> I think the biggest failure of the open web is simply the lack of a "Publish" function. The simplest approach to something like this is Apache homedirs or fi

> I think the biggest failure of the open web is simply the lack of a "Publish" function. The simplest approach to something like this is Apache homedirs or finger plan files [0]: you write some text in a file in your home directory and a service makes it accessible to anyone who connects to your machine. Apparently plan files were somewhat popular thing at one point; you could finger the machines at id Software and read what John Carmack was doing on any given week [1]. The problem with this approach is that the internet (not just the web) is not end-to-end. Assuming your ISP isn't using CGNAT, I have to: - Punch a hole in my firewall or setup up a DMZ host. Unless my workstation is the only thing on my network and hooked directly into my modem, but nobody does that. Everybody has a LAN with private addressing. - Setup dynamic DNS, since there's no guarantee that my ISP has given me a static address. In practice this isn't that bad, but if I lose power in a thunderstorm you need to have the same name you had before. - Harden and update whatever service I run. It'll get probed regularly, and is a high value target since it presumably runs on the same machine where I run my password manager or buy things using I credit card. A VPS is just a convenience and security measure here. You get a public IP address without any additional management (default-deny firewall, NAT) and can isolate your private data from the VPS which is more likely to be compromised. The alternative would be to make a new network which gets rid of all the extra layers of management - just your machine, with a publicly accessible name that you can point people to. No smart network appliances in-between imposing NAT, DHCP, or firewalls beyond the one on your machine. I think there are P2P networks which work like this, or Tor if you give your machine a name in the .onion namespace. I don't know of any which are better on the security aspect though. [0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html [1] https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive