they're precisely the people who caused this problem in the first place and to suggest more capitalism will solve problems inherently caused by capitalism is the definition of the old adage "insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results." This problem will only be solved by regulation.
Given that, DRM is entirely useless
This is a common claim, but it's not realistic.
The commercial success of modern AAA titles with budgets comparable to Hollywood blockbusters is often extremely front-loaded. That is, like new movies, these games typically make a disproportionate part of their lifetime revenue during the first few weeks after release. No-one in the gaming industry expects a DRM scheme to protect a AAA title indefinitely, but if some online-linked scheme can take even a few weeks to crack after launch, that can make a huge difference to the total revenues brought in by a game.
At the other end of the spectrum, the commercial success of a small indie game might be determined by selling a few hundred extra copies. If some simple copy protection efforts can significantly reduce casual copying, that could be the difference between making money and losing money.
People sometimes look at DRM as if it's some black-and-white issue for the creators, something that has no benefit if it's not 100% effective. That's not how the real world works.
The counter argument is every netflix show and movie, every hbo show, every amazon show, is available via torrent moments after it comes out. And yet Netflix and Amazon are an N and A in FAANG. They're hugely profitable, even though it can all be pirated trivially.
Similarly there are things like humblebundle which releases all software DRM free (or did) yet devs are making money.
This isn't about zero piracy. It's about whether or not DRM is effective. I think sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. I'm not sure I can put my finger on where it is and where it isn't.
As one example, my impression is it's important for software like Maya, 3DSMax, Autodesk. I'm confident most companies i've worked for would not bother purchasing the appropriate number of licenses if they didn't have to. It might not even be deliberate. It's just if the software wasn't DRMed they'd just install on each new employee's machine and put it on a forgotten TODO list to buy a new license. The software is large enough and the market small enough that DRM matters.
On the other hand, examples of Netflix above, it not clear it matters for movies. Nor is it clear it matters for AAA games or even many popular Indie games.
Even in the case of services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, the DRM measures are a significant impediment to casual infringement, and in particular to "ignorant" casual infringement by the kind of person who would quite happily put a whole show on their YouTube channel and then write something like "No copyright intended" in the description as if that meant they hadn't just flagrantly broken the law. For any big name, mass market title, there will probably be a way to acquire it illegally relatively quickly after release for those who know where to look, but there is a very long tail of infringement beyond that point and that's what they're trying to control with these kinds of measures.
As a pertinent illustration, a while back Google started adding a download icon to the default toolbar for HTML5 videos in Chrome. It didn't do anything you couldn't do before just by using the context menu and saving. And yet Internet forums were swamped by complaints from people who made DRM-free videos available on their sites in the immediate aftermath, because viewers assumed the presence of the icon meant it was now OK to download the videos to keep or share arbitrarily. My businesses typically don't employ any fancy DRM schemes for content we provide to customers once they've paid and logged in to whatever system they're using. But that week, after spending an insane amount of time chasing down copies of multimedia content that was for paying customers only yet suddenly started popping up on every hosting/sharing system you can think of, we did implement a really dumb "breaking change" in how we served videos, just to get rid of that icon, and it solved our problem overnight.
It's hard to respect the rights of someone who is willing to sacrifice yours to ensure theirs.
That isn't even just a software thing. It's a fundamental problem of civil life; backed by willingness/asymmetry in means to practically apply force.
I'd gladly pay for a good game. I am very much less likely to pay for a game I cannot try. I will not do SaaS games anymore on principle. The business model may be the most advantageous in terms of operating game studios, but I'm done handing over information to third parties, and being left high and dry when they decide they want to fundamentally change things/not host infrastructure anymore. In that sense, I treat it like any other piece of software I rely on. If I can't mirror/host/modify/distribute/fork source; I'm not terribly interested.
For me a game is a tool. It is a tool through which wonder and joy can be experienced at the myriad of things we can coerce a computer into doing. Tell me I can't do anything with it except pay for it and let it take up space on my drive, and you've lost a sale.
Then again, as an astute architect once pointed out to me; clearly I'm not the intended audience; and the number of people committed to servicing the audience I'm a part of is few and far between. This will likely remain the status quo until the end of my days; and it isn't even like I've made a contribution to the space as of yet; so I tend to suffer in silence as the sinner with a rock should.
When the day comes that I do, (especially in the unlikely event the game is actually good) I may come down off the fence and make the debate space intolerable for game-industry status quo people.
It's hard to respect the rights of someone who is willing to sacrifice yours to ensure theirs.
Indeed. So how do you think game developers felt watching their hard work get ripped by pirates who would offer absurd rationalisations to justify breaking the law and taking something that other people spent a lot of time and money to make without paying for it?
I'd gladly pay for a good game. I am very much less likely to pay for a game I cannot try.
That is your prerogative. In days gone by, before online distribution was the norm and other strategies became viable, game developers used to release demos that featured, say, the first couple of levels of a game so you could try it out. This is hardly a new thing, and it's never something that many game developers were against.
If I can't mirror/host/modify/distribute/fork source; I'm not terribly interested.
Again, that's your prerogative. I actually have a lot of sympathy for this view; at my businesses, we adopt a very similar strategy in avoiding SaaS for anything critical to our business operations.
But we have to realise that we are in a relatively small minority here. As long as the online systems or DRM or whatever are reasonably transparent, most people simply don't care. As you say, the likes of us are not the intended audience of these products.
American IP law was alway writtein in a one sided way to deny ownership rights to the general public, what about big media and game companies lobbying away the public domain?
So I won't feel anything for people like you and your pro drm arguments, none of this would be talked about pre-internet because the only way to give us software was to give us all the files.
The modern game industry is committing fraud and stealing software on a mass scale because of the criminally underhanded IP laws.
Steam/uplay/origin were forced into existence, no one wanted them and were imposed on the population because game consumers were 100's of miles away.
The internet is just one sized world computer and programmers and ceo's know they can now issue commands down the wire to impose their will on the computer illiterate.
your pro drm arguments
I don't know what a pro-DRM argument looks like here. Do you think an argument that solving a problem where two huge groups have each been abused by a significant fraction of the other group over a multi-decade period in a way that affects everyone's lives and billions in economic activity might need more nuance than giving one side everything it wants and putting the other side in front of a firing squad is pro-DRM?
none of this would be talked about pre-internet
Most of this wasn't very relevant pre-Internet. You couldn't see a new work you'd spent the equivalent of $100,000,000 developing with a team of hundreds over a period of years being cracked and then copied to millions of people within a matter of hours pre-Internet.
In those days, sure, you got all the files, but you also probably got asked to read a word from a certain page in the manual or something when you loaded the game as a crude but surprisingly effective form of copy protection. You couldn't just look anything you needed to know up online because that sort of "online" didn't exist back then. Sometimes people did distribute cracked versions of games, but again they didn't circulate rapidly among the community because they had to be individually copied and shared around on physical media.
Using the capabilities of the Internet to counter widespread abuse facilitated by those same capabilities is hardly a radical strategy. Absent a radical global overhaul of IP law (which I'd fully support, but I don't see happening any time soon) relying on technological solutions to protect itself is all the creative industry has.
Clearly you have strong views on this, so how would you resolve the impasse in a way that better respects the rights of consumers without obliterating all viable business models for creators?
The real value of game stores isn't the DRM, it's things like simplified installation and automatic updates. They're essentially package managers. Before this, games came in several CDs which were fragile and players had to download and apply many incremental patches just to play online. Stores like Steam changed everything. Few people remember how it used to be before them.
Copyright infringement is inconsequential when faced with these benefits and simplicity. Infringement takes effort. In order to infringe, people have to fiddle with torrents and trackers, search for the data they want, evaluate the quality of each torrent and trust that the executables they download are not malicious. This isn't something your average person is going to do even if it costs $0. Lots of people do it because the creators themselves leave them no choice: refusing to do business in the consumer's country, including invasive malware in the form of DRM and anti-cheating software that renders games unplayable for reasons such as lack of internet connection or use of a virtual machine. People go out of their way to make the "pirate" version the superior version.
Just to be sure I've understood your argument, you're claiming that providing easy access to copyright-protected works is sufficient to prevent piracy, as no-one will attempt to pirate things that are readily available on a legal basis so DRM is pointless?
I agree that not providing a good, legal means to get something is an incentive for pirates, but the idea that all piracy just goes away if you do is absurd. Some people tried experiments with this a few years ago, and found that even for something that you could literally get legally for free just by downloading it from the original website, a high proportion of the copies being played actually came from other sources and were not legally obtained.
I've run a business that creates original content and makes it available through an online portal. My team and I have on occasion watched, in real time, over periods of hours or even days, as some people have gone to lengths that were hard to believe just to scrape our content in a way that would let them set up a copycat. Obviously we shut them down before they could pose a serious risk to the business, but it was a great demonstration of the weakness of arguments that people are basically decent and will buy stuff legally if you make it easy. Some people are like that, many people even. And more people will buy stuff legally if you don't make it unreasonably difficult. But many people will still try to rip you off, no matter what you product costs or how easy it is to get.
We've been at the DRM game a long time, through games, music, videos, etc. They all work about as well as they've worked before.
If you want to control your hardware, do what you will. But I'm not happy if you need controls in all my hardware.
There's an argument to be made that the encumbrances you hope for are largely controlled by global corporations who yield to governments, and aren't aligned with the rights of individuals and culture at large (extended copyright, CPU backdoors, carrier backdoors, etc).
Loss is built into every business model. Loss prevention is a reasonable response. But this cycle of "more controls, more DRM, more backdoors" returns again and again, and is worth resisting.
Loss is built into every business model. Loss prevention is a reasonable response. But this cycle of "more controls, more DRM, more backdoors" returns again and again, and is worth resisting.
I think you have to look at the issue from both sides. When I was younger, I was the same idealistic anti-DRM person as others commenting here. I took the same black and white views about how it's unjustified and since it will inevitably be broken it's pointless.
Then I learned something about the real economics of content creation at different scales, and some of my own business interests have intersected with this area from the other side. That tends to give you a more nuanced view of the situation.
FWIW, I'm a strongly liberal, pro-rights kind of person. I don't imagine I like hostile DRM measures or systems I can't fully control any more than anyone else here. But not liking them is different to not understanding the motivations for them or accepting that in some circumstances they may be a justified and proportionate response to a demonstrable threat. People did rip software and music and movies and so on, on a massive scale, before we evolved the modern culture. Different media have tried to solve that problem in different ways.
With music, where it's viable to have a very low cost product, we have solved it to some extent by making legitimate channels easier to access at a price where buying legally isn't a big deal. In other news, most music files you download aren't DRM'd at all these days. The flip side of this one is that a lot of the artists themselves are now basically getting scammed by the big music distribution services paying them a tiny fraction of the revenues they're bringing in and some pretty shady rights transfer agreements. But in terms of legal copyright for the final listener, it's essentially a solved problem.
With software or movies, you often can't afford to distribute everything easily at throwaway prices, because the costs involved in production are much higher and you need the people who benefit from the product to contribute a fair part of that cost or the whole production becomes unviable. Part of the reaction here has been the unfortunate trend towards only investing the big money in smash hit franchises that are sure to make a huge profit even if they suffer significant infringement as well. Plenty of people will go to the theatre to watch the next MCU movie or will buy the next installment of Assassin's Creed or next year's version of their favourite sports game where the only thing that changed significantly was the players and teams in the database. But for anything that isn't a sure-fire hit, you can probably drop a couple of zeroes off the budget anyone will give you now.
Even with the sure-fire hits, you can expect that Assassin's Creed title to have some sort of phone-home lock when it launches, which will probably protect a large amount of revenue in the opening weeks until someone cracks it.
And of course for software that is more expensive still -- like business applications that used to cost hundreds per seat before -- the move to SaaS and online hosting has a very convenient side effect for the developers that it becomes essentially impervious to piracy if they do it right. Not that everyone does, as Adobe has demonstrated yet again just this week.
I think the fundamental problem is that copyright has evolved to a strange and not entirely logical position in law today. It intends to prevent actions that could cause severe damage to a legitimate creator who made and released work in return for the rights the law claimed to offer. And yet it remains primarily a civil matter, and infringements tend to be of such low value individually that they aren't worth pursuing through normal legal actions and as such render the associated rights largely unenforceable in practice, even though the collective damage from infringement may still be severe. So big rightsholders resort to things like DRM and lobbying for otherwise nonsensical laws that try to criminalise circumvention of DRM schemes even if the original act of copying would itself have been legal.
If there were meaningful criminal penalties for knowingly redistributing works in violation of copyright, which were enforced by public authorities like any other crime, but if there were also much tighter restrictions on what DRM was allowed to do and obligations on those releasing works using it to ensure the legitimate rights of people who paid for access were respected, we might be better off. But in reality, criminal copyright laws for commercial infringement are still rarely enforced and the vast majority of infringement goes unchallenged, so rightsholders continue to resort to the IP version of street justice and throwing their considerable legal and lobbying weight around to get their way, often to the detriment of legitimate customers who are happy to pay a fair price for works they enjoy but then suffer the consequences of broken DRM or bad legal actions or whatever.
People blame ads all the time, but the blame is surface level: they dislike ads because they are unpleasant. But this is blaming a symptom of the real problem.
The real problem is tough to solve.
Ads themselves, intrinsically, are not bad. Ever tried to launch a better product? It turns out people rarely flock to it. Information about products seeps slowly through a population who would benefit from it. So, at its core, marketing helps increase the rate of information propagation.
But that's not all that marketing does, of course. Marketing has value as a signal, also: if a company is spending a lot of money on marketing, economists say it is 'posting a bond', meaning they put a lot of money into some asset (the brand) that will lose value if their product fails to deliver on its promises. That's not always true, of course, but brands with big budgets more often than not tend to more consistently deliver than those with no budget, so there's some signal there.
But still, humans are imperfect, so a portion of marketing is spent convincing people of things that aren't true, and it works some portion of the time, so it continues. And that's where marketing walks across the line separating its value as economic utility to its recipients into psychological manipulation.
Why do people put up with manipulation? Some say it's forced on them, that they have no choice.
But they do, broadly, have a choice. And their choice is, in aggregate, to be cheap. People are not willing to pay enough for content to allow that content to be delivered without the sort of marketing that goes beyond informational and bond-making and into intrusive and obtrusive.
So then content makers have a choice: do we not make content (or social platforms, or search engines, etc) at all, or do we make content and post ads?
That's not really a choice. The only option is to sell ads. And it is because consumers consistently choose to spend less money, and pay for their consumption not in immediate dollars but by offering up their attention to those who wish to change consumers' spending allocations. We can blame advertisers for this, but until consumers become willing to pony up - and they almost certainly will not - we will continue getting ads all the time, and continue blaming ads for a crappy web experience.