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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 12 2016, @01:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-run-your-OWN-facebook-at-home dept.

The original purpose of the web and internet, if you recall, was to build a common neutral network which everyone can participate in equally for the betterment of humanity. Fortunately, there is an emerging movement to bring the web back to this vision and it even involves some of the key figures from the birth of the web. It's called the Decentralised Web or Web 3.0, and it describes an emerging trend to build services on the internet which do not depend on any single "central" organisation to function.

So what happened to the initial dream of the web? Much of the altruism faded during the first dot-com bubble, as people realised that an easy way to create value on top of this neutral fabric was to build centralised services which gather, trap and monetise information.

[...] There are three fundamental areas that the Decentralised Web necessarily champions: privacy, data portability and security.

Privacy: Decentralisation forces an increased focus on data privacy. Data is distributed across the network and end-to-end encryption technologies are critical for ensuring that only authorized users can read and write. Access to the data itself is entirely controlled algorithmically by the network as opposed to more centralized networks where typically the owner of that network has full access to data, facilitating customer profiling and ad targeting.
Data Portability: In a decentralized environment, users own their data and choose with whom they share this data. Moreover they retain control of it when they leave a given service provider (assuming the service even has the concept of service providers). This is important. If I want to move from General Motors to BMW today, why should I not be able to take my driving records with me? The same applies to chat platform history or health records.
Security: Finally, we live in a world of increased security threats. In a centralized environment, the bigger the silo, the bigger the honeypot is to attract bad actors. Decentralized environments are safer by their general nature against being hacked, infiltrated, acquired, bankrupted or otherwise compromised as they have been built to exist under public scrutiny from the outset.

In the Web 3.0 I want a markup tag that delivers a nasty shock to cyber-spies...


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:06PM (#413501)

    The original purpose of the internet was dreamed up by the good folks in ARPA, which was to provide a resilient communications system for the military; especially nuclear sites in the event of nuclear war.

    Any attempt to build a decentralised system on IPv[46] is pretty well doomed, because IPv[46] is already centralised. You have central numbering, central naming and some other centralised services as well in things like encryption. Sure, there's some delegation, but it's all contingent on the moods of the people up top.

    Come back when they have a new transport and naming infrastructure. Until then it's all masturbation.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:22PM (#413511)

    Until then it's all masturbation.

    ...something something out of my cold, dead hands...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:59PM (#413530)

    Only a wireless system can work in this case, and you can quickly run into trouble with interference if you want people to run their own mesh network. Taps can always be made into the flow of data, so you're argument is kind of useless. The only real answer here is encryption and tech like TOR that makes every connection near impossible to pin down.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:52PM (#413584)

      Enh, not really.

      You could have people putting together ad hoc wired connections as well. Down to two soup cans and some string across your back yard fence, if you like.

      Yes, encryption needs to be involved, as does a distributed PKI and topology-insensitive routing and so on ... it's a big topic.

      But you don't strictly need wireless.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @05:27PM (#413549)

    Addressing is centralized because otherwise it would be an unmanageable clusterfuck if it wasn't. Who really cares about centralized naming? If you want some alternate, decentralized naming, you can do your own alternate, decentralized DNS.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:48PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @06:48PM (#413581)

      Centralised naming means a court can order the naming authority to do stuff.

      DNS is not tough enough.

      Alternative DNS is not tough enough, at most you're just shifting the jurisdiction of vulnerability. Because it has a centralised source, one can also mandate disconnections from that source at a national level.

      Decentralised naming is possible (it's basically just a decentralised database) - you just need to revamp the infrastructure for it. There are a couple of approaches, of which blockchains are just one.