Web Security CEO Warns About Control Of Internet Falling Into Few Hands (cnbc.com)

The idea behind the internet was to make a massive, decentralized system that wasn't under control of anyone, but that is increasingly changing, according to Matthew Prince, CEO of web security company CloudFlare. His statements come at a time when Google and Facebook and other companies are increasingly building new products and services and locking in users to their respective walled gardens. From a CNBC report: "More and more of the internet is sitting behind fewer and fewer players, and there are benefits of that, but there are also real risks," said Matthew Prince, chief executive officer of web security company CloudFlare, in an interview with CNBC. His comments came at CloudFlare's Internet Summit -- a conference featuring tech executives and government security experts -- on Tuesday in San Francisco. "If everything sits behind Facebook and you can't publish pictures like that, is the world a better place? Probably not," said Prince. "Before you know it, you could wake up and find more of the internet sits behind a small number of gate-keepers," said Prince. Putting that sort of power in the hands of a small number of people and companies "might not be the best thing," he said. Still, the wave of consolidation among the major internet companies is likely to continue, at least for now, he said.

Comments

A good thing.

[BarbaraHudson]

They use Facebook as an example. If we can get all Facebook users to voluntarily wall themselves off from the rest of the Internet, it's a win-win situation. They're happy, we're happy.

Re:A good thing.

[networkBoy]

Facebook reminds me of early AOL...
Just waiting for someone to link FB Messenger with IRC O_o

Re: A good thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well. That was something I never considered, as an avid IRC user. I'm already sick enough of sites asking me to use Facebook logins as a certificate for commenting or logging on.

Re:A good thing.

[kheldan]

It's more likely that we'll wake up one day to a world where you have to have a Facebook account, with your real name and all your real, personal information, or you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymore. The Internet is already largely one big data-collection and surveillance network, and even not using your real name anywhere is trivial for someone with the right level of access to information to circumvent and discover who and where you are. The next step if this 'consolidation' continues will be to make sure there is no anonymity allowed for anyone; you'll have to log in to everything using a Facebook account, or something similar, so all your activity can be thoroughly tracked and logged by the 'proper agencies' -- for your own protection, of course.

Or so they'd like it to be. I'd sooner not even have the Internet anymore, and go back to using libraries for information, receiving paper bills for money I owe, and mailing paper checks to pay them. We all survived and thrived just fine before the Internet, and we'd all survive and thrive just fine without it. It'd be a pain at first but we'd get used to it. The more people that realize all that, the better. If people start leaving the Internet in droves then either it'd have to change or die.

Re:A good thing.

[mlts]

I remember a few years back, having a FB account was pretty much a job requirement, where I got told to bugger off because I didn't tell the world how many coils I dropped in the commode that morning. It has gotten better, but for a while, I eventually just wound up making a dummy account on there, Twitter, and other places just to make the HR people happy.

It isn't just Facebook. I'm seeing companies put all their eggs in the AWS basket. My fear is that cloud providers overtake having servers in-house, and we are back to the mainframe era. Cloud places have their use, but there is always the security question, and there is always the grave concern about data sitting on a remote site where you have zero physical control over it. If there is a security breach and the data is local, you can physically yank the network cable. If there is a breach at a cloud provider, trying to staunch the bleeding is a lot tougher, especially if one of the cloud accounts got hacked, and the rogue admin has just as much power as you do.

Re:A good thing.

[BarbaraHudson]

The main argument against anonymity is that it would reduce trolling, hate, etc. Too bad that it didn't work out that way. Put someone behind a keyboard and the bad behaviour comes out, real name policies be damned.

Re:A good thing.

[ShaunC]

Cloud places have their use, but there is always the security question, and there is always the grave concern about data sitting on a remote site where you have zero physical control over it.

There's also the outage question. Microsoft's Azure has had two significant outages in the last 10 days. Companies using Google's Apps For Work suffered a 7+ hour outage of Gmail this week during (US) business hours. When your enterprise is built on one of these services, what do you do when it goes down? You wait. That's all you can do, sit there and wait and hope the services come back up soon. Sure, you'll get a credit against your SLA after the fact, but that doesn't offset the fact that your ability to conduct business was down for hours on end and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

At least when you're running services on premise, you have some control over the situation. You can investigate and resolve the problem yourself. Getting your company's service restored is the #1 priority, not priority #1852 among 5,000 other companies all suffering through the cloud outage.

Re:A good thing.

[slashrio]

Stupid HR. If you create a FB account you can present yourself in any favourable way you like.
You can lie as much as you want, as long as you don't state during your interview that everything stated on your FB page *is real.
And they trust that information? Idiots...

Re:A good thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more likely that we'll wake up one day to a world where you have to have a Facebook account, with your real name and all your real, personal information, or you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymore.

Won't happen. Facebook is common, but they don't have everybody. Some are not so "social", some don't care about facebook (its boring), some are tinfoil types who won't register themselves anywhere.

Either way, facebook doesn't have everybody and never will. If you make business on the internet, you want to get everybodys business. You don't want to not sell to 5%-10% of the market because they aren't on facebook. Now, facebook may be a nice place for a business to advertise - reaching lots of people. They'll still have other channels (plain webpage, phone number, or a real shop) to reach the rest.

When internet banking was new, some banks demanded a specific version of internet explorer. I informed them that shutting out the 9% or so who uses other OSes did not make business sense. One bank lost my business on this - another actually got rid of the requirement. the facebook craze will fold the same way. Just ask: "Do you want to cut out 10*% of the market like that?"

Re:A good thing.

[kheldan]

Won't happen. Facebook is common, but they don't have everybody.

Since you don't seem to read and/or comprehend everything posted, I'll reiterate: I'm describing a possible dystopian future where Facebook is required. Sadly, I also think it's not too far-fetched, just like I don't think it's too far-fetched that in another possible dystopian future, everyone on the gods-be-damned Internet will be required to log in somehow using their real name, no more anonymity allowed -- at which points, I go back to using Public Libraries with printed books for everything, and paying my bills with checks instead of electronically -- or with cash, in person.

Too late

[ColdWetDog]

We've already lost that fight in terms of a truly decentralized Internet. The various governments and large corporations already are fighting to stake out various levels of control. The companies that operate the core infrastructure also have an outsized level of control.

I think the idea of a communication system that relied on numerous small autonomous nodes was a great one, but unless we can make some sort of giant mesh network, it will never happen. Even a big mesh is likely to get controlled by governments in one way or another.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the idea of a communication system that relied on numerous small autonomous nodes was a great one, but unless we can make some sort of giant mesh network, it will never happen. Even a big mesh is likely to get controlled by governments in one way or another.

The reason everyone moved away from decentralized things like usenet and email (outside of gmail) was spam everywhere, giant mesh networks will probably have the same problem.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

...have you ever heard of the blockchain? Ethereum project? It's the key to a decentralized Internet. https://www.ethereum.org/

Re:Too late

[mlts]

That can be solved. It would take a PKI, but I can see something like USENET with some trusted CAs, ability for people to chose whom they trust, and signed messages doing a good job at stopping spam. If someone does spam, their cert gets revoked, or if a SLC based system is used, the CA just doesn't bother to sign the certs, and the nodes forwarding traffic just drop anything from that key.

The problem is that decentralized PKI research stopped at PGP, and the world moved to SSL/TLS's model of all or nothing trust. If we had various amounts of trust, a decentralized model would stop spam, but would also keep the same anti-spam mechanisms from being used for censorship.

Re:Too late

[WaffleMonster]

We've already lost that fight in terms of a truly decentralized Internet. The various governments and large corporations already are fighting to stake out various levels of control. The companies that operate the core infrastructure also have an outsized level of control.

It has never been easier for peers to communicate amongst themselves and never easier for people to host whatever content they want from their own fat pipes. What a single broadband customer has today in bandwidth entire corporations and universities wished they had 20 years ago.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

people are blocked, terms of service, and straight up (probably technically criminal in a world with justice and magic ponies) filtering of their self-served server traffic.

Try running httpd from your fat pipes and trying to access it from elsewhere on the internet. If it still works for you, enjoy it while it lasts.

Re:Too late

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem is that ISPs forbade all of their non-lexus-lane('business class') customers from running servers. Thus no college geeks getting their friends and family back home to try their new enhanced smtp and imap server appliance solutions.

But I thank you for your comment. We are in a dark ages of sorts. As long as enough of us remember for enough decades, we, or our descendents, will eventually see the light.

Re:Too late

[mlts]

I've ended up using VPNs to get around that. It isn't cheap, but a Linode box acting as a NAT/proxy box [1], with a VPN to your real machines can get around most of that. You can also use AWS, a router OS like VyOS or PFSense, and a VPC to also allow for your home servers to have a "legitimate" IP to handle incoming traffic.

[1]: Assume the Linode box can be compromised at any moment, so don't terminate your TLS connections there. Terminate them on your machines. It also is wise to have provisioning scripts (or Ansible playbooks) so if your Linode instance gets compromised, you can zero it out and rebuild it quickly.

Re:Too late

[peawormsworth]

The reason everyone moved away from decentralized things ... was spam everywhere, giant mesh networks will probably have the same problem.

If people really had their own servers/services hosted at home and they could easily white list the people they wanted to allow communication with, then there would be zero spam.

Maybe the idea that strangers should be able to contact you from a single common and global email address should disappear... and then the spam problem just solves itself.

Re:Too late

[peawormsworth]

Tor hidden services do not require permission from the ISP. They do not even require permission from your own router. It looks like and acts like regular traffic which will not be blocked. Which means that if the users embraced tor, we could all run our own email and chat servers. Plus it would have the added side effect of an additional level of privacy.

Most computer support the Tor Browser and most phones support Orbot. It could be widely deployed and would be accessible by most client hardware today.

Re:Too late

[peawormsworth]

I doubt what you say. I hear some talk about this, but I have yet to see any good explanation of how this can be widely deployed.

websites are the biggest problem?

[rubycodez]

what about Cisco and other big "security" and traffic control appliance makers

Mirroring the real world

[Anonymous Coward]

There will always be walled gardens. Yes, accessing information today is easier than ever before and will continue to get easier and easier, but there will always be walled gardens, private areas where access is limited in some fashion.

Just like in the real world, there are a few companies who provide most of the products. Just like 200 years ago in the real world, this wasn't the case, but today it is. With technology this just happens faster.

Create a small company and if it's successful it will most likely get bought up by a bigger company. How is this different than any other aspect of life?

Social Media Alternative

[XeroCurve]

Well if anyone is interested I started my own Social Networking site. No frills, no ads, very minimal info needed to start or use, will not prompt you for more info ever, will never sell a users info for any reason, if you delete your profile it gets deleted! www.C0NTACT.net

We are ditching you Internet peeps

[WillAffleckUW]

Sorry, we got annoyed at all your misuse, so we're all migrating to Internet 3 and you can whine about stuff on your lonesome, while we play in our 40 Gbps puddle without you and your spam and other irritations.

Can't say we'll miss you.

It's (not) been fun!

Not really a problem, IMHO.

[Qbertino]

Google and Co. are basically what Compuserve, AOL and T-Online were back then.

All that needs to happen is that a few FOSS developers finally get fed up and finally redo all protocols that have gone bad or broken and replace DNS with some Blockchain based namecoin thingie, replacing email and perhaps even web on top of that with some new, fully network abstracted and end-to-end encrypted data exchange layer sans anoying ads and Facebook is history.

Until then we're simply a two class internet, with ordinaries on Facebook and experts on encrypted Jabber and maybe diaspora.

Facebook, Snapcrap, WhatsCrap and the liked are basically todays mass media channels. But unlike the unwieldy and expensive radiostations of yesteryear they can be replaced by the next teenager with a laptop, some extra time and the next fad up his sleve.

I really don't see much of a problem here. Not yet that is.

Re:Not really a problem, IMHO.

[Anonymous Coward]

I still remember the DNS battles back in the day. There's nothing stopping that from happening again. A sort of dark web on top of the old garbage with just a few tiny changes in your OS/browser settings. I think what you suggested, a blockchain-style DNS replacement, just might be the answer. It's true that a central authority brings order to chaos, but chaos just might be what we need on the Internet for true freedom to survive. Fuck the CAs, fuck the DNS monopoly.

Re:Not really a problem, IMHO.

[Anonymous Coward]

Until then we're simply a two class internet, with ordinaries on Facebook and experts on encrypted Jabber and maybe diaspora.

You misspelled "criminals and cronies". It has more than 7 letters, and none of them are "x", "p", or "t".

Re:Not really a problem, IMHO.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what you suggested, a blockchain-style DNS replacement, just might be the answer.

If you think Bitcoin's terabyte chain file is bad, imagine a billion host long DNS resolution chain that every server node would have to keep a duplicate of. Before DNS, every server kept its own hosts file. The fact that this didn't scale is what led to DNS to begin with. Sure, one should invent a more decentralized DNS, but I don't think Namecoin is it.

Re: Not really a problem, IMHO.

[Anonymous Coward]

Experts on encrypted Jabber? I thought you were doing away with all the shit, yet you exist on bringing this Cisco pile with you? Fuck, better go back and bring MySpace before you finish.

Re:Not really a problem, IMHO.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Until then we're simply a two class internet, with ordinaries on Facebook and experts on encrypted Jabber and maybe diaspora."

Two words: Lexus Lanes. To be able to run your own communication nodes that can be accessed by others, you have to be able to run a server. Most ISP contracts forbid this unless you pay triple or something for a "business class" connection.

Sure, we may get some webrtc or other p2p stuff, it'll come down the pipe just as soon as the NSA is 100% sure they own it inside and out. (seriously, I wonder if I can write a IPv4/6 stack that sits atop webrtc. i.e. I'm guessing my ISP may let webrtc traffic through while blocking upstream port 80)

Re:Not really a problem, IMHO.

[Rexdude]

All that needs to happen is that a few FOSS developers finally get fed up and finally redo all protocols that have gone bad or broken and replace DNS with some Blockchain based namecoin thingie, replacing email and perhaps even web on top of that with some new, fully network abstracted and end-to-end encrypted data exchange layer sans anoying ads and Facebook is history.

2 words:Network effect. Unless enough number of people decide to adopt whatever decentralized solution you describe above (or similar), it will be business as usual. As an example, the Signal app by OpenWhisper Systems provides secure, encrypted voice calls and messaging, but who are you going to call when everyone you know is using Whatsapp or FB Messenger and aren't about to switch away?

This isn't news

[taustin]

The idea behind the internet was to make a massive, decentralized system that wasn't under control of anyone.

That may have been the idea behind it, but centralized control has been in place since the DNS system was put in. Yeah, in theory, you can do stuff by IP address, but in practice, that hasn't actually worked since Apache added virtual servers. No, the web isn't the internet, but it's the only internet most people actually use any more.

Re:This isn't news

[Anonymous Coward]

DNS is not, nor can it be, "centralized control".

ANYONE can put up a competing DNS tree.

Been there, done that, for several years - and it worked just fine. The only requirement is consensus - those that want to use the independent tree just add a reference.

Anyone can do that.

The ONLY centrally controlled feature was IP number allocation - and that goes away with IPv6.

Re:This isn't news

[peawormsworth]

... centralized control has been in place since the DNS system was put in.

A Tor Hidden service bypasses DNS. Set up a service and then tell your Tor service to provide it as a hidden service. You will get back an onion address. Give the onion address to anyone and the request will get through to your server box without DNS ever being contacted.

I think that the Tor network maintains a list of some sort to make sure onion requests get directed back to your server. But they do not have a mechanism for determining the difference between one onion server and another. So there is no way to reject some onion server and allow others.

Oh the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

That, coming from the Cloudflare CEO...

CONSOLIDATE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Consolidate!
Consolidate!
Consolidate!

Into a few hands, like cloudflare?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you guy, but lets include your own company in this. How many sites is cloudflare sitting in front of? What are they doing with the information they collect on the traffic that passes through them?

Hrmmph

Re:Into a few hands, like cloudflare?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing: that's rich coming from Cloudflare - the company that single-handedly decides you can't access vast swathes of the internet if you're connecting from a TOR exit node.

That company does more than all the others put together to make my internet browsing experience completely miserable...

The retards are the issue

[HBI]

I mean the *cough* common users. The Internet worked fine when you required some skill to get on it. As soon as it became easy - and even hooking up to AOL was not painless, in retrospect - that's when the commercialization and ultimately the regulation and surveillance followed.

We've been talking about a 'second net' for many years now, one with no lusers. Perhaps Tor is it?

Re:The retards are the issue

[Penguinisto]

We've been talking about a 'second net' for many years now, one with no lusers. Perhaps Tor is it?

FreeNet and Internet2 (for starters) were both supposed to be 'it'...

(hell, FreeNet still exists. Who'da thunk it? Pity that my corporate firewall denies access outright, no?)

Re: The retards are the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a network with no users and very few services as a result, you are more than welcome to stick to 127.0.0.1. you are also welcome to simulate that "only nerds here no lasers" experience by going back downstairs to mom's basement. The rest of us live in a socially connect world of people.

The biggest threat to this is Google...

[iCEBaLM]

Who uses any other search engine than Google? What happens when Google/Alphabet decide they want to lock shit down, censor search results, or even stop providing search services because it becomes unprofitable? Then what? Hell, the first two are already happening in some countries.

We should have competition in the search space, unfortunately bing is near useless, and there is really nothing else.

Re:The biggest threat to this is Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

ANYONE can provide search results.

The difficulty is QUALITY. Google has spent the time and money to create a huge database, and fast, accurate search capability, that people prefer it over any other.

Someone else can do the same.

Re:The biggest threat to this is Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is greed, exploitation, and social (im)mobility.

Anybody qualified to compete with Google has been bribed to work there or marginalized completely through the US Government's abuse of security clearances and classifications.

Re:The biggest threat to this is Google...

[The-Ixian]

I have been using Bing for over a year now.

I used to cross query with Google, but it turned out that Bing was at least as good, and a lot of times better. Plus, I like the gadgets Bing has... like a Base64 encoder/decoder and other geeky stuff.

I also like the changing wallpaper. It's just pretty.

Re:The biggest threat to this is Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who uses any other search engine than Google?

Me. Different ones on different systems.

Kim Yanhee

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohhh, really? is CloudFlare MITM as a service?

Look who's talking

[Anonymous Coward]

CloudFlare has many criminal customers.

Check out this recent list of DDoS/"Stresser"/"Booter" websites proudly hosted by CloudFlare:

alphastress.com, anonymous-stresser.net, aurastresser.com, beststresser.com, boot4free.com, booter.eu, booter.org, booter.xyz, bullstresser.com, buybooters.com, cnstresser.com, connectionstresser.com, crazyamp.me, critical-boot.com, cstress.net, cyberstresser.org, darkstresser.info, darkstresser.net, databooter.com, ddos-fighter.com, ddos-him.com, ddos.city, ddosbreak.com, ddosclub.com, ddostheworld.com, defcon.pro, destressbooter.com, destressnetworks.com, diamond-stresser.net, diebooter.com, diebooter.net, down-stresser.com, downthem.org, exitus.to, exostress.in, free-boot.xyz, freebooter4.me, freestresser.xyz, grimbooter.com, heavystresser.com, hornystress.me, iddos.net, inboot.me, instabooter.com, ipstresser.co, ipstresser.com, jitterstresser.com, k-stress.pw, layer-4.com, layer7.pw, legionboot.com, logicstresser.net, mercilesstresser.com, mystresser.com, netbreak.ec, netspoof.net, networkstresser.com, neverddos.com, nismitstresser.net, onestress.com, onestresser.net, parabooter.com, phoenixstresser.com, pineapple-stresser.com, powerstresser.com, privateroot.fr, purestress.net, quantumbooter.net, quezstresser.com, ragebooter.net, rawlayer.com, reafstresser.ga, restricted-stresser.info, routerslap.com, sharkstresser.com, signalstresser.com, silence-stresser.com, skidbooter.info, spboot.net, stormstresser.net, str3ssed.me, stressboss.net, stresser.club, stresser.in, stresser.network, stresser.ru, stresserit.com, synstress.net, titaniumbooter.net, titaniumstresser.net, topstressers.com, ts3booter.net, unseenbooter.com, vbooter.org, vdos-s.com, webbooter.com, webstresser.co, wifistruggles.com, xboot.net, xr8edstresser.com, xtreme.cc, youboot.net

If CloudFlare would stop providing bulletproof hosting for criminals and spammers, the internet would be a better place. But CloudFlare apparently loves its criminal customers. DDoS purveyors, terrorist websites, malware distributors, CloudFlare seems to welcome them all to its hive of scum and villainy. Maybe it's time to revive the concept of the Usenet Death Penalty and apply it to all traffic to and from CloudFlare. They're the sewer of the internet and should be null routed and de-peered.

See also: CloudFlare Watch

The Vertical Web

[broward]

http://nodemy-ghost.herokuapp....

Saturated industries often consolidate for vertical integration. Large companies buy smaller competitors, and they also purchase their vertical supply chain to reduce costs and manage dependencies. A classic example is the American car industry, which went from 1500 companies to today's Big Three (and the occasional glitch like Tesla).

If the IT industry is post-inflective, then vertical integration might be happening. This spreadsheet defines the "Vertical Web" as power production, data centers, etc, up to consumer devices and software.

If a mature industry can support three or four major players, ther are some interesting predictions:

Twitter is a natural acquisition target for a couple of the stronger players.

Twitter will not be one of the Big Three (or Four).

Yahoo is a weak player, despite its industry longevity.

Facebook or Amazon will probably emerge as the fourth player, and the loser will be absorbed or parted out. One of the top three may stumble but it seems unlikely at this point. Facebook is the newest and least experienced company.

The Big Three (or Four) will eventually do significant layoffs. If you're a current employee and relatively young, you should think about when this might occur.

Re:The Vertical Web

[justthinkit]

I spent about 5 minutes trying to figure out who you thought the Big Three (or Four) were.

From Wikipedia's List of the largest information technology companies:
(1) Apple
(2) Samsung
(3) Foxconn
(4) Amazon

I think only one of your Big Three (or Four) is on that list...

The rest of the list:
(5) HP
(6) Microsoft
(7) IBM
(8) Google
(9) Dell
(10) Sony
(11) Panasonic
(12) Huawei
(13) Intel

Facebook's revenue is one-third of #13's

The List of largest Internet companies is even more unrecognizable. Twitter was #19 on the second list, Yahoo #13...

It is not the software...

[Anonymous Coward]

but the physical network that needs to be replaced. What is needed today is for projects like seattle wireless and others that previously offered free wifi to the internet to instead roll out mixed media point to point links to begin providing a meshed and decentralized network akin to what the internet was intended to be back in the late 80s early 90s, before commercial interests began recentralizing it under the banner of corporate governance.

Having said that, in order to get rid of the centralized custodianship of IPv4/6 addresses, we need to come up with a protocol (perhaps blockchain based, but as bitcoin has shown a sufficiently large colluding group can wrest control of the network and thus signing authority) to verifiably prove the identity of a network or host and push those changes into the routing table or more likely routing db (with only the most recently used host/subnet paths making it into the in-memory routing table.

Perhaps like tor/i2p the host key can generate a certain length hash to use as the network id in order to help ensure they are unique and of sufficient quantity for everyone to get one, even if hostile actors attempt to hog most or all possible address ranges.

If you think this sounds like a good idea, write up a draft proposal of it. I have the outlines, but someone more technically adept needs to detail the technical details and pitfalls. (And yes I am aware of the massive memory usage compared even to modern ipv4 tables. It cannot be helped if it is going to be truly distributed, rather than 'managed by what will become a fascist organization'

Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just coming up now? This has been brewing for years. Has he never heard of net neutrality? What does he think that's about? Why are Facebook and Google et al never included in conversations about the corporate seizing of the web? People sure are dumb in the 21st century, this needed to be publicly discussed long, long ago.

I don't see how the dots connect?

[ukoda]

How does popularity of a few sites mean the control of the Internet is changing?

Surely it is about who controls the DNSs and top level routers that affects control of the Internet. That is a real issue to worry about but as I understand things those are not controlled by the big websites.

The reverse way of looking at it is if people waste their time in walled gardens so what? As long as the rest of the Internet still works who cares. How is people limiting themselves to a few websites stopping me from accessing all those little niche sites I enjoy?

I don't see the connection between users with tunnel vision wasting time on popular site and the availability of the rest of the Internet?

Re:I don't see how the dots connect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the little niche sites I enjoyed went full retard and now require facebook or google login to work. Now I can't use them :(

Re:I don't see how the dots connect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more, Facebook breaks the concept of a hyperlink by putting everything behind a walled garden.

Standards

[nine-times]

I think the root of the problem here is that, in the past several years, there has been no focus on developing common open standards.

I think the easiest example to give is the difference between messaging apps and email. If I use Gmail and I want to send an email to someone whose email is on Office 365, AOL, Yahoo, a private email server, or any email server at all, there's not really any difficulty. I can connect to my server either by using Google's website or by using a standard protocol (SMTP), the email gets transferred to the recipient's mail server through a standard protocol (again SMTP), and then the recipient can probably download it using a standard protocol (e.g. IMAP). SMTP and IMAP aren't without their shortcomings, and the openness of this system has had problems because of its openness (e.g. spam), but overall it works wonderfully. However, things would not work this way if they were designed today.

In contrast, several companies (including Facebook, Apple, Google, and Microsoft) have developed messaging applications, which are to some degree aimed at replacing SMS, IM, and/or email. These applications each use proprietary protocols for sending and receiving messages, and there is no compatibility between them. While I can use Thunderbird to send and receive my email on my Gmail account, there isn't a 3rd-party open source Hangouts app, because (at least as far as I know) the protocols for it are not open. From my Gmail account, I can send email to users with "facebook.com" email addresses, but I can't use hangouts to message with Facebook Messenger users. I need a Facebook account in order to do that.

This is just an easy and obvious example. I chose to compare email to messaging because I think it makes for an easy comparison, and it's clearly a bit stupid. There isn't really anything so complex about text messaging that Facebook, Apple, Google, WhatsUp, and all other messaging apps couldn't simply message each other. However, I don't think this a fluke, but instead the easiest-to-understand example of how the internet is moving more and more toward walled gardens. Nobody is developing open standards, or at least, nobody is really agreeing to use them.

To give another example, many sites let you log in with your Facebook account or your Google account-- I think some let you use a Twitter or LinkedIn account. This is great, since it diminishes the number of login credentials that you need to know, memorize, or secure. However, each of these companies are basically offering their own separate incompatible authentication service. The site developer has to decide to actively support Google Authentication, and if they do, it doesn't allow me to authenticate on their site against my Facebook credentials (for example). They must support each method of authentication individually, rather than having one framework that allows authentication against whichever identity provider the user wishes to use.

And although some people will think I'm a crackpot, I think this is a very widespread problem that includes Silicon Valley's obsession with "apps". Instead of developing a photo-hosting service, you have to have a photography app that's tied to a service. They make it so you can't use the app with a different service, and you can't use the service with a different app. Then a couple of companies (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple) buy all these different apps, and make it so the apps and the services only interact well with their other apps and services. It's not hard to see how this quickly turns into a set of walled gardens.

In my view this all goes back to the issue of standards. If these apps and services used standard protocols and standard APIs, then they could all interact with each other.

Re:Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Good post, and I agree with everything you said.

I can send email to users with "facebook.com" email addresses

... for the moment. Email is on its way out. Companies hate it because it is not proprietary and owned/controlled by them. Users hate it because it isn't trendy with a big ad campaign behind it. I give it maybe 10 more years. Already today I know almost no one who uses it between friends or family. All that kind of communication has moved to the walled gardens.

Re:Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Email is on its way out. Companies hate it because it is not proprietary and owned/controlled by them. ... Already today I know almost no one who uses it between friends or family. All that kind of communication has moved to the walled gardens.

I'll give up on it one day after "the fax" stops being a thing. I hear electronic faxing is looking good for those whose problem was recording the paperwork.

Re:Standards

[eionmac]

Braw analysis.

No it wasn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea behind the internet was to make a massive, decentralized system that wasn't under control of anyone...

Nonsense. The idea of the internet was to have a bunch of computers connected together. The idea of who was controlling it wasn't really considered, but since it was started by DARPA, the idea most certainly would have been to have it controlled by the US government.

Years in the making

[Anonymous Coward]

not sure how it will be stopped in the last hours.

what i think is really going on

[FudRucker]

the governments around the world (including the US Govt) they dont like the peasants & peons having so much access to free speech and unauthorized news and media that the powers that be control, so the big TV Networks, MPAA & RIAA and other old school mass media dont like the internet because it gives the peasants too much freedom, they can not corral the peasants in to their monopolized narrative of news and information and revenue generating movies & music, the freedom of the internet has become a thorn in their side

Re:what i think is really going on

[FudRucker]

the governments around the world (including the US Govt) they dont like the peasants & peons having so much access to free speech and unauthorized news and media that the powers that be Can Not control,

i had to fix that

Re:what i think is really going on

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the powers that be also saw the internet to be used as a tool for control and mass surveillance, which sucks. However successful they may be in using the internet as that type of tool (which is fairly successful, since it's mind-numbingly easy to do so when most services fail to use any form of encryption), the flipside is that the corrupt establishments didn't send their cronies the memo that that's what the system is overwhelmingly being used for.

So you get things like mass dumps of private comms from the establishment themselves, uncovering all their secrets and airing their dirty laundry, which is kinda cool. The final piece to the puzzle is somehow getting the "old school mass media" to wake up and actually cover the stories and evil being brought to light by those mass comms drops and you solve two problems at once: everyone learns the real value of the internet and how to use that power for good, not for evil.

I don't use facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Therefore, they have no control over me.

Re:I don't use facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use it either, but I'm not so naive. You can have your little FB-free experience... as long as you never want to log into anything, never want to talk to your friends or family, never want to shop or bank online, never want to use government services like renewing your number plates, never want to click on a link because they all point behind the walled garden, etc etc. Have fun with that. At some point, might as well unplug your network cable.

(Yes, we're not quite there yet, but we've set off down the road and are well on the way there. And it may or may not be FB: the point is that it's a stand-in for whatever centralized power we put into that position).

You miss the point..

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it's still technically possible to have all the free-as-in-freedom, open, 1337 h4x0r services running in parallel with the social media spyware crap. The problem is that more and more of what most people actually want (like news, social media, entertainment) is falling under the control of big players ergo 'Authority'. At some point it will be possible for whatever pseudo-democracy you are living in to make all the other stuff illegal, without pissing off 99.9% of the population (which is what has kept the internet fairly open up to now).

Where is our p2p net?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thought this would happen in 2010.

Re:we're happy...

[slashrio]

... not if there isn't any 'rest of the Internet' anymore.

Correct, but..

[s.petry]

We have customers demanding that we host their data in the cloud. Making matters worse, our executives all see it as a great way to cut costs. In other words, people worried about security are ignore when people above them can get fat bonus checks for cost cutting. Given the lack of punishment those people receive from all levels, that won't be changing any time soon.

Re:Correct, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Build. Your. Own. Clouds aren't just for the big boys.

Get someone on your team that can speak business. An IT guy that can talk to execs prevent this sort of scenario from playing out. A business minded techie can convince the power players in the organization that not outsourcing saves money by not having to pay for someone else's profit. They can also take a part of the pie from the big players by overbuilding and making the cloud center profitable, selling short-term contracts to fill time while waiting to "feed the elephant".

Get over the PHB hate. Become the PHB or hire one on your side and you will have the influence to make your goals happen.

Re:Correct, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets be real here. Every job interview I've had for a Linux position asked about my AWS experience. As of now, being able to create an AMI, use vRouters, make VPCs, stash data in a S3 bucket and move it to Glacier, all while using Route 53 for DNS is more important than anything else. Just like the SAN did away with individual drive arrays, has Amazon's AWS has done away with VMWare and hardware knowledge.

Wait, what?

[s.petry]

A social media outlet who has been repeatedly proven to censor information harmful to certain Marxist/Progressive/Socialist agendas, and been advocate for propaganda to politicians is being criticized and you claim the person making the criticism is a Russian Troll? How about you talk about issues which are derived in fact and stop protecting the various forms of media which would make the Pravda jealous? Are you paid to shill using the rules for radicals? Mkay then

Re:you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymor

[slashrio]

(Why does everybody write 'Internet' with a capital 'I'?)

Anyway, why not 'invent' your own internet?
You could start with a bulletin box connected to a telephone modem...
Then establish an organisation with members that are allowed to access that box, etc. etc. and before you know it, you have your own internet.
Just wondering whether you'd start tracking your clients or not.

Remember

[s.petry]

More often than not posts are considered "trolls" because they differ from, or harm the opposition. I occasionally get posts rated "troll" where the only argument against my position is ad hominem. My position tends to harm the progressive agenda, go figure.

As to not restrict my point to my own personal anecdotes, see how Trump has been treated since day one in media. I don't agree with all of Trumps policies and can happily debate where I think there are problems. The media flat out lies and claims he does not have any. I guess they can't find the keys to that interweb thing. Perhaps the people in charge of finding and reading papers are all now working at the same outsourcing firm as the Disney people?

Hillary on the other hand has scandal after scandal and MSM refuses to acknowledge them, let alone actually perform their journalistic duty and investigate any of them. I heard Prager and Shapiro talk about the people paying to play, including some of the people in the game. MSM however is way too busy telling everyone how courageous she is for taking a few days off the campaign trail for pneumonia. Oh, and did any of those same people praising her offer an apology to the people they demonized as "conspiracy theorists" for saying something was wrong with her? Has Hillary apologized to the people she may have infected from the magical time of diagnosis (Friday which no media person could confirm) until they had to wheel her away to that great medical establishment called "Chelsea's Apartment"? I know she lacks the Bernie and Trump support, but I'd bet there were at least a few dozen people exposed in the three days of campaigning.

I am pretty sure my cynic is showing.. sorry about that.

Re:Remember

[BarbaraHudson]

We can see that with the claim that Trump is encouraging people to kill Hillary again. All he said was, she is against guns, let her go for a while without armed bodyguards. Hillary should have been indicted, and Sanders running instead, but the investigation into her was purposefully hobbled right from the beginning. Anyone else, the evidence would have been put to a grand jury. While not the best source, this list is pretty damning, as was her refusal to turn over the actual server, and instead sort through the emails herself to see what would be turned over, which she had no right to do.

Re:Remember

[kheldan]

More often than not posts are considered "trolls" because they differ from, or harm the opposition.

Friend, you're FAR from being alone in that. Happens to me all the time. Finally, I gave up any semblance of civility and just cut loose, because it's not like the real trolls are holding anything back. Any attempts to defend myself in 'dignified' ways just gets twisted into something else anyway. Largely, the Internet has become just a sewer for the lowest common denominators of humanity. The vast majority of civil, intelligent, insightful conversations I have, are still face-to-face.

Re: you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymo

[Anonymous Coward]

It could work for a while. Then you would get a visit

Re:we're happy...

[BarbaraHudson]

Still be worth it, even if the rest of us had to go to some type of bbs/usenet-style store-and-forward mesh network.

Re:you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymor

[s.petry]

Why do you not understand what a proper noun is. Government and government are both possibly correct answers depending on context. Sure, "Internet" is not "John John Doe", but Federal Bureau of Investigation is a proper noun too.

Re:you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymor

[slashrio]

Is that a special property of American English? In that case I wasn't aware of that. If it weren't, I still was not aware. :)

Re:you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymor

[kheldan]

Just wondering whether you'd start tracking your clients or not.

Screw you, jackass.

Re:you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymor

[s.petry]

It's a property of "English" in general, though perhaps you may (correctly?) notice it more often in American English. In the UK Parliament is a proper noun, yet parliament is the correct definition for what Parliament does.