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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, @07:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @07:52PM (#413610)

    I2P, Tor, CJDNS, Hyperboria.

    You know what they all have in common? None of them have enough (known secure) nodes or security auditing to protect from the passive surveillance on the clearnet. And in order to truly have a decentralized web, as discussed, we would need grassroots mesh networks with a rotating set of 'trusted' routers in-between them on trusted hardware/software without government mandated 'legal tap points' in order to assure ourselves that the network was secure.

    The public wifi initiative failed for the same reason Tor is failing: Not enough principled people willing to risk runins with the authorities in order to make a stand for freedom of speech, association, and anonymity so that each of us can browse/chat/speak on questionable topics without the government (any government) having the capability to stick their nose into it.

    People can say 'OMG terrorism', but the surveillance state has failed in its goal of 'stopping terror' and we are much better off trusting each other and taking a small risk of being attacked, rather than taking a big risk and letting the governments inevitably take all power away from the people returning us at best to a pseudo feudalistic state, and at worse putting us into the kind of shackles the predecessors to the African slave trade recieved back in Roman or pre-Roman times. (Or are still a part of in certain central african/middle eastern countries today, not including the fully sociopathic wealthy in all countries of the world.)