17 ms·

Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

585 points by amirmc 13y ago

wwwtyro 13y ago
Part of the difficulty of bringing this about is making p2p easy for users. I have high hopes that WebRTC data channels can start tearing these walls down by making it as simple as opening a web app.
- valisystem 13y ago
  Not only easy, but also fast and reliable enough to compete with centralized services.
  - wwwtyro 13y ago
    Fair point. A significant reason that p2p networks like freenet tend to be slow is because of low adoption - the more users there are, the faster it can be. I submit that making p2p applications easy to use will in turn make them faster than we have seen before, because adoption rates promise to be much higher.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > Part of the difficulty of bringing this about is making p2p easy for users. As a general concept, P2P is easy for users - using bittorrent clients, TPB, etc. is essentially mainstream. The one thing that would be nice is browser support - I would love it if Chrome had the option to download .torrent files using the Chrome download manager. Thanks to web seeds[0], this would allow providers to convert any download to a torrent instead, both increasing use of P2P and decreasing their own server load. Users wouldn't even need to know that they're using Bittorrent to download files - all they'd see are faster download speeds. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding
  - m_mueller 13y ago
    Opera has this since about 8 years. I used Opera heavily back then, but I never felt that this needs to be baked in. Other opera features I miss much more, most importantly free keyboard hotkey programming. I always had y, x, c (without modifier) mapped to back, forward and fast forward.
  - wwwtyro 13y ago
    > As a general concept, P2P is easy for users - using bittorrent clients, TPB, etc. is essentially mainstream. I wish that were true, but I am forced to disagree; it's been my experience (and that of my tech-savvy friends with whom I have discussed this UX shortcoming) that most people don't know how to torrent (much less set up and use freenet). Showing my parents or most of my siblings how to use a torrent client in conjunction with a tracker site is not going to be a fruitful task. If it's not as easy as Youtube or Netflix (click and watch), they aren't going to put in the effort to learn or remember how to do it.
aaronpk 13y ago
I always chuckle when the title of the article was obviously changed after first putting it online because the slug uses a different word: "Tim Berners-Lee: we need to re-decentralise the web" vs "tim-berners-lee-reclaim-the-web"
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  That doesn't imply the title was changed. Shorter slugs are nicer, and there could be some policy involved in keeping them short. It doesn't mean anything.
  - aaronpk 13y ago
    "reclaim" vs "re-decentralise" The actual article never mentions the term "re-decentralise" at all.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Still it's standard practice. I've done it often for a few news sites I've managed content for. A word doesn't even have to be in TFA, just needs to sum it well enough.
      - thirsteh 13y ago
        It's done all the time to get search engines to rank the page higher for the keywords mentioned and listed.
soapdog 13y ago
The idea of an open, free and decentralized web created by all for all is one of the main reasons I became a Mozillian. I invite all that think this is a good idea to check out their local Mozilla communities and help carry this mission onwards. You can get guidance on how to get involved with Mozilla by following the instructions and filling the form at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ =)
- rasz_pl 13y ago
  Funny you say that. If you study history you will learn Mozilla org was big on pushing proprietary non standard compliant extensions. Rise of IE curbed their enthusiasm because roles have changed. I think it was in one of the interview videos at https://www.coursera.org/course/insidetheinternet https://www.coursera.org/course/insidetheinternet
  - amaranth 13y ago
    If you mean Netscape that was a different group of people at a different time with different goals. Some of those people carried over to the Mozilla project but the goals have always been different.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Create 13y ago
Why Tim Berners-Lee is wrong about DRM in HTML5 http://craphound.com/?p=4651 http://craphound.com/?p=4651
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  Here's a link to the real text: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/12/tim-berners-lee-drm-cory-doctorow?CMP=twt_fd http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/12/tim-b...
  - Create 13y ago
    and while at it some links to the real origins of the web: For ADD-ers: http://youtu.be/hSyfZkVgasI http://youtu.be/hSyfZkVgasI The story: http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet Long PR story short: RPC was already prevalent, that is how you control(led) your stuff remotely. Like Tim did on his day job. Today, if you'd ask for a NeXT-like toy, you'd be denied were you an average Eastern member of CERN (n.b. western equivalent). As a true westerner, TBL asked for it and got one. Put the gopher link address ptr in the reserved field of the text font properties (where things like bold and italics properties are stored) and voilà. Mix in a simplified SGML for markup (as it was customary back then for typefaces and layout on printers). One could also hire cheap disposable students to actually write the web clients and servers to be cross platform (the web's virtue/value). Would the "web" have just ran on NeXT, it would be long extinct, let alone have taken off. Clicking on text is how you used Oberon or even Genera Document Examiner (perhaps even over the network). It was the spirit of the times. Even Jobs demoed a WYSIWYG client-server application in 5 minutes on the NeXT. What an insult. On linking and hypertext: all post-war era anglo-saxon stuff is spin (including Vannevar and Tim invented the web myths). The real stuff comes from Belgium, as did Tim's boss, btw.
gress 13y ago
Given the support Google has from the tech community, I don't see much movement on this in the near future.
- TillE 13y ago
  Google has support insofar as they still offer several really good products, but after the Reader shutdown, KitKat/Nestle branding, the NSA revelations, etc, I think they're a whole lot less geek-cool. They're not the new Microsoft quite yet, and they may never be, but Google is a long way from their peak of hacker-ish credibility.
  - gress 13y ago
    Their benevolent intentions as somehow more than just a self-interested corporation are still strongly defended around here. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184912
- stompin 13y ago
  given the years of covert actions slowly coming to light, this is changing. I'm not just talking about relationships with 3-letter agencies but also actions like colluding to push down developer salaries, black-boxing their search algorithms, suddenly blacklisting competitors in their search rankings (e.g. Rap Genius), WiFi and Streeview privacy invasion, etc... How many times have they already faced Antitrust accusations? Add to that the fact that Google is THE face of the recent tech backlash. Others don't like the whole idea that they employ a tiny fraction of someone like GM yet "hoovering up public subsidies and then avoiding taxes"[1]. If the public backlash continues or increases, we'll all start to face (some) repercussions - so how long will the tech community support Google en masse? [1]http://www.economist.com/news/21588893-tech-elite-will-join-bankers-and-oilmen-public-demonology-predicts-adrian-wooldridge-coming?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/the_coming_tech_lash http://www.economist.com/news/21588893-tech-elite-will-join-...
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    A lot of that is a tempest in a teapot. Rap Genius was blacklisted for good reasons, they were clearly gaming the system using blackhat SEO techniques. Antitrust accusations? You mean those funded by Microsoft astroturf lobbying groups? And just listen to your other complaint: Google is the face of rich privileged techies, and at the same time, their uncool for theoretically pushing down salaries, and these already hated SF techies should be showered with even more money? If you look at the publicly released transcripts, Steve Jobs was the ringleader of this effort anyway and threatened to "go to war" with some of the players if they poached Apple employees. Why isn't Apple facing similar outrage over this? Steve Jobs tried to price fix engineering salaries and price fix eBooks.
cromwellian 13y ago
My own rant on this from 2008 from a different perspective: http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.html http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...
- oneofthose 13y ago
  Excellent article and almost 6 years old. There are many projects to mention here but so far none of them took of as far as I know. Or did they? After publishing my own rant about the same topic [0], Dave Winer commented via Twitter and argued that RSS is a very successful tool that decentralizes the web. I didn't understand his point at the time but today I think he is absolutely right. His point was that when trying to fix the problem we should look at what already exists and works. Why did RSS succeed? Probably because it solved a problem for many people. It did not try to reinvent old things in a decentralized way but offered real benefits. Another good example for this git vs svn (centralized vs decentralized revision system). [0] http://www.soa-world.de/echelon/2011/09/the-decentralized-web-movement.html http://www.soa-world.de/echelon/2011/09/the-decentralized-we...
- nathana 13y ago
  Fantastic! Thanks for sharing. I've been beating the same drum for years within my circle of friends, and I always tend to get the "huh?" reaction. It's always refreshing to discover somebody else who seems to be running on the same wavelength. :) I miss USENET. Nowadays, my digital identity has been spread to the four corners, across Facebook, Twitter, various unrelated phpBB-based sites, and places such as /. and HN. Even if I wanted to, there is no possible way that I could re-locate every digital utterance I have ever made publicly. Not only that, but I don't truly "own" anything I write anymore. It's stored in some unmarked server somewhere, stuffed into a schema that has no published documentation. I still have e-mail archives going back 10+ years, but if Facebook ceases to exist 10 years into the future, it will be like the (admittedly few) worthwhile written conversations and interactions I had with people on there never happened. There will be no record of it. There's got to be a better way.
knocte 13y ago
This talk is very relevant too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA
munificent 13y ago
Wow, the giant flashing ad on the left of that article was so distracting I was unable to read the text. I eventually opened up the web inspector and just deleted the damn thing from the DOM.
- BlackDeath3 13y ago
  Do you not care to use (or perhaps not have the capacity to use) an adblocker?
  - Create 13y ago
    Digital Restrictions Management will take care of that. Not only mandatory flashing, but also tracking.
    - taway2012 13y ago
      How? How can DRM force me to display the iframe containing an ad.
      - admax88q 13y ago
        DRM can force you to do whatever you want. It's proprietary code running on your system. If you want to view the content, it will ensure that you've seen the ad before it renders the content.
        MichaelGG 13y ago
        The "on your system" part is what prevents this from happening. However, with features like remote attestation, a DRM platform could be built. If users start accepting PCs locked down like tablets, then this might be an issue.
        admax88q 13y ago
        I'm not sure I follow. The DRM extensions are basically hooks to proprietary plugins. If the plugin decides that you didn't view the ad, then it will refuse to play to request media. Then can and will be workarounds, but thanks to lobbying those workaround are criminal in many parts of the world.
nawitus 13y ago
The internet is decentralized, the web has never been. HTTP protocol doesn't support it. But it's time to do that. What we need is the possibility of peer-to-peer connections between browsers.
- foobarqux 13y ago
  That doesn't seem nearly as important as having a decentralized data store.
- jimktrains2 13y ago
  Sure HTTP does. You can cache things, sign things, &c. It's the current philosophy of "web apps" and not "hypertext" that isn't decentralization.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Web apps are not an issue: https://unhosted.org/ https://unhosted.org/ The problem is not technical, it's social, political and economical.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      Web apps are a bit of an issue, but unhosted web apps are not more of an issue than applications (as opposed to utilities composable in the shell) in general - which is a tremendous improvement.
  - nawitus 13y ago
    Well, technically a browser can listen to incoming connections, but in any case standards don't require it.
- sushirain 13y ago
  I'm curious, what will that enable?
  - stingraycharles 13y ago
api 13y ago
http://redecentralize.org/ http://redecentralize.org/
j2kun 13y ago
They make a reference that the NSA may be actively using a quantum computer to break mainstream encryption (or that it may happen soon). Puh-leez.
higherpurpose 13y ago
I'm having a really hard time trying to stomach anything Tim Berners Lee is saying these days, when I know he's such a big proponent of bringing DRM to his "open web" (and inevitably turning it into a more "closed" one, in the end). Also, isn't this decentralization? Not having the data in one mega-American-cloud? Seems to me that Tim is doing a lot of PR for big companies lately, masked as a benefit for the users, just like he's doing with the whole DRM thing, which he actually says would be beneficial for users. But let's assume he's not trying to be malicious here, and that he has a point. Here's the thing. Yes, I agree that having every country demand companies to host the data locally is going to make it very hard for innovation to spread, and therefore, progress will slow. HOWEVER, right now it seems we only have a choice between this, and allowing US to get their hands on all the data. I didn't even see Obama mention anything about NSA not being able to tap the world's fiber cables anymore. So until US gets serious about not doing shitty stuff like that to the world's users, then I absolutely think all the other countries should try to force companies to host the data locally. There is one other solution to this, that will allow companies to keep the data wherever they want, and that's encrypting everything by default, and even them not being able to decrypt the data without the user allowing it. So stuff like OTR for chat systems, DarkMail/PGP for e-mail systems, and so on. Make it so the web is completely trust-less, so other countries don't have to trust Google or the American government to not get their data, because they could be assured there's nothing for them to get other than strongly encrypted data. Unfortunately, this option isn't even on the table right now with the big companies, and the US government will push against companies trying to do this, too. And the only way to get this option on the table, is for them to think that other countries are going to inevitably force them to store the data locally, and build data-centers locally. Only then they might start preferring this "encrypt everything with the user having the key" solution, as an alternative to storing data in every country or region. So until that happens, I absolutely support countries demanding data to be stored locally, because I know that minutes before that will begin to happen, US companies and the US government will agree to letting the data be fully encrypted and trustless. But not any sooner than that. So in the end, we'll get what we want, and the Internet will be safe.
MikeTaylor 13y ago
It's great that Berners-Lee is saying this, but he'd have retained a lot more of his authority to pronounce on the future of the Web had he not thrown his weight behind the W3C's horrible plan to put DRM into HTML.
- desireco42 13y ago
  Let's crucify his for that :) I hear what you are saying, but there is also reason for drm. Or we will have flash forever. What I am saying, I at least can understand why he did it.
  - viraptor 13y ago
    If we were sure flash stays forever, we could just finish implementing Lightspark. With DRM that's going to be much harder.
  - fafner 13y ago
    Flash and Silverlight are dying anyway. So it's up to the movie industry and not up to us to bend over. And you know at least Flash was separated from the browser and ported to several systems. DRM in HTML5 will mean that Google, Apple, Microsoft will simply bundle their DRM modules and the free software world can fuck off. DRM in HTML5 is far worse than the status quo.
    - pekk 13y ago
      Whatever we may WISH, Flash is still everywhere. And still necessary, for example, to play sounds across browsers
      - fafner 13y ago
        And that has absolutely nothing at all to do with DRM...
      - indrax 13y ago
        Legacy browsers sure, but deciding whether to add DRM to HTML presupposes a browser that plays sound according to the standard.
freifunk_berlin 13y ago
Help us decentralize the internet: https://www.diyisp.org/dokuwiki/doku.php https://www.diyisp.org/dokuwiki/doku.php There are a lot of diy-isps out there. Engage with your community and become part of a diy-isp, e.g. by hosting services there, peering with them, etc.
techaddict009 13y ago
Time Berners Lee : "I would have got rid of the slash slash after the colon. You don't really need it. It just seemed like a good idea at the time." When asked what he would have done differently!!
- zupa-hu 13y ago
  I think that was rather a joke. A good one, though.
  - clockwerx 13y ago
    Let me know if you'd prefer to write mailto:// or http:www.fish.com
donpdonp 13y ago
The IndieWeb movement is pushing the constructs built on top of the web into a decentralized form using self hosted content and webhook notifications. Example: Comments on a blog post. Given a blog post at URL A, comments are created by posting a note on your own site at URL B, then using a webhook to notify the blog that such a comment exists. Your content cannot go away as long as you host it, and its not dependent on the blog's cooperation to be available, just to be findable. http://indiewebcamp.com/comment http://indiewebcamp.com/comment
- GrinningFool 13y ago
  Doesn't that introduce the reverse problem though? That makes someone else's content depend on the availability of your content - in the example of comments, the context and any intermediate replies can be lost if you stop hosting them. Leaving not a record of a conversation behind, but only indecipherable fragments. A quick scan through the page at the link posted also seems to indicate the protocol depends a lot on content providers being well behaved. I'm assuming that somewhere in there there is handling for when content simply goes away with notification?
  - pekk 13y ago
    Why can't your blog periodically verify its links? It seems obvious that you can't depend on notifications that something is no longer available
  - edoloughlin 13y ago
    the protocol depends a lot on content providers being well behaved I think this is true of existing content, except there are much fewer content providers and there's no protocol.
- riffraff 13y ago
  so, trackbacks?
  - jeena 13y ago
    Oh yeah the good old parsing HTML-comments for weird SGML data, this worked out well in the past ;) It is good for everybody that we tried something like that in the past but please don't bring it back.
rayiner 13y ago
Decentralizing the web won't really help when all communications flows throw a handful of telecom companies.
dbingham 13y ago
Decrentralizing the web's software isn't good enough. We need to decentralize the hardware. Right now, connections to the web look like a tree, where a whole bunch of connections get funneled through an ISP. That ISP has the power. The power to throttle, the power to block, the power to record. And that ISP can be pressured by other powers. We need to decentralize so that instead of looking like a hierarchical tree, the internet looks like a graph. With each building forming a node that connects to its neighbors. Of course, the amount of work it would take to build such a web and move to it likely rules out the possibility of it ever happening. I mean, how do we go about forming a movement to build this? It only works, really, if everyone's on board.
- m_mueller 13y ago
  Just throwing an idea a the wall here: Maybe it could be combined with the decentralization of the power grid, i.e. smartgrids? This would (a) give additional incentives to home owners (subsidizing their investment) and power companies (going after the broadband market) and (b) it would solve the question on where to get the bandwidth from.
- thisiswrong 13y ago
  >Right now, connections to the web look like a tree, where a whole bunch of connections get funneled through an ISP This is very true. More so if you look at countries like the UK where ISPs have recently been consolidated into MAFIAA-complying monopolies that censor just about anything that Hollywood and the government ask them to. It's scary how close ISPs are to the 'governements' of the UK and USA. Obamas' recent NSA 'reform' proposal even suggested that ISPs be in charge of surveillance & storage of Metadata instead of the NSA! WTF? Fascism. Mesh networks have a big role to play in decentralizing the the post-NSA internet. Micropayments through bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will encourage individual nodes to provide bandwidth to users [1]. Smartphone apps like OpenGarden [2] and systems like the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) [3] are the frontrunners of the new internet. [1] https://crypto.cs.virginia.edu/courses/14s-pet/2014/01/30/awsomnet-crypto-currency-incentivized-mesh-network/ https://crypto.cs.virginia.edu/courses/14s-pet/2014/01/30/aw... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Garden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Garden [3] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-privacy-nsa-isp http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-pr...
sergiosgc 13y ago
We need IPV6. We need every device to be fully connected, not the halfassed solution we have now. Full connectivity plus ever increasing distributed and unused computing capacity is the right playground for a new set of network usage paradigms. The mainframe->distributed->mainframe cycle will then once again swing to distributed (yes, we now live again in a mainframe age).
swalsh 13y ago
I've been trying to think about "rethinking" government for quite a while. The idea of a web based governance system seems really appealing, in the sense that I think the greatest strength of the web is how quickly ideas can go from concept to execution. Its about the closest thing to a meritocracy as we've ever come, and that's simply because the gate keeper is thrown away. Think about how many great things have sprung out of places like Reddit. Ordinary people who have a quick flash of a good idea can take 30 minutes to type something up... and sometimes it gets traction. Getting things done in our current system requires an inhuman like persistence, and the luck of making a relevant connection. Even if you have a good idea, its a difficult thing to execute. I have this image of a framework/protocol in my head around allowing various policies to be created, and built on top of each other. As a programmer I pretty much used object oriented programming as an inspiration. Though I guess even OOP had its inspiration from biology. Its a way for an organic system to grow and adapt robustly. I think just like computer programs, government needs that too. Added to that, if the web has a decent self regulation mechanism, that makes the justification of regulating the web even harder. The one problem is, the advantage "physical" governments have is they have sovereignty. If Amazon starts doing illegal things, the FBI can arrest Jeff Bezos. The internet doesn't have an equivlent means. However I think there is away to have the essence of sovereignty, and that is through a new crypto-currency like bitcoin. Imagine if to be a part, and to receive the benefits of this online sovereign nation you had to register your receive address. If the sovereign entity had a way to embargo your ability to accept payments in the currency, it might be enough penalty to fall back inline with whatever regulations were created. I think it also provides another means to give legitamicy to a crypto-currency. An example of something that would be cool is this. You want to create an open source space program, so you propose the idea on your local netizen forum. The idea has overwhelming support, so someone creates a new policy component, and gives permissions to suction tax funds. I can imagine something like that happening in hours. Imagine initiating a public effort going from idea to reality in hours.
- teekert 13y ago
  I fear that you are overestimating humanity: "The idea has overwhelming support, so someone creates a new policy component, and gives permissions to suction tax funds"... You are not afraid that this will lead to radical redistribution of wealth eventually resulting in loss of motivation to create wealth? (Yes, the Atlas Shrugged scenario.)
doctoboggan 13y ago
Perfect timing, I just released a tool that enabled a more decentralized web. It used BitTorrent Sync to distribute files and I plan on implementing namecoin or colored coins for name resolution. As soon as an open source, stable btsync clone is released I plan on swapping it in. The biggest drawback is that you can only serve static content, although I think many websites today would be fine with this restriction. You can read more on my website: http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web-browser/ http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web... Follow along with the development on github here: https://github.com/jminardi/syncnet https://github.com/jminardi/syncnet
- p4bl0 13y ago
  This is quite nice. You should submit it as a "Show HN". You can be sure that as soon as you have a free software replacement for btsync I'll use it at least to serve my personal website. By the way, have you heard about Freenet? https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/
  - joshstrange 13y ago
    He did a few days ago[0] but it didn't get very much attention unfortunately. I only saw it because I spent way too much time on HN that day. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7171978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7171978
  - doctoboggan 13y ago
    Yeah I did submit it but it didn't get much attention. I don't know the etiquette on resubmitting items.
    - coldpie 13y ago
      Try again when you've got a new feature or make a new release or something else noteworthy. There's always some timing luck to a HN submission.
- mwilcox 13y ago
gaius 13y ago
What we need is Gopher, Tim.
acd 13y ago
I think a powerful thing would be a p2p anonymous net interface that ships default with the Linux kernel. So not only would you have eth0: You would have p2p0: Anonymous, Unique ID, DHT So you could reach your web server eiher via 192.168.0.100 or short unique id SSL communications will not be based on central CAs because that model is long compromised. I think we should built this together. Maybe its GNUnet?
peterwwillis 13y ago
This actually has nothing to do with the web in general, or the internet, or politics, or personal liberties, or peer to peer networks. This is about designing stable distributed applications. Almost every really big, really stable website (or network service) is built on a set of distributed applications. Global data redundancy is just one of the considerations. If you want your application available everywhere, all the time, you have to design it to withstand faults, to distribute data and computation, and to do this over long distances, and still perform the same actions the same way everywhere. That's all a de-centralized web needs to look like, and it's actually already implemented in many places. What I think Tim is saying is that we need to move away from concepts that centralize data and computation and use existing proven models to make them more stable in a global way. And i'm totally behind that. But if you think we're going to get there with p2p, self-hosted solutions, new protocols, new tools, new paradigms, or a new internet, you've completely missed the boat. We have had everything we need to accomplish what Tim wants for a while. It just has to be used properly [which some companies actually do]. But good luck convincing most companies to spend the time and money doing that...
- dclara 13y ago
  I partially agree with you in the sense that we don't need new network with p2p or self-hosted solutions, but need stable distributed applications. How? I cannot agree with you to realize it via data redundancy and replication. The way you mentioned is just what Google is doing right now, which is not true distributed computing. Google's architecture relies on replicating services across many different machines to achieve distributed computing/storage and fault-tolerance across the world. See the reference here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/googlecluster-ieee.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... The real distributed computing solution for providing a well-organized web has been proposed to build a layer on top of the existing physical infrastructure of the internet to present the web in a de-centralized manner under a systematic way. http://bit.ly/MwT4rx http://bit.ly/MwT4rx
  - peterwwillis 13y ago
    As far as i'm aware there's no such thing as "true" or "real" distributed computing. It's a wide field of study with many different overlapping concepts. The paper you linked to does describe how queries are resolved by Google, and not quite the whole picture required for a typical distributed computing model. But to say it's not distributed computing is... confusing. Clearly they must support this model over many sites the world over, and we know from other documents that they geo-locate data to make it more convenient, meaning it's portable and partitionable. Sounds like a distributed computing system to me.
auvrw 13y ago
in the absence of a relevant plug for a library that i've written (shame), here's one for a library that someone else wrote http://www.infoq.com/presentations/private-backend http://www.infoq.com/presentations/private-backend tl;dw: next time you build a webservice, let your users use private drive, dropbox, or whatever accounts to host their data (or at least the data that doesn't get JOINed to other tables all over the place). one has to pay for data ownership, but it's not per-service charge. the article's kind of a tease. it's easy to say things like "open" and "decentralized," but i guess if i want to know what specific implementations were discussed, i'd have to buy the magazine.
shmerl 13y ago
May be he should revert his stance on DRM in HTML then. Supporting it goes completely against the idea of decentralizing the Web, since it's giving control to gatekeepers and taking it away from users.
fuckpig 13y ago
Let's decentralize first by removing the centralized generic resources that consume too much of the traffic, like Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon and Google.
- wutbrodo 13y ago
  How do you propose "removing" Amazon, Wikipedia, et al?
  - fuckpig 13y ago
    I imagine there are some legal ways to do that.
rch 13y ago
> we need a bit of anti-establishment push back Wow. Understatement of the century.
StephenFalken 13y ago
"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." -- Alan Kay
- yungchin 13y ago
  source: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442# http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...
EGreg 13y ago
I wrote about this as well: http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21 http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21 Two years ago I really became passionate about the problem of decentralizing the consumer internet again. We can see with git and other tools how distributed workflows are better in many ways than centralized ones. The internet was originally designed to be decentralized, with no single point of failure, but there's a strong tendency for services to crop up and use network effects to amass lots of users. VC firms have a thesis to invest in such companies. While this is true, the future is in distributed computing, like Wordpress for blogs or Git for version control. I started a company two years ago to build a distributed publishing platform. And it's nearly complete. http://qbix.com/blog http://qbix.com/blog http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135 Soon... it will let people run a distributed social network and publish things over which they have personal control. And I'm open sourcing it: http://github.com/EGreg/Q http://github.com/EGreg/Q http://qbixstaging.com/QP http://qbixstaging.com/QP <-- coming soon
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Git is an interesting example, even though the software itself is decentralized it seems to be most commonly used around centralized services. See how upset HN gets when github goes down.
josteink 13y ago
Why should we care what some guy says when that same guy thinks that putting DRM in the an open standard makes sense? Tim Berners-Lee needs to withdraw his statement, acknowledge his mistake and publicly apologize before his voice can carry any weight again.
zokier 13y ago
I'm surprised by the amount of comments declaring "Berners-Lee supported DRM so his words are meaningless". Not that I myself put a lot of weight to his words, but not for some silly DRM issue (frankly I didn't even remember that), but because I can't really say what his contribution to the web (or anything relevant) has been in the past couple of decades. Looking at his wikipedia page, it mentions that he founded W3C in 1994, and that's about it. Everything since seems to be some sort fluff, often with grandiose names and concepts but very little substance. So I'm not surprised that people do not put weight on his words, but rather the reason why they don't and the apparent recency of this opinion.
callesgg 13y ago
The web was never decentralized. The internet was, and kind of is. The web meaning basically http websites. On a bunch of servers.
bariswheel 13y ago
He needs to get over that slash slash. Really, it's fine. He's hung over it.

585 points by amirmc 13y ago

Part of the difficulty of bringing this about is making p2p easy for users. I have high hopes that WebRTC data channels can start tearing these walls down by making it as simple as opening a web app.

valisystem 13y ago
Not only easy, but also fast and reliable enough to compete with centralized services.
- wwwtyro 13y ago
  Fair point. A significant reason that p2p networks like freenet tend to be slow is because of low adoption - the more users there are, the faster it can be. I submit that making p2p applications easy to use will in turn make them faster than we have seen before, because adoption rates promise to be much higher.
chimeracoder 13y ago
> Part of the difficulty of bringing this about is making p2p easy for users. As a general concept, P2P is easy for users - using bittorrent clients, TPB, etc. is essentially mainstream. The one thing that would be nice is browser support - I would love it if Chrome had the option to download .torrent files using the Chrome download manager. Thanks to web seeds[0], this would allow providers to convert any download to a torrent instead, both increasing use of P2P and decreasing their own server load. Users wouldn't even need to know that they're using Bittorrent to download files - all they'd see are faster download speeds. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding
- m_mueller 13y ago
  Opera has this since about 8 years. I used Opera heavily back then, but I never felt that this needs to be baked in. Other opera features I miss much more, most importantly free keyboard hotkey programming. I always had y, x, c (without modifier) mapped to back, forward and fast forward.
- wwwtyro 13y ago
  > As a general concept, P2P is easy for users - using bittorrent clients, TPB, etc. is essentially mainstream. I wish that were true, but I am forced to disagree; it's been my experience (and that of my tech-savvy friends with whom I have discussed this UX shortcoming) that most people don't know how to torrent (much less set up and use freenet). Showing my parents or most of my siblings how to use a torrent client in conjunction with a tracker site is not going to be a fruitful task. If it's not as easy as Youtube or Netflix (click and watch), they aren't going to put in the effort to learn or remember how to do it.

aaronpk 13y ago

I always chuckle when the title of the article was obviously changed after first putting it online because the slug uses a different word: "Tim Berners-Lee: we need to re-decentralise the web" vs "tim-berners-lee-reclaim-the-web"

dkuntz2 13y ago
That doesn't imply the title was changed. Shorter slugs are nicer, and there could be some policy involved in keeping them short. It doesn't mean anything.
- aaronpk 13y ago
  "reclaim" vs "re-decentralise" The actual article never mentions the term "re-decentralise" at all.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Still it's standard practice. I've done it often for a few news sites I've managed content for. A word doesn't even have to be in TFA, just needs to sum it well enough.
    - thirsteh 13y ago
      It's done all the time to get search engines to rank the page higher for the keywords mentioned and listed.

soapdog 13y ago

The idea of an open, free and decentralized web created by all for all is one of the main reasons I became a Mozillian. I invite all that think this is a good idea to check out their local Mozilla communities and help carry this mission onwards. You can get guidance on how to get involved with Mozilla by following the instructions and filling the form at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/ =)

rasz_pl 13y ago
Funny you say that. If you study history you will learn Mozilla org was big on pushing proprietary non standard compliant extensions. Rise of IE curbed their enthusiasm because roles have changed. I think it was in one of the interview videos at https://www.coursera.org/course/insidetheinternet https://www.coursera.org/course/insidetheinternet
- amaranth 13y ago
  If you mean Netscape that was a different group of people at a different time with different goals. Some of those people carried over to the Mozilla project but the goals have always been different.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Create 13y ago

Why Tim Berners-Lee is wrong about DRM in HTML5 http://craphound.com/?p=4651 http://craphound.com/?p=4651

JetSpiegel 13y ago
Here's a link to the real text: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/12/tim-berners-lee-drm-cory-doctorow?CMP=twt_fd http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/mar/12/tim-b...
- Create 13y ago
  and while at it some links to the real origins of the web: For ADD-ers: http://youtu.be/hSyfZkVgasI http://youtu.be/hSyfZkVgasI The story: http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet Long PR story short: RPC was already prevalent, that is how you control(led) your stuff remotely. Like Tim did on his day job. Today, if you'd ask for a NeXT-like toy, you'd be denied were you an average Eastern member of CERN (n.b. western equivalent). As a true westerner, TBL asked for it and got one. Put the gopher link address ptr in the reserved field of the text font properties (where things like bold and italics properties are stored) and voilà. Mix in a simplified SGML for markup (as it was customary back then for typefaces and layout on printers). One could also hire cheap disposable students to actually write the web clients and servers to be cross platform (the web's virtue/value). Would the "web" have just ran on NeXT, it would be long extinct, let alone have taken off. Clicking on text is how you used Oberon or even Genera Document Examiner (perhaps even over the network). It was the spirit of the times. Even Jobs demoed a WYSIWYG client-server application in 5 minutes on the NeXT. What an insult. On linking and hypertext: all post-war era anglo-saxon stuff is spin (including Vannevar and Tim invented the web myths). The real stuff comes from Belgium, as did Tim's boss, btw.

gress 13y ago

Given the support Google has from the tech community, I don't see much movement on this in the near future.

TillE 13y ago
Google has support insofar as they still offer several really good products, but after the Reader shutdown, KitKat/Nestle branding, the NSA revelations, etc, I think they're a whole lot less geek-cool. They're not the new Microsoft quite yet, and they may never be, but Google is a long way from their peak of hacker-ish credibility.
- gress 13y ago
  Their benevolent intentions as somehow more than just a self-interested corporation are still strongly defended around here. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184912
stompin 13y ago
given the years of covert actions slowly coming to light, this is changing. I'm not just talking about relationships with 3-letter agencies but also actions like colluding to push down developer salaries, black-boxing their search algorithms, suddenly blacklisting competitors in their search rankings (e.g. Rap Genius), WiFi and Streeview privacy invasion, etc... How many times have they already faced Antitrust accusations? Add to that the fact that Google is THE face of the recent tech backlash. Others don't like the whole idea that they employ a tiny fraction of someone like GM yet "hoovering up public subsidies and then avoiding taxes"[1]. If the public backlash continues or increases, we'll all start to face (some) repercussions - so how long will the tech community support Google en masse? [1]http://www.economist.com/news/21588893-tech-elite-will-join-bankers-and-oilmen-public-demonology-predicts-adrian-wooldridge-coming?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/the_coming_tech_lash http://www.economist.com/news/21588893-tech-elite-will-join-...
- cromwellian 13y ago
  A lot of that is a tempest in a teapot. Rap Genius was blacklisted for good reasons, they were clearly gaming the system using blackhat SEO techniques. Antitrust accusations? You mean those funded by Microsoft astroturf lobbying groups? And just listen to your other complaint: Google is the face of rich privileged techies, and at the same time, their uncool for theoretically pushing down salaries, and these already hated SF techies should be showered with even more money? If you look at the publicly released transcripts, Steve Jobs was the ringleader of this effort anyway and threatened to "go to war" with some of the players if they poached Apple employees. Why isn't Apple facing similar outrage over this? Steve Jobs tried to price fix engineering salaries and price fix eBooks.

cromwellian 13y ago

My own rant on this from 2008 from a different perspective: http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.html http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...

oneofthose 13y ago
Excellent article and almost 6 years old. There are many projects to mention here but so far none of them took of as far as I know. Or did they? After publishing my own rant about the same topic [0], Dave Winer commented via Twitter and argued that RSS is a very successful tool that decentralizes the web. I didn't understand his point at the time but today I think he is absolutely right. His point was that when trying to fix the problem we should look at what already exists and works. Why did RSS succeed? Probably because it solved a problem for many people. It did not try to reinvent old things in a decentralized way but offered real benefits. Another good example for this git vs svn (centralized vs decentralized revision system). [0] http://www.soa-world.de/echelon/2011/09/the-decentralized-web-movement.html http://www.soa-world.de/echelon/2011/09/the-decentralized-we...
nathana 13y ago
Fantastic! Thanks for sharing. I've been beating the same drum for years within my circle of friends, and I always tend to get the "huh?" reaction. It's always refreshing to discover somebody else who seems to be running on the same wavelength. :) I miss USENET. Nowadays, my digital identity has been spread to the four corners, across Facebook, Twitter, various unrelated phpBB-based sites, and places such as /. and HN. Even if I wanted to, there is no possible way that I could re-locate every digital utterance I have ever made publicly. Not only that, but I don't truly "own" anything I write anymore. It's stored in some unmarked server somewhere, stuffed into a schema that has no published documentation. I still have e-mail archives going back 10+ years, but if Facebook ceases to exist 10 years into the future, it will be like the (admittedly few) worthwhile written conversations and interactions I had with people on there never happened. There will be no record of it. There's got to be a better way.

knocte 13y ago

This talk is very relevant too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA

munificent 13y ago

Wow, the giant flashing ad on the left of that article was so distracting I was unable to read the text. I eventually opened up the web inspector and just deleted the damn thing from the DOM.

BlackDeath3 13y ago
Do you not care to use (or perhaps not have the capacity to use) an adblocker?
- Create 13y ago
  Digital Restrictions Management will take care of that. Not only mandatory flashing, but also tracking.
  - taway2012 13y ago
    How? How can DRM force me to display the iframe containing an ad.
    - admax88q 13y ago
      DRM can force you to do whatever you want. It's proprietary code running on your system. If you want to view the content, it will ensure that you've seen the ad before it renders the content.
      - MichaelGG 13y ago
        The "on your system" part is what prevents this from happening. However, with features like remote attestation, a DRM platform could be built. If users start accepting PCs locked down like tablets, then this might be an issue.
        admax88q 13y ago
        I'm not sure I follow. The DRM extensions are basically hooks to proprietary plugins. If the plugin decides that you didn't view the ad, then it will refuse to play to request media. Then can and will be workarounds, but thanks to lobbying those workaround are criminal in many parts of the world.

nawitus 13y ago

The internet is decentralized, the web has never been. HTTP protocol doesn't support it. But it's time to do that. What we need is the possibility of peer-to-peer connections between browsers.

foobarqux 13y ago
That doesn't seem nearly as important as having a decentralized data store.
jimktrains2 13y ago
Sure HTTP does. You can cache things, sign things, &c. It's the current philosophy of "web apps" and not "hypertext" that isn't decentralization.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Web apps are not an issue: https://unhosted.org/ https://unhosted.org/ The problem is not technical, it's social, political and economical.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Web apps are a bit of an issue, but unhosted web apps are not more of an issue than applications (as opposed to utilities composable in the shell) in general - which is a tremendous improvement.
- nawitus 13y ago
  Well, technically a browser can listen to incoming connections, but in any case standards don't require it.
sushirain 13y ago
I'm curious, what will that enable?
- stingraycharles 13y ago

api 13y ago

http://redecentralize.org/ http://redecentralize.org/

j2kun 13y ago

They make a reference that the NSA may be actively using a quantum computer to break mainstream encryption (or that it may happen soon). Puh-leez.

higherpurpose 13y ago

I'm having a really hard time trying to stomach anything Tim Berners Lee is saying these days, when I know he's such a big proponent of bringing DRM to his "open web" (and inevitably turning it into a more "closed" one, in the end). Also, isn't this decentralization? Not having the data in one mega-American-cloud? Seems to me that Tim is doing a lot of PR for big companies lately, masked as a benefit for the users, just like he's doing with the whole DRM thing, which he actually says would be beneficial for users. But let's assume he's not trying to be malicious here, and that he has a point. Here's the thing. Yes, I agree that having every country demand companies to host the data locally is going to make it very hard for innovation to spread, and therefore, progress will slow. HOWEVER, right now it seems we only have a choice between this, and allowing US to get their hands on all the data. I didn't even see Obama mention anything about NSA not being able to tap the world's fiber cables anymore. So until US gets serious about not doing shitty stuff like that to the world's users, then I absolutely think all the other countries should try to force companies to host the data locally. There is one other solution to this, that will allow companies to keep the data wherever they want, and that's encrypting everything by default, and even them not being able to decrypt the data without the user allowing it. So stuff like OTR for chat systems, DarkMail/PGP for e-mail systems, and so on. Make it so the web is completely trust-less, so other countries don't have to trust Google or the American government to not get their data, because they could be assured there's nothing for them to get other than strongly encrypted data. Unfortunately, this option isn't even on the table right now with the big companies, and the US government will push against companies trying to do this, too. And the only way to get this option on the table, is for them to think that other countries are going to inevitably force them to store the data locally, and build data-centers locally. Only then they might start preferring this "encrypt everything with the user having the key" solution, as an alternative to storing data in every country or region. So until that happens, I absolutely support countries demanding data to be stored locally, because I know that minutes before that will begin to happen, US companies and the US government will agree to letting the data be fully encrypted and trustless. But not any sooner than that. So in the end, we'll get what we want, and the Internet will be safe.

MikeTaylor 13y ago

It's great that Berners-Lee is saying this, but he'd have retained a lot more of his authority to pronounce on the future of the Web had he not thrown his weight behind the W3C's horrible plan to put DRM into HTML.

desireco42 13y ago
Let's crucify his for that :) I hear what you are saying, but there is also reason for drm. Or we will have flash forever. What I am saying, I at least can understand why he did it.
- viraptor 13y ago
  If we were sure flash stays forever, we could just finish implementing Lightspark. With DRM that's going to be much harder.
- fafner 13y ago
  Flash and Silverlight are dying anyway. So it's up to the movie industry and not up to us to bend over. And you know at least Flash was separated from the browser and ported to several systems. DRM in HTML5 will mean that Google, Apple, Microsoft will simply bundle their DRM modules and the free software world can fuck off. DRM in HTML5 is far worse than the status quo.
  - pekk 13y ago
    Whatever we may WISH, Flash is still everywhere. And still necessary, for example, to play sounds across browsers
    - fafner 13y ago
      And that has absolutely nothing at all to do with DRM...
    - indrax 13y ago
      Legacy browsers sure, but deciding whether to add DRM to HTML presupposes a browser that plays sound according to the standard.

freifunk_berlin 13y ago

Help us decentralize the internet: https://www.diyisp.org/dokuwiki/doku.php https://www.diyisp.org/dokuwiki/doku.php There are a lot of diy-isps out there. Engage with your community and become part of a diy-isp, e.g. by hosting services there, peering with them, etc.

techaddict009 13y ago

Time Berners Lee : "I would have got rid of the slash slash after the colon. You don't really need it. It just seemed like a good idea at the time." When asked what he would have done differently!!

zupa-hu 13y ago
I think that was rather a joke. A good one, though.
- clockwerx 13y ago
  Let me know if you'd prefer to write mailto:// or http:www.fish.com

donpdonp 13y ago

The IndieWeb movement is pushing the constructs built on top of the web into a decentralized form using self hosted content and webhook notifications. Example: Comments on a blog post. Given a blog post at URL A, comments are created by posting a note on your own site at URL B, then using a webhook to notify the blog that such a comment exists. Your content cannot go away as long as you host it, and its not dependent on the blog's cooperation to be available, just to be findable. http://indiewebcamp.com/comment http://indiewebcamp.com/comment

GrinningFool 13y ago
Doesn't that introduce the reverse problem though? That makes someone else's content depend on the availability of your content - in the example of comments, the context and any intermediate replies can be lost if you stop hosting them. Leaving not a record of a conversation behind, but only indecipherable fragments. A quick scan through the page at the link posted also seems to indicate the protocol depends a lot on content providers being well behaved. I'm assuming that somewhere in there there is handling for when content simply goes away with notification?
- pekk 13y ago
  Why can't your blog periodically verify its links? It seems obvious that you can't depend on notifications that something is no longer available
- edoloughlin 13y ago
  the protocol depends a lot on content providers being well behaved I think this is true of existing content, except there are much fewer content providers and there's no protocol.
riffraff 13y ago
so, trackbacks?
- jeena 13y ago
  Oh yeah the good old parsing HTML-comments for weird SGML data, this worked out well in the past ;) It is good for everybody that we tried something like that in the past but please don't bring it back.

rayiner 13y ago

Decentralizing the web won't really help when all communications flows throw a handful of telecom companies.

dbingham 13y ago

Decrentralizing the web's software isn't good enough. We need to decentralize the hardware. Right now, connections to the web look like a tree, where a whole bunch of connections get funneled through an ISP. That ISP has the power. The power to throttle, the power to block, the power to record. And that ISP can be pressured by other powers. We need to decentralize so that instead of looking like a hierarchical tree, the internet looks like a graph. With each building forming a node that connects to its neighbors. Of course, the amount of work it would take to build such a web and move to it likely rules out the possibility of it ever happening. I mean, how do we go about forming a movement to build this? It only works, really, if everyone's on board.

m_mueller 13y ago
Just throwing an idea a the wall here: Maybe it could be combined with the decentralization of the power grid, i.e. smartgrids? This would (a) give additional incentives to home owners (subsidizing their investment) and power companies (going after the broadband market) and (b) it would solve the question on where to get the bandwidth from.
thisiswrong 13y ago
>Right now, connections to the web look like a tree, where a whole bunch of connections get funneled through an ISP This is very true. More so if you look at countries like the UK where ISPs have recently been consolidated into MAFIAA-complying monopolies that censor just about anything that Hollywood and the government ask them to. It's scary how close ISPs are to the 'governements' of the UK and USA. Obamas' recent NSA 'reform' proposal even suggested that ISPs be in charge of surveillance & storage of Metadata instead of the NSA! WTF? Fascism. Mesh networks have a big role to play in decentralizing the the post-NSA internet. Micropayments through bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will encourage individual nodes to provide bandwidth to users [1]. Smartphone apps like OpenGarden [2] and systems like the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) [3] are the frontrunners of the new internet. [1] https://crypto.cs.virginia.edu/courses/14s-pet/2014/01/30/awsomnet-crypto-currency-incentivized-mesh-network/ https://crypto.cs.virginia.edu/courses/14s-pet/2014/01/30/aw... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Garden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Garden [3] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-privacy-nsa-isp http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-pr...

sergiosgc 13y ago

We need IPV6. We need every device to be fully connected, not the halfassed solution we have now. Full connectivity plus ever increasing distributed and unused computing capacity is the right playground for a new set of network usage paradigms. The mainframe->distributed->mainframe cycle will then once again swing to distributed (yes, we now live again in a mainframe age).

swalsh 13y ago

I've been trying to think about "rethinking" government for quite a while. The idea of a web based governance system seems really appealing, in the sense that I think the greatest strength of the web is how quickly ideas can go from concept to execution. Its about the closest thing to a meritocracy as we've ever come, and that's simply because the gate keeper is thrown away. Think about how many great things have sprung out of places like Reddit. Ordinary people who have a quick flash of a good idea can take 30 minutes to type something up... and sometimes it gets traction. Getting things done in our current system requires an inhuman like persistence, and the luck of making a relevant connection. Even if you have a good idea, its a difficult thing to execute. I have this image of a framework/protocol in my head around allowing various policies to be created, and built on top of each other. As a programmer I pretty much used object oriented programming as an inspiration. Though I guess even OOP had its inspiration from biology. Its a way for an organic system to grow and adapt robustly. I think just like computer programs, government needs that too. Added to that, if the web has a decent self regulation mechanism, that makes the justification of regulating the web even harder. The one problem is, the advantage "physical" governments have is they have sovereignty. If Amazon starts doing illegal things, the FBI can arrest Jeff Bezos. The internet doesn't have an equivlent means. However I think there is away to have the essence of sovereignty, and that is through a new crypto-currency like bitcoin. Imagine if to be a part, and to receive the benefits of this online sovereign nation you had to register your receive address. If the sovereign entity had a way to embargo your ability to accept payments in the currency, it might be enough penalty to fall back inline with whatever regulations were created. I think it also provides another means to give legitamicy to a crypto-currency. An example of something that would be cool is this. You want to create an open source space program, so you propose the idea on your local netizen forum. The idea has overwhelming support, so someone creates a new policy component, and gives permissions to suction tax funds. I can imagine something like that happening in hours. Imagine initiating a public effort going from idea to reality in hours.

teekert 13y ago
I fear that you are overestimating humanity: "The idea has overwhelming support, so someone creates a new policy component, and gives permissions to suction tax funds"... You are not afraid that this will lead to radical redistribution of wealth eventually resulting in loss of motivation to create wealth? (Yes, the Atlas Shrugged scenario.)

doctoboggan 13y ago

Perfect timing, I just released a tool that enabled a more decentralized web. It used BitTorrent Sync to distribute files and I plan on implementing namecoin or colored coins for name resolution. As soon as an open source, stable btsync clone is released I plan on swapping it in. The biggest drawback is that you can only serve static content, although I think many websites today would be fine with this restriction. You can read more on my website: http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web-browser/ http://jack.minardi.org/software/syncnet-a-decentralized-web... Follow along with the development on github here: https://github.com/jminardi/syncnet https://github.com/jminardi/syncnet

p4bl0 13y ago
This is quite nice. You should submit it as a "Show HN". You can be sure that as soon as you have a free software replacement for btsync I'll use it at least to serve my personal website. By the way, have you heard about Freenet? https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/
- joshstrange 13y ago
  He did a few days ago[0] but it didn't get very much attention unfortunately. I only saw it because I spent way too much time on HN that day. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7171978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7171978
- doctoboggan 13y ago
  Yeah I did submit it but it didn't get much attention. I don't know the etiquette on resubmitting items.
  - coldpie 13y ago
    Try again when you've got a new feature or make a new release or something else noteworthy. There's always some timing luck to a HN submission.
mwilcox 13y ago

gaius 13y ago

What we need is Gopher, Tim.

acd 13y ago

I think a powerful thing would be a p2p anonymous net interface that ships default with the Linux kernel. So not only would you have eth0: You would have p2p0: Anonymous, Unique ID, DHT So you could reach your web server eiher via 192.168.0.100 or short unique id SSL communications will not be based on central CAs because that model is long compromised. I think we should built this together. Maybe its GNUnet?

peterwwillis 13y ago

This actually has nothing to do with the web in general, or the internet, or politics, or personal liberties, or peer to peer networks. This is about designing stable distributed applications. Almost every really big, really stable website (or network service) is built on a set of distributed applications. Global data redundancy is just one of the considerations. If you want your application available everywhere, all the time, you have to design it to withstand faults, to distribute data and computation, and to do this over long distances, and still perform the same actions the same way everywhere. That's all a de-centralized web needs to look like, and it's actually already implemented in many places. What I think Tim is saying is that we need to move away from concepts that centralize data and computation and use existing proven models to make them more stable in a global way. And i'm totally behind that. But if you think we're going to get there with p2p, self-hosted solutions, new protocols, new tools, new paradigms, or a new internet, you've completely missed the boat. We have had everything we need to accomplish what Tim wants for a while. It just has to be used properly [which some companies actually do]. But good luck convincing most companies to spend the time and money doing that...

dclara 13y ago
I partially agree with you in the sense that we don't need new network with p2p or self-hosted solutions, but need stable distributed applications. How? I cannot agree with you to realize it via data redundancy and replication. The way you mentioned is just what Google is doing right now, which is not true distributed computing. Google's architecture relies on replicating services across many different machines to achieve distributed computing/storage and fault-tolerance across the world. See the reference here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/googlecluster-ieee.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... The real distributed computing solution for providing a well-organized web has been proposed to build a layer on top of the existing physical infrastructure of the internet to present the web in a de-centralized manner under a systematic way. http://bit.ly/MwT4rx http://bit.ly/MwT4rx
- peterwwillis 13y ago
  As far as i'm aware there's no such thing as "true" or "real" distributed computing. It's a wide field of study with many different overlapping concepts. The paper you linked to does describe how queries are resolved by Google, and not quite the whole picture required for a typical distributed computing model. But to say it's not distributed computing is... confusing. Clearly they must support this model over many sites the world over, and we know from other documents that they geo-locate data to make it more convenient, meaning it's portable and partitionable. Sounds like a distributed computing system to me.

auvrw 13y ago

in the absence of a relevant plug for a library that i've written (shame), here's one for a library that someone else wrote http://www.infoq.com/presentations/private-backend http://www.infoq.com/presentations/private-backend tl;dw: next time you build a webservice, let your users use private drive, dropbox, or whatever accounts to host their data (or at least the data that doesn't get JOINed to other tables all over the place). one has to pay for data ownership, but it's not per-service charge. the article's kind of a tease. it's easy to say things like "open" and "decentralized," but i guess if i want to know what specific implementations were discussed, i'd have to buy the magazine.

shmerl 13y ago

May be he should revert his stance on DRM in HTML then. Supporting it goes completely against the idea of decentralizing the Web, since it's giving control to gatekeepers and taking it away from users.

fuckpig 13y ago

Let's decentralize first by removing the centralized generic resources that consume too much of the traffic, like Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon and Google.

wutbrodo 13y ago
How do you propose "removing" Amazon, Wikipedia, et al?
- fuckpig 13y ago
  I imagine there are some legal ways to do that.

rch 13y ago

> we need a bit of anti-establishment push back Wow. Understatement of the century.

StephenFalken 13y ago

"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." -- Alan Kay

yungchin 13y ago
source: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442# http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...

EGreg 13y ago

I wrote about this as well: http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21 http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21 Two years ago I really became passionate about the problem of decentralizing the consumer internet again. We can see with git and other tools how distributed workflows are better in many ways than centralized ones. The internet was originally designed to be decentralized, with no single point of failure, but there's a strong tendency for services to crop up and use network effects to amass lots of users. VC firms have a thesis to invest in such companies. While this is true, the future is in distributed computing, like Wordpress for blogs or Git for version control. I started a company two years ago to build a distributed publishing platform. And it's nearly complete. http://qbix.com/blog http://qbix.com/blog http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135 Soon... it will let people run a distributed social network and publish things over which they have personal control. And I'm open sourcing it: http://github.com/EGreg/Q http://github.com/EGreg/Q http://qbixstaging.com/QP http://qbixstaging.com/QP <-- coming soon

jiggy2011 13y ago
Git is an interesting example, even though the software itself is decentralized it seems to be most commonly used around centralized services. See how upset HN gets when github goes down.

josteink 13y ago

Why should we care what some guy says when that same guy thinks that putting DRM in the an open standard makes sense? Tim Berners-Lee needs to withdraw his statement, acknowledge his mistake and publicly apologize before his voice can carry any weight again.

zokier 13y ago

I'm surprised by the amount of comments declaring "Berners-Lee supported DRM so his words are meaningless". Not that I myself put a lot of weight to his words, but not for some silly DRM issue (frankly I didn't even remember that), but because I can't really say what his contribution to the web (or anything relevant) has been in the past couple of decades. Looking at his wikipedia page, it mentions that he founded W3C in 1994, and that's about it. Everything since seems to be some sort fluff, often with grandiose names and concepts but very little substance. So I'm not surprised that people do not put weight on his words, but rather the reason why they don't and the apparent recency of this opinion.

callesgg 13y ago

The web was never decentralized. The internet was, and kind of is. The web meaning basically http websites. On a bunch of servers.

bariswheel 13y ago

He needs to get over that slash slash. Really, it's fine. He's hung over it.