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HBO's 'Silicon Valley' Joins The Push For A Decentralized Web (ieee.org)
Tekla Perry writes:
HBO's fictional Silicon Valley character Richard Hendricks sets out to reinvent the Internet into something decentralized. ["What if we used all those phones to build a massive network...we could build a completely decentralized version of our current Internet with no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word."] That sound a lot like what Brewster Kahle, Tim Berners-Lee, and Vint Cerf have been calling the decentralized web. Kahle tells IEEE Spectrum about how closely HBO's vision matches his own, and why he's happy to have this light shined on the movement.
In 2015 Kahle pointed out the current web isn't private. "People, corporations, countries can spy on what you are reading. And they do." But in a decentralized web, "the bits will be distributed -- across the net -- so no one can track the readers of a site from a single point or connection."
He tells IEEE Spectrum that though the idea is hard to execute, a lot of people are already working on it. "I recently talked to a couple of engineers working for Mozilla, and brought up the idea of decentralizing the web. They said, 'Oh, we have a group working on that, are you thinking about that as well?'"
In 2015 Kahle pointed out the current web isn't private. "People, corporations, countries can spy on what you are reading. And they do." But in a decentralized web, "the bits will be distributed -- across the net -- so no one can track the readers of a site from a single point or connection."
He tells IEEE Spectrum that though the idea is hard to execute, a lot of people are already working on it. "I recently talked to a couple of engineers working for Mozilla, and brought up the idea of decentralizing the web. They said, 'Oh, we have a group working on that, are you thinking about that as well?'"
...and ended up where we are here.
You, the person reading this right now, is on Slashdot. According to Alexa, it's one of the top 5,500 most visited websites on the internet, so even despite its downturn of late, there's still millions of people who visit this website every month.
Why are you all not on Usenet? You're all technical enough to download and configure Pan or Agent, and if your ISP doesn't provide Usenet access, a 5GB block on Blocknews costs $2.75 and will provide years of text-based discussion. There are plenty of technical categories, and plenty of them have actual users on them.
But you're on Slashdot.
You are here because millions of other people are here, and because not every NNTP server replicates every message, everywhere, ever. You are here because the value of information is determined by the person posting that information, and for some people, posting "you are all cows", "only luddites use nntp without apps", or "Fr33 V1@gra" is deemed valuable, while the vast majority of readers disagree. Spam filtering can only happen with someone deciding 'this is spam' and 'this is not spam', and boom, there is the beginning centralization.
Why are you not on Retroshare?
It has forum-like functions, email-like functions, IRC-like functions, and even Limewire-like functions and is 100% decentralized and relies on PGP keys for connectivity, so everything is encrypted.
You're not on it because getting messages to proliferate is a problem, especially if you only have a few friends who aren't themselves connected. You're not on it because firewall configuration is a pain, even if you know how to port forward. You're not on it because 2/3 of the discussion is key exchanges, and the way many people get started is in the new users room which is, essentially, centralized. Or, maybe you are there...and hopefully you're not one of the people who post things in the forums which are actually-racist or providing bomb-making tutorials or degradingly sexually explicit.
Even at that, what's to stop a TLA agency or RIAA lawyer from just being another user who's a part of the system? Decentralization combined with equal access invalidates the viability of the goal to minimize access by undesirable parties, as it's only a matter of time before "Joe Blough the dude who likes to discuss fishing and parasailing...who also happens to be in MI6" joins. Blocking government issues IP addresses is easy enough, but you're back to needing a central authority to provide that.
Without the commons, a project never gets any traction. With the commons, we end up with Facebook, but without the filtering tools that keep it generally free of dick pics (or a means to at least hide them).
No matter how you slice it, the network effect is inherently necessary to make an internet service work, and attaining critical mass of a decentralized (and presumably free/Free) communications platform is something that has yet to be done successfully. After all, you're not on Usenet or Retroshare. You're still on Slashdot.
That won't stop you being arrested, your computers and devices seized forever and your reputation dragged through the mud. Your life will be made a living hell, your family will have to distance from your in order to have at least a faint hope at carrying on with their lives, and even if you're acquitted you will never, ever recover. Once a suspect pedo, always a pedo.