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I read through several pages before giving up and jumping to the end ... but what I saw gave no objective reason that the war will be won, this is pure hope or

by zmmmmm 5y ago

I read through several pages before giving up and jumping to the end ... but what I saw gave no objective reason that the war will be won, this is pure hope or maybe a "call to arms". I actually don't see any convincing reason why we'll "win" this war and in fact I feel like we are on the precipice of becoming permanently locked out from it ever being possible. The main reason is the complex web of laws interacting established platforms that make it effectively illegal for any new competitor to ever become established. All over the world governments are starting to regulate complex and specific requirements around security, surveillance, encryption, etc that are fundamentally incompatible with true "general purpose" computing. For example, if your computer can encrypt things without a backdoor then authorities cannot listen. But if it can't then by definition it is not a general purpose computer. Which is it going to be? I think governments will win and we will lose general purpose computing.

Taek 5y ago
I think we will win because locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms. We are reaching a turning point where even the brightest minds struggle to generate major innovations on the locked down web. You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. Conversely, the dweb is flush right now with innovation and new ideas, with an ecosystem of builders that are excited to share and compound off of eachother's ideas. I believe that at maturity, the dweb will run absurd agile circles around the lockdown web.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Where do you see the decentralized web innovating or winning?
- aaron_m04 5y ago
  > You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. I don't doubt this suffocation is real, but isn't it really the strong network effects that Facebook benefits from which stops somebody from "building the next FB"?
  - Taek 5y ago
    Facebook refuses to let anyone else tap those network effects, that's what's suffocating. Remember when Facebook and Twitter and everyone else had these amazing robust APIs you could build entire startups on top of? Then when they killed hundreds of companies overnight by turning them off? In the dweb, those APIs can't be shut off. Those hundreds of innovative companies would still be alive and adding value to the world.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      I love the dweb! At the risk of going a bit off-topic, which dweb projects are you interested in?
    - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
      I don't see the point. You still have the network effect: people aren't going to install 20 social media apps. Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple.
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        "Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple. " No it is not, when you serve over 100 billion e2e encrspted messages everyday all around the world, and groups and chat, ... and all of it in a way that people think it is instant. Thats a problem with Signal. It is really really sluggish compared to whatsapp or telegram.
        toast0 5y ago
        I worked at WhatsApp for almost eight years. It's actually pretty simple behind the covers. Yes, there's a lot of attention to detail and a lot of edge cases that WA covers better than most others, but there's not a lot of truly complex things. It's mostly doing a lot of simple things well (and some amount of picking the right structures to keep things as simple as possible). Often doing things simply means skipping current computing trends. And of course, sometimes doing things simply doesn't actually meet the needs, and may make changes harder later. Of course, Signal has much harder to meet privacy goals and a smaller staff and they didn't build on Erlang, so they're playing on hard mode.
- leereeves 5y ago
  > You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. TikTok and Zoom aren't exactly the next Facebook (yet), but they both compete effectively against the incumbent powers.
  - dng88 5y ago
    And they are from china … great to replacing a superpower that goes to senate and court and the one basically not?
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  FYI: Dweb decentralised web. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentral... I'm still not sure what it is but I kind of get the idea.
  - mftb 5y ago
    Right and that's one of the ways that we can recognize it's an interesting area. Once it's understood, the problems well-bounded, the window has generally closed. Of course there is also risk, sometimes we've wandered too far afield and we're just out in the weeds.
- TrainedMonkey 5y ago
  Counterpoint: closed platforms will continue to account to majority of users because innovation available to open platforms is counterbalanced by massive amount of capital available to closed platforms.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms Locked down platforms can iterate faster than open platforms. Eg. Email vs. Slack. Email hasn't change fundamentally in decades but slack is growing and adding useful (to some) features. Many HN crowd say they don't want/need change, but customer bases tend to disagree.
  - mastazi 5y ago
    And yet more people use email than Slack. My parents don’t know what Slack is but both have email. So does my teenage daughter. VCs like to see growth of course, so Slack until recently was the winner from a VC’s point of view, and I suspect here at HN we are a bit biased towards that viewpoint. But growth of one single product doesn’t tell you much about the grand scheme of things. Email is a very good example because no other messaging product has more adoption than it.
    - stackbutterflow 5y ago
      But could email be invented and be massively adopted in today's world?
    - blackoil 5y ago
      Honestly, lot more people use WhatsApp/FB Messenger/iMessage for personal communication. Slack/Teams are taking away huge amount of intra-office communication. For professional and inter-corp communication, email is still popular because LinkedIn product managers aren't smart enough to build de-facto comm. platform over there network.
    - ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
      They use FB messenger more than email to communicate. Email is basically the same as mail now, a place for receipts and newsletters and so on. It’s a bad point from both of y’all tho since you’re ignoring what marketing verticals are. Email and slack are seen as pro tools, not everyday stuff
  - eyelovewe 5y ago
- dasil003 5y ago
  I want to believe in dweb too, but I've been around since the truly distributed days of email/ftp/nntp/gopher and the birth of the web, and while I believe in open protocols, no distributed system has outcompeted a centralized one in terms of practical value to users. Even email, the most powerful protocol of them all, still requires hosting, people are never going to run their own email servers at scale. So inevitably you have centralized nodes, and at some point economies of scale kick in and there is a qualitative difference once consolidation achieves a certain critical mass. For instance, it's now very hard to run your own email server even if you want to, because if you get blacklisted by Gmail as a small operator you are unable to interact with a huge percentage of humans, with essentially no recourse. Again, I truly want to be inspired here and will work to suppress my cynicism if you can just tell me why you think dweb will be different from Indie Web, Mastodon, or App.net.
  - Taek 5y ago
    The big step that dweb has taken in the past year is that it's now possible to build all the same protocols without requiring users or community managers to run servers themselves. Everything can be done in the web browser, and nothing requires user to have uptime anymore.
    - Meai 5y ago
      With "dweb" do you refer to getdweb.net or to one of the many other alternatives that have sprung up? Can you explain how it works, is it available via the regular browser by typing in an url? What's the selling point? Sorry, I know I could do this research myself but I did that several times now with various alternatives and it just doesn't seem like any of them are good enough. Does dweb help against DDOS?
      - nextaccountic 5y ago
        We already have a technology where people don't need to run servers: torrents. That's because everyone that uses it is simultaneously a server. A big problem of torrents (and IPFS, and most p2p technologies) is how to give proper incentive for people to contribute. There are "cheating" clients that don't upload back for example. And there are people that close the torrent as soon as it is downloaded. Well, you can sometimes rely on people's sense of belonging to a community; or you can sometimes shun noncooperating people from the community (as in private trackers). I think dweb's main contribution is giving the option of monetary compensation for participating in the network. Perhaps such incentive wasn't needed when people were just seeding things they are passionate about, like movies and music, but it may enable more boring stuff to be decentralized as well. Hence, blockchain. Most current p2p protocols are about sharing data in a decentralized way, but you can also execute algorithms on this data. That's what's being done with blockchain today (technically you wouldn't need a blockchain for this, but we already established we might want a way to give monetary incentive to peers, so, there's that) This scheme may or may not work. I think it may have adverse effects, like when the web was taken down by advertising and commercial interests. But it also opens a path to a new kind of web. About ddos: existing protocols have a big problem with scaling; an actual denial of service attack would make things much worse. That's why Lbry (which is a decentralized Youtube of sorts) is mostly accessed through a centralized site, Odysee - funnily enough, Odysee doesn't use any form of decentralization to serve the videos. It could make peers serve themselves using webtorrent or other protocol on top of webrtc, and it might some day just do it, but it doesn't at this time.
megameter 5y ago
The thing that has always defanged authorities of the past is organizational inability to see where the game is changing. And the game has gone on for a long time - villages would do all sorts of things to operate outside of the vision of the local lords. The probable source of disruption comes from people one step removed from the top who see an opportunity to shake up the system and turn an activist message into opportunistic gain. This is why we often see waves of "anti-corruption" campaigns, sudden policy shifts, etc. The politicians see a trend forming and jump on to it. When they get in power they walk some of it back, but they can't turn back the clock all the way. The source of a trend towards GPC comes from a series of "small wins" like the recent breakthroughs in Right to Repair, from IP that has recently expired, and from nationalistic competition("world's free-est country" will always be a title up for grabs). It only takes one little country that's a "hacker haven" to jump ahead of the rest for a clamor to erupt. The dominant players will conclude that the answer is to strongarm that country into the hegemonic framework; others in weaker positions will see opportunities in jumping on. Then the fight is waged economically, and if the resulting products and services are desirable, concessions are made.
bakugo 5y ago
I agree. I think the reaction to the recent reveal of Windows 11's TPM requirement shows that we have basically no chance of winning this war because the average computer owner of the 2020s is simply not intelligent or educated enough to know when they're being screwed over. They hear "it's for your security!" and immediately roll over like trained dogs.
- scrps 5y ago
  Not quite sure how TPM and secure boot have gotten the reputation of screwing users over... I utilize both on my thinkpad running linux. Personally I like knowing if you steal my laptop you just got yourself a very slick paperweight as the entire boot stack is locked to my keys and if you try to boot my drive outside of my system or with a different kernel TPM is going to stiffle both of those attempts. I think that reputation stems from both TPM and secure boot being a bit difficult to grok and I would agree about screwing users over if there was no end-user access/cryptographically locked by the vendor but both are fully accessible.
  - no_time 5y ago
    TPM,Secure boot,Pluton,memory encryption... These are all the puzzle pieces of a locked down system more akin to an xbox than a PC. One by one they are harmless but together they can completely take away control from the user. These technologies could be good for everyone but right now they are good for whoever hold the encryption keys built into them (not you). With the user override feature detailed in the eff link we could have the best of both worlds (superb security, personal freedom to run anything). Too bad we are heading in the exact opposite direction... I invite you to read this https://www.eff.org/wp/trusted-computing-promise-and-risk https://www.eff.org/wp/trusted-computing-promise-and-risk or this http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A206552&dswid=-525 http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A2065...
    - scrps 5y ago
      Sure, of course there is tension between security and control, the same systems that allow me to secure my system from tampering or theft can also be used against me by the vendor to stop me from having full access. I don't think that problem can be attacked by blaming the underlying tech, that quickly heads into the same territory of thought governments use to try and justify weakening encryption because it can be used by bad actors. I think the options (and to be fair all of them are hard) are: competition from vendors that allow full control, regulation from governments forcing vendors to give users full access, or subverting the implementation to regain control. Also forgot to mention with secure boot you are able to sign with keys you have generated.
vaylian 5y ago
> For example, if your computer can encrypt things without a backdoor then authorities cannot listen. But if it can't then by definition it is not a general purpose computer. No. The user could still deliberately chooose to run a different back-doored encryption software on the same computer. The definition still holds.
- zmmmmm 5y ago
  They can only choose to do that if they can run that software. We are pretty close to the situation already where users no longer have choice over what software they can run. The iPhone went there years ago. The situation on Android is tenuous. OSX and Windows both now both start from a secure boot mechanism. At this point it is still possible for a user to work around these things but this is now "at the pleasure" of the OS maker and not something the user actually controls. Removal of a couple of checkboxes is how far we are from losing user-controlled right to install software on any mainstream consumer supported OS. So I am arguing that now that operating system manufacturers have forfeited their ability to say they cannot prevent the user from installing software, it is only a matter of time before it becomes legally mandated that they close off this capability, and deliver only software that is delivered from a verified (probably government licensed) channel.
  - eyelovewe 5y ago
    Where does Linux fit into your story?
    - svilen_dobrev 5y ago
      hah. Linux. It lives on the mercy of hardware-majors. Which live on the mercy of the software-major (there's only one left, M$. They aren't multiple). i upgraded my home server few months ago. It was runing archlinux for 13 years. It was up-to-date, not some ancient codebase. Yet, the "new" 2y-old-tech motherboard/processor/memory combo did not even start / recognize the SSDs. Took me a week in debugging, and replacing the motherboard with another one. Exactly One check box in the BIOS/setup, yes, and your gone. The 2nd mb did have it. The 1st did not anymore. have fun
e7e6eydid8 5y ago
I always see everything from national laws of various stripes to human apathy blamed for the slow decline of general purpose computing but I think the answer no one wants to admit is that the dream simply hinged on figuring out how to overcome certain practical hurdles that we have failed to cleae. There's all sorts of fingers that could be pointed in different directions across different industries of course (some being the same industry now due to consolidation of the stack) but the most fundamental failure of judgement in my opinion was that there was a romantic notion once upon a time that computers would be this great equalizer that could even allow clever enough eggheads to take on the world (literally, not with some fancy high value business idea) while simultaneously bringing real opportunity and equality to the common man ('anyone who can use a computer will be more valuable than a CEO'). The former idea never quite managed to explain why these eggeads wouldn't be beholden to the limitations of the hardware at their disposal (Turns out computing hardware multiplies the effectiveness of the boogey men just as readily as it does the eggheads and the boogeymen do a lot more hiring). The latter notion was abandoned by the same people who dreamed it up in the first place not that they'll admit it (of course they wanted computing to empower the common man, it's surely a coincidence that every step of the way they focused on expanding only an egghead's ability to command computers with wider accessibility being an afterthought motivated primarily by profit incentives) I think the ugly truth is that general purpose computing was more of a philisophical goal than a realistic one. It seems a lot more likely that from a technological perspective it's just a lot more efficient to have an expansive commons of innovative collaboration available for dueling giants to draw from on an as-needed basis.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
> "I actually don't see any convincing reason why we'll "win" this war and in fact I feel like we are on the precipice of becoming permanently locked out from it ever being possible. ... For example, if your computer can encrypt things without a backdoor then authorities cannot listen. ..." Why? Buy an off the shelf processor chip, buy memory chips, buy some interface chips to provide access to peripherals and storage, solder them to a board and you have a general purpose computer that will boot any code you write for it. The Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc. are examples of this. If you want an absolute guarantee of no third-party code not under your control, use an FPGA to custom implement your processor the way that Bunnie Huang's Precursor project does. FOSS fills the gap for software. Sure, you might not get the performance you want for the price you want, you might not be able to connect to the sites you want, or run a specific proprietary software package but that has nothing to do with general purpose computing. In no way, shape, or form is general purpose computing endangered nor has it ever been.
- zmmmmm 5y ago
  > Buy an off the shelf processor chip, buy memory chips, buy some interface chips to provide access to peripherals and storage, solder them to a board I suspect those things will become regulated and require either constraints built in or license to be able to purchase them. Then likely aveneues for connection will be required to verify devices are trusted (so, cellular companies, ISPs) and they will do this by associating devices that try to communicate with government issued cryptographic signatures that are built into chips etc. And yeah you could bypass everything but it will still be illegal. So a bit like you could build your own car but you won't be legally allowed to drive it on the road and you will incur huge liability if you try.
- username90 5y ago
  > Buy an off the shelf processor chip Sure in a free market you could do that, be we aren't living in a free market. Both corporations and politicians wants you to use locked in devices where you are easier to monetize and control. And since those are the two powers controlling regulations chances are you will no longer be able to buy those chips legally without an active software engineering license and a business document stating what you will use them for. It wont happen tomorrow, but what about 20-40 years? Compare todays market with 20 years ago and how much it changed, extrapolate 20 years in the future and it doesn't seem improbable at all.
graycat 5y ago
On several points I agree with the OP on the desirability of "universal computing". For more, I've long thought of most of the concerns in the OP and have not been and still am not much concerned: Why not? === No Smartphones For all the threats of smartphones, I avoid them -- I don't have a smartphone. My phone is an old Bell touch tone desk set connected to essentially a land line. I saw some threats of smartphones and didn't like the cost to buy, cost of usage, bad keyboard, small screen, and the general inability to write and run my software, old and new. === Digital Appliances For threats of digital appliances, devices, from, say, Amazon, I don't have any. No way do I want some digital appliance listening to everything I say. === The Cloud I don't trust the cloud. I make no direct use of the cloud. So the cloud is not a threat or cost to me. And I don't have to do mud wrestling with their poor or missing documentation on how their services work. What they are offering, no thanks. Not even for free. And whatever they say about reliability, security, or functionality, I don't believe it. === Encryption For threats of encryption, if the situation gets serious, say, for my email, then I will make use of PGP (pretty good privacy). So, I will have encryption under my control that Apple, etc. can't do anything about. And I won't have to worry about back doors. There was a reason PGP was open source -- to keep a big power, government, company, from getting control over encryption, putting in back doors, etc. I like the idea of being able to control my own encryption. === Text and Console Windows To me, the main data I work with is just text, the standard ASCII character set. And my main user interface is text in console windows. A big reason is that it is easy to automate the use of text in console windows. So, in particular, I make minimal use of the Microsoft user interface idea of on-screen direct manipulation graphical user interfaces (GUI). I never liked the idea of a GUI -- insults me as a user; is an interface I essentially can't program; gives output tough to process further. In one sense, important to me, a GUI is nearly always a big step backwards; it has me do something once; but to do it 200 times I have to do it 200 times as I do it once. Instead, I want to automate doing that 200 times. E.g., I had a list of about 300 URLs and wanted to download them all. So I used my text editor KEDIT to develop a REXX script to call the program CURL 300 times and then ran the script in a console window and then processed the 300 downloaded files with KEDIT. No use of GUIs. For such work, usually GUIs are useless. === Files I'm totally in love with Microsoft's NTFS (new technology file system or some such) file system. I would like better documentation on the file and directory (I HATE Apple introducing the word folder) attributes such as system, hidden, archive, etc. and on locking and concurrency. E.g., for handling those 300 files, do that in a subdirectory -- don't let other files get in the way and can copy, delete, etc. easily. === Manipulating the Text Since I work with text, I need good tools for handling text, and my most important computing tools are the text editor KEDIT, its macro language KEXX, the scripting language REXX, the D. Knuth mathematical word processing TeX (I write TeX but no LaTeX), a spell checker ASPELL that comes with the TeX distribution I use, the .NET languages and object library, for some important work an old Watcom Fortran compiler (with the very nice IBM linear programming package OSL, optimization subroutine library). So, I want good tools and if necessary write my own and don't want little apps doing things for and/or to me. Really, so far I have no apps at all. === Version of Windows? Since I like text and console windows so much, the stuff Microsoft added to Windows 7 Professional to get to Window 10 Home Edition I don't want. I just like that version of Windows 7. I can think of some improvements I would like a lot, but none of those are in Windows 10. For what Apple wants me to use, no way, not a chance, never. === Good Windows To me, one of the best things about any of the versions of Windows is that they are still good to great places to run old command line software. E.g., KEDIT goes back to PC/DOS, OS/2, Windows 95, ..., Windows 7, Windows 10. === Typing for Developing I used KEDIT with KEXX and REXX to develop the software for the Web site of my startup, 24,000 .NET programming language statements in 100,000 lines of typing (lots of good comments with some little KEDIT macros to ease using documentation, etc.). Visual Studio seems to be intended to do what I do with KEDIT -- so far I prefer KEDIT to Visual Studio. E.g., Visual Studio is part of the long standing Microsoft idea of GUIs, and I just reject that as a big step backwards. I had no trouble at all using KEDIT, etc. to develop that software. The problems were, e.g., bad documentation for SQL Server that made getting a connection string a solid week of mud wrestling. Finally someone in Microsoft's SQL Server organization solved the problem. === Documentation or Experiments Part of the Microsoft, Apple GUI approach is no real documentation, e.g., nothing like what was written by Mike Cowlishaw for REXX or by D. Knuth for TeX, and, instead, learn just by experimentation. I don't like that experimentation -- e.g., Windows 10 has some huge number of special keystrokes that do things, and I still have no knowledge of what those keystrokes are or do. I encounter those keystrokes by accident; some windows pop up, and I work to close them ASAP since whatever they are I know I want nothing to do with them. I don't like undocumented tools. === No, I Don't Want That Generally what the Apple, Microsoft people and their app developers have in mind to please me just makes me angry. What they are offering me, I don't want. To me their work just gets in the way of my work; I hate their work and their assumptions about my work. So, on several points I agree with the OP on "universal computing". If Microsoft will keep console windows and let me run old software, I will be happy. To make me happier, they can do better on documentation and tools for common tasks in system management. E.g., I'd like better means of backup and restore. For more, they can have fewer bugs and security problems. For more, I would like some good documentation for Microsoft's Power Shell. For the rest of the industry, I wish I could get a keyboard as good as IBM shipped with their PC/AT.
CyberRabbi 5y ago
The general public will lose access to cheap general purpose computers, to the extent that they even exist now. Maybe because it poses a threat but probably most because the general public doesn’t care about general purpose computing. There will be no outcry when it becomes inaccessible to them. The government can never effectively ban general purpose computing in an authoritative way because it’s just too easy to build a computer. You can build a computer using a bunch of fpgas connected together. If they ban fpgas, hackers will start using 80s-style 8 bit micros. That is all to say, the people who care about general purpose computing will never lose it and the people who don’t care won’t even notice.
- mcphage 5y ago
  > The general public will lose access to cheap general purpose computers, to the extent that they even exist now. How much did a general purpose computer cost 30 years ago? How much did it cost 20 years ago? How much did it cost 10 years ago? How much does a Raspberry Pi Zero W cost now?
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    Despite the cheapness of those devices, they are increasingly irrelevant and inaccessible to the general public. They are instead being passed over for locked down devices like iPads and iPhones. To a normal person the mere thought of figuring out how to use a raspberry pi (or increasingly even a windows PC) induces a stress response.
    - mcphage 5y ago
      How relevant and accessible to the public were general purpose computers in the past? > To a normal person the mere thought of figuring out how to use a raspberry pi (or increasingly even a windows PC) induces a stress response. I’d argue that this has always been true—the only difference is that now, if you’re willing to push through that stress, you can get one for dirt cheap. And I’d also argue that the reasons that this is true are completely ignored by the article at hand.

by zmmmmm 5y ago

Taek 5y ago

I think we will win because locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms. We are reaching a turning point where even the brightest minds struggle to generate major innovations on the locked down web. You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. Conversely, the dweb is flush right now with innovation and new ideas, with an ecosystem of builders that are excited to share and compound off of eachother's ideas. I believe that at maturity, the dweb will run absurd agile circles around the lockdown web.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Where do you see the decentralized web innovating or winning?
aaron_m04 5y ago
> You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. I don't doubt this suffocation is real, but isn't it really the strong network effects that Facebook benefits from which stops somebody from "building the next FB"?
- Taek 5y ago
  Facebook refuses to let anyone else tap those network effects, that's what's suffocating. Remember when Facebook and Twitter and everyone else had these amazing robust APIs you could build entire startups on top of? Then when they killed hundreds of companies overnight by turning them off? In the dweb, those APIs can't be shut off. Those hundreds of innovative companies would still be alive and adding value to the world.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    I love the dweb! At the risk of going a bit off-topic, which dweb projects are you interested in?
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    I don't see the point. You still have the network effect: people aren't going to install 20 social media apps. Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      "Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple. " No it is not, when you serve over 100 billion e2e encrspted messages everyday all around the world, and groups and chat, ... and all of it in a way that people think it is instant. Thats a problem with Signal. It is really really sluggish compared to whatsapp or telegram.
      - toast0 5y ago
        I worked at WhatsApp for almost eight years. It's actually pretty simple behind the covers. Yes, there's a lot of attention to detail and a lot of edge cases that WA covers better than most others, but there's not a lot of truly complex things. It's mostly doing a lot of simple things well (and some amount of picking the right structures to keep things as simple as possible). Often doing things simply means skipping current computing trends. And of course, sometimes doing things simply doesn't actually meet the needs, and may make changes harder later. Of course, Signal has much harder to meet privacy goals and a smaller staff and they didn't build on Erlang, so they're playing on hard mode.
leereeves 5y ago
> You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively. TikTok and Zoom aren't exactly the next Facebook (yet), but they both compete effectively against the incumbent powers.
- dng88 5y ago
  And they are from china … great to replacing a superpower that goes to senate and court and the one basically not?
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
FYI: Dweb decentralised web. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentral... I'm still not sure what it is but I kind of get the idea.
- mftb 5y ago
  Right and that's one of the ways that we can recognize it's an interesting area. Once it's understood, the problems well-bounded, the window has generally closed. Of course there is also risk, sometimes we've wandered too far afield and we're just out in the weeds.
TrainedMonkey 5y ago
Counterpoint: closed platforms will continue to account to majority of users because innovation available to open platforms is counterbalanced by massive amount of capital available to closed platforms.
vineyardmike 5y ago
> locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms Locked down platforms can iterate faster than open platforms. Eg. Email vs. Slack. Email hasn't change fundamentally in decades but slack is growing and adding useful (to some) features. Many HN crowd say they don't want/need change, but customer bases tend to disagree.
- mastazi 5y ago
  And yet more people use email than Slack. My parents don’t know what Slack is but both have email. So does my teenage daughter. VCs like to see growth of course, so Slack until recently was the winner from a VC’s point of view, and I suspect here at HN we are a bit biased towards that viewpoint. But growth of one single product doesn’t tell you much about the grand scheme of things. Email is a very good example because no other messaging product has more adoption than it.
  - stackbutterflow 5y ago
    But could email be invented and be massively adopted in today's world?
  - blackoil 5y ago
    Honestly, lot more people use WhatsApp/FB Messenger/iMessage for personal communication. Slack/Teams are taking away huge amount of intra-office communication. For professional and inter-corp communication, email is still popular because LinkedIn product managers aren't smart enough to build de-facto comm. platform over there network.
  - ulisesrmzroche 5y ago
    They use FB messenger more than email to communicate. Email is basically the same as mail now, a place for receipts and newsletters and so on. It’s a bad point from both of y’all tho since you’re ignoring what marketing verticals are. Email and slack are seen as pro tools, not everyday stuff
- eyelovewe 5y ago
dasil003 5y ago
I want to believe in dweb too, but I've been around since the truly distributed days of email/ftp/nntp/gopher and the birth of the web, and while I believe in open protocols, no distributed system has outcompeted a centralized one in terms of practical value to users. Even email, the most powerful protocol of them all, still requires hosting, people are never going to run their own email servers at scale. So inevitably you have centralized nodes, and at some point economies of scale kick in and there is a qualitative difference once consolidation achieves a certain critical mass. For instance, it's now very hard to run your own email server even if you want to, because if you get blacklisted by Gmail as a small operator you are unable to interact with a huge percentage of humans, with essentially no recourse. Again, I truly want to be inspired here and will work to suppress my cynicism if you can just tell me why you think dweb will be different from Indie Web, Mastodon, or App.net.
- Taek 5y ago
  The big step that dweb has taken in the past year is that it's now possible to build all the same protocols without requiring users or community managers to run servers themselves. Everything can be done in the web browser, and nothing requires user to have uptime anymore.
  - Meai 5y ago
    With "dweb" do you refer to getdweb.net or to one of the many other alternatives that have sprung up? Can you explain how it works, is it available via the regular browser by typing in an url? What's the selling point? Sorry, I know I could do this research myself but I did that several times now with various alternatives and it just doesn't seem like any of them are good enough. Does dweb help against DDOS?
    - nextaccountic 5y ago
      We already have a technology where people don't need to run servers: torrents. That's because everyone that uses it is simultaneously a server. A big problem of torrents (and IPFS, and most p2p technologies) is how to give proper incentive for people to contribute. There are "cheating" clients that don't upload back for example. And there are people that close the torrent as soon as it is downloaded. Well, you can sometimes rely on people's sense of belonging to a community; or you can sometimes shun noncooperating people from the community (as in private trackers). I think dweb's main contribution is giving the option of monetary compensation for participating in the network. Perhaps such incentive wasn't needed when people were just seeding things they are passionate about, like movies and music, but it may enable more boring stuff to be decentralized as well. Hence, blockchain. Most current p2p protocols are about sharing data in a decentralized way, but you can also execute algorithms on this data. That's what's being done with blockchain today (technically you wouldn't need a blockchain for this, but we already established we might want a way to give monetary incentive to peers, so, there's that) This scheme may or may not work. I think it may have adverse effects, like when the web was taken down by advertising and commercial interests. But it also opens a path to a new kind of web. About ddos: existing protocols have a big problem with scaling; an actual denial of service attack would make things much worse. That's why Lbry (which is a decentralized Youtube of sorts) is mostly accessed through a centralized site, Odysee - funnily enough, Odysee doesn't use any form of decentralization to serve the videos. It could make peers serve themselves using webtorrent or other protocol on top of webrtc, and it might some day just do it, but it doesn't at this time.

megameter 5y ago

The thing that has always defanged authorities of the past is organizational inability to see where the game is changing. And the game has gone on for a long time - villages would do all sorts of things to operate outside of the vision of the local lords. The probable source of disruption comes from people one step removed from the top who see an opportunity to shake up the system and turn an activist message into opportunistic gain. This is why we often see waves of "anti-corruption" campaigns, sudden policy shifts, etc. The politicians see a trend forming and jump on to it. When they get in power they walk some of it back, but they can't turn back the clock all the way. The source of a trend towards GPC comes from a series of "small wins" like the recent breakthroughs in Right to Repair, from IP that has recently expired, and from nationalistic competition("world's free-est country" will always be a title up for grabs). It only takes one little country that's a "hacker haven" to jump ahead of the rest for a clamor to erupt. The dominant players will conclude that the answer is to strongarm that country into the hegemonic framework; others in weaker positions will see opportunities in jumping on. Then the fight is waged economically, and if the resulting products and services are desirable, concessions are made.

bakugo 5y ago

I agree. I think the reaction to the recent reveal of Windows 11's TPM requirement shows that we have basically no chance of winning this war because the average computer owner of the 2020s is simply not intelligent or educated enough to know when they're being screwed over. They hear "it's for your security!" and immediately roll over like trained dogs.

scrps 5y ago
Not quite sure how TPM and secure boot have gotten the reputation of screwing users over... I utilize both on my thinkpad running linux. Personally I like knowing if you steal my laptop you just got yourself a very slick paperweight as the entire boot stack is locked to my keys and if you try to boot my drive outside of my system or with a different kernel TPM is going to stiffle both of those attempts. I think that reputation stems from both TPM and secure boot being a bit difficult to grok and I would agree about screwing users over if there was no end-user access/cryptographically locked by the vendor but both are fully accessible.
- no_time 5y ago
  TPM,Secure boot,Pluton,memory encryption... These are all the puzzle pieces of a locked down system more akin to an xbox than a PC. One by one they are harmless but together they can completely take away control from the user. These technologies could be good for everyone but right now they are good for whoever hold the encryption keys built into them (not you). With the user override feature detailed in the eff link we could have the best of both worlds (superb security, personal freedom to run anything). Too bad we are heading in the exact opposite direction... I invite you to read this https://www.eff.org/wp/trusted-computing-promise-and-risk https://www.eff.org/wp/trusted-computing-promise-and-risk or this http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A206552&dswid=-525 http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A2065...
  - scrps 5y ago
    Sure, of course there is tension between security and control, the same systems that allow me to secure my system from tampering or theft can also be used against me by the vendor to stop me from having full access. I don't think that problem can be attacked by blaming the underlying tech, that quickly heads into the same territory of thought governments use to try and justify weakening encryption because it can be used by bad actors. I think the options (and to be fair all of them are hard) are: competition from vendors that allow full control, regulation from governments forcing vendors to give users full access, or subverting the implementation to regain control. Also forgot to mention with secure boot you are able to sign with keys you have generated.

vaylian 5y ago

> For example, if your computer can encrypt things without a backdoor then authorities cannot listen. But if it can't then by definition it is not a general purpose computer. No. The user could still deliberately chooose to run a different back-doored encryption software on the same computer. The definition still holds.

zmmmmm 5y ago
They can only choose to do that if they can run that software. We are pretty close to the situation already where users no longer have choice over what software they can run. The iPhone went there years ago. The situation on Android is tenuous. OSX and Windows both now both start from a secure boot mechanism. At this point it is still possible for a user to work around these things but this is now "at the pleasure" of the OS maker and not something the user actually controls. Removal of a couple of checkboxes is how far we are from losing user-controlled right to install software on any mainstream consumer supported OS. So I am arguing that now that operating system manufacturers have forfeited their ability to say they cannot prevent the user from installing software, it is only a matter of time before it becomes legally mandated that they close off this capability, and deliver only software that is delivered from a verified (probably government licensed) channel.
- eyelovewe 5y ago
  Where does Linux fit into your story?
  - svilen_dobrev 5y ago
    hah. Linux. It lives on the mercy of hardware-majors. Which live on the mercy of the software-major (there's only one left, M$. They aren't multiple). i upgraded my home server few months ago. It was runing archlinux for 13 years. It was up-to-date, not some ancient codebase. Yet, the "new" 2y-old-tech motherboard/processor/memory combo did not even start / recognize the SSDs. Took me a week in debugging, and replacing the motherboard with another one. Exactly One check box in the BIOS/setup, yes, and your gone. The 2nd mb did have it. The 1st did not anymore. have fun

e7e6eydid8 5y ago

I always see everything from national laws of various stripes to human apathy blamed for the slow decline of general purpose computing but I think the answer no one wants to admit is that the dream simply hinged on figuring out how to overcome certain practical hurdles that we have failed to cleae. There's all sorts of fingers that could be pointed in different directions across different industries of course (some being the same industry now due to consolidation of the stack) but the most fundamental failure of judgement in my opinion was that there was a romantic notion once upon a time that computers would be this great equalizer that could even allow clever enough eggheads to take on the world (literally, not with some fancy high value business idea) while simultaneously bringing real opportunity and equality to the common man ('anyone who can use a computer will be more valuable than a CEO'). The former idea never quite managed to explain why these eggeads wouldn't be beholden to the limitations of the hardware at their disposal (Turns out computing hardware multiplies the effectiveness of the boogey men just as readily as it does the eggheads and the boogeymen do a lot more hiring). The latter notion was abandoned by the same people who dreamed it up in the first place not that they'll admit it (of course they wanted computing to empower the common man, it's surely a coincidence that every step of the way they focused on expanding only an egghead's ability to command computers with wider accessibility being an afterthought motivated primarily by profit incentives) I think the ugly truth is that general purpose computing was more of a philisophical goal than a realistic one. It seems a lot more likely that from a technological perspective it's just a lot more efficient to have an expansive commons of innovative collaboration available for dueling giants to draw from on an as-needed basis.

ThrowawayR2 5y ago

> "I actually don't see any convincing reason why we'll "win" this war and in fact I feel like we are on the precipice of becoming permanently locked out from it ever being possible. ... For example, if your computer can encrypt things without a backdoor then authorities cannot listen. ..." Why? Buy an off the shelf processor chip, buy memory chips, buy some interface chips to provide access to peripherals and storage, solder them to a board and you have a general purpose computer that will boot any code you write for it. The Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc. are examples of this. If you want an absolute guarantee of no third-party code not under your control, use an FPGA to custom implement your processor the way that Bunnie Huang's Precursor project does. FOSS fills the gap for software. Sure, you might not get the performance you want for the price you want, you might not be able to connect to the sites you want, or run a specific proprietary software package but that has nothing to do with general purpose computing. In no way, shape, or form is general purpose computing endangered nor has it ever been.

zmmmmm 5y ago
> Buy an off the shelf processor chip, buy memory chips, buy some interface chips to provide access to peripherals and storage, solder them to a board I suspect those things will become regulated and require either constraints built in or license to be able to purchase them. Then likely aveneues for connection will be required to verify devices are trusted (so, cellular companies, ISPs) and they will do this by associating devices that try to communicate with government issued cryptographic signatures that are built into chips etc. And yeah you could bypass everything but it will still be illegal. So a bit like you could build your own car but you won't be legally allowed to drive it on the road and you will incur huge liability if you try.
username90 5y ago
> Buy an off the shelf processor chip Sure in a free market you could do that, be we aren't living in a free market. Both corporations and politicians wants you to use locked in devices where you are easier to monetize and control. And since those are the two powers controlling regulations chances are you will no longer be able to buy those chips legally without an active software engineering license and a business document stating what you will use them for. It wont happen tomorrow, but what about 20-40 years? Compare todays market with 20 years ago and how much it changed, extrapolate 20 years in the future and it doesn't seem improbable at all.

graycat 5y ago

On several points I agree with the OP on the desirability of "universal computing". For more, I've long thought of most of the concerns in the OP and have not been and still am not much concerned: Why not? === No Smartphones For all the threats of smartphones, I avoid them -- I don't have a smartphone. My phone is an old Bell touch tone desk set connected to essentially a land line. I saw some threats of smartphones and didn't like the cost to buy, cost of usage, bad keyboard, small screen, and the general inability to write and run my software, old and new. === Digital Appliances For threats of digital appliances, devices, from, say, Amazon, I don't have any. No way do I want some digital appliance listening to everything I say. === The Cloud I don't trust the cloud. I make no direct use of the cloud. So the cloud is not a threat or cost to me. And I don't have to do mud wrestling with their poor or missing documentation on how their services work. What they are offering, no thanks. Not even for free. And whatever they say about reliability, security, or functionality, I don't believe it. === Encryption For threats of encryption, if the situation gets serious, say, for my email, then I will make use of PGP (pretty good privacy). So, I will have encryption under my control that Apple, etc. can't do anything about. And I won't have to worry about back doors. There was a reason PGP was open source -- to keep a big power, government, company, from getting control over encryption, putting in back doors, etc. I like the idea of being able to control my own encryption. === Text and Console Windows To me, the main data I work with is just text, the standard ASCII character set. And my main user interface is text in console windows. A big reason is that it is easy to automate the use of text in console windows. So, in particular, I make minimal use of the Microsoft user interface idea of on-screen direct manipulation graphical user interfaces (GUI). I never liked the idea of a GUI -- insults me as a user; is an interface I essentially can't program; gives output tough to process further. In one sense, important to me, a GUI is nearly always a big step backwards; it has me do something once; but to do it 200 times I have to do it 200 times as I do it once. Instead, I want to automate doing that 200 times. E.g., I had a list of about 300 URLs and wanted to download them all. So I used my text editor KEDIT to develop a REXX script to call the program CURL 300 times and then ran the script in a console window and then processed the 300 downloaded files with KEDIT. No use of GUIs. For such work, usually GUIs are useless. === Files I'm totally in love with Microsoft's NTFS (new technology file system or some such) file system. I would like better documentation on the file and directory (I HATE Apple introducing the word folder) attributes such as system, hidden, archive, etc. and on locking and concurrency. E.g., for handling those 300 files, do that in a subdirectory -- don't let other files get in the way and can copy, delete, etc. easily. === Manipulating the Text Since I work with text, I need good tools for handling text, and my most important computing tools are the text editor KEDIT, its macro language KEXX, the scripting language REXX, the D. Knuth mathematical word processing TeX (I write TeX but no LaTeX), a spell checker ASPELL that comes with the TeX distribution I use, the .NET languages and object library, for some important work an old Watcom Fortran compiler (with the very nice IBM linear programming package OSL, optimization subroutine library). So, I want good tools and if necessary write my own and don't want little apps doing things for and/or to me. Really, so far I have no apps at all. === Version of Windows? Since I like text and console windows so much, the stuff Microsoft added to Windows 7 Professional to get to Window 10 Home Edition I don't want. I just like that version of Windows 7. I can think of some improvements I would like a lot, but none of those are in Windows 10. For what Apple wants me to use, no way, not a chance, never. === Good Windows To me, one of the best things about any of the versions of Windows is that they are still good to great places to run old command line software. E.g., KEDIT goes back to PC/DOS, OS/2, Windows 95, ..., Windows 7, Windows 10. === Typing for Developing I used KEDIT with KEXX and REXX to develop the software for the Web site of my startup, 24,000 .NET programming language statements in 100,000 lines of typing (lots of good comments with some little KEDIT macros to ease using documentation, etc.). Visual Studio seems to be intended to do what I do with KEDIT -- so far I prefer KEDIT to Visual Studio. E.g., Visual Studio is part of the long standing Microsoft idea of GUIs, and I just reject that as a big step backwards. I had no trouble at all using KEDIT, etc. to develop that software. The problems were, e.g., bad documentation for SQL Server that made getting a connection string a solid week of mud wrestling. Finally someone in Microsoft's SQL Server organization solved the problem. === Documentation or Experiments Part of the Microsoft, Apple GUI approach is no real documentation, e.g., nothing like what was written by Mike Cowlishaw for REXX or by D. Knuth for TeX, and, instead, learn just by experimentation. I don't like that experimentation -- e.g., Windows 10 has some huge number of special keystrokes that do things, and I still have no knowledge of what those keystrokes are or do. I encounter those keystrokes by accident; some windows pop up, and I work to close them ASAP since whatever they are I know I want nothing to do with them. I don't like undocumented tools. === No, I Don't Want That Generally what the Apple, Microsoft people and their app developers have in mind to please me just makes me angry. What they are offering me, I don't want. To me their work just gets in the way of my work; I hate their work and their assumptions about my work. So, on several points I agree with the OP on "universal computing". If Microsoft will keep console windows and let me run old software, I will be happy. To make me happier, they can do better on documentation and tools for common tasks in system management. E.g., I'd like better means of backup and restore. For more, they can have fewer bugs and security problems. For more, I would like some good documentation for Microsoft's Power Shell. For the rest of the industry, I wish I could get a keyboard as good as IBM shipped with their PC/AT.

CyberRabbi 5y ago

The general public will lose access to cheap general purpose computers, to the extent that they even exist now. Maybe because it poses a threat but probably most because the general public doesn’t care about general purpose computing. There will be no outcry when it becomes inaccessible to them. The government can never effectively ban general purpose computing in an authoritative way because it’s just too easy to build a computer. You can build a computer using a bunch of fpgas connected together. If they ban fpgas, hackers will start using 80s-style 8 bit micros. That is all to say, the people who care about general purpose computing will never lose it and the people who don’t care won’t even notice.

mcphage 5y ago
> The general public will lose access to cheap general purpose computers, to the extent that they even exist now. How much did a general purpose computer cost 30 years ago? How much did it cost 20 years ago? How much did it cost 10 years ago? How much does a Raspberry Pi Zero W cost now?
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  Despite the cheapness of those devices, they are increasingly irrelevant and inaccessible to the general public. They are instead being passed over for locked down devices like iPads and iPhones. To a normal person the mere thought of figuring out how to use a raspberry pi (or increasingly even a windows PC) induces a stress response.
  - mcphage 5y ago
    How relevant and accessible to the public were general purpose computers in the past? > To a normal person the mere thought of figuring out how to use a raspberry pi (or increasingly even a windows PC) induces a stress response. I’d argue that this has always been true—the only difference is that now, if you’re willing to push through that stress, you can get one for dirt cheap. And I’d also argue that the reasons that this is true are completely ignored by the article at hand.