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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...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday October 12 2016, @08:02PM
This article is basically preaching to the choir being posted here. Of course most Soylentils want back the wild west internet of the 90s. But that ship has sailed, because to quote the summary, "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." Now how exactly are we supposed to fix that?
This is a hard problem, but groups like Google are actually working to solve it. We are on about generation 4 of open authentication protocols, with the newest cool thing being OAuth2 over JWT Bearer tokens. They work great. They are also too complicated for an amateur to discover and configure correctly, so our only hope is making amateur-friendly frameworks that have it baked in. Unfortunately the specific protocols change too rapidly for one framework to rise up and become as ubiquitous as PHP. So yeah, we can have decentralized user data powered by decentralized authentication, but only the big guys with big resources will be able to supply them securely and effectively. This leaves the little guys with the same options as now: build your own cheap (and probably insecure) centralized data store, or farm that out to the big guys (basically Google since nobody else wants to share their walled garden).
Remember that even in the old days, much of the user-generated web was on GeoCities. You go back farther than that and it was mostly on university infrastructure. We've never really been in a position to make this work without big guys to magnanimously provide the basics.
Individual users generally do not have the skills to maintain their own health records securely while making them easily available to the people we want to see them. Even if they did, they mostly would just rather somebody else do it for them. That is the health industry, where records are under legal obligation to be portable, private, and secure. In the rest of the world it's a wild west because the user still doesn't care. You're not going to build a network of responsible data sharers out of busy people who don't care.
Conversely, the bigger the silo, the more resources are available to lock it down. In a decentralized network each node is less secure, and therefore you are less likely to be able to trust the security of the nodes you interact with. The only ways that the decentralized network is practically more secure is that A) it will be more difficult for attackers to guess where your data is stored, and B) the payoff for compromising an individual node will be much less. Criminal hackers typically fall into two categories: target-seekers and opportunists. The target-seekers will not be deterred by the "security-by-obscurity" offered by advantage A and their individual payoff is always small. The opportunists don't care about where your data is stored, and they would love the lower stakes per node because that makes for much lower visibility and therefore lower chances that their already-decentralized-botnet will be noticed poking at all the things it can find.
I'm not saying that the security advantages don't exist. But there's a reason people put their money in central banks instead of holding onto it themselves.
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What made the internet free before was not the infrastructure. The infrastructure is the same then as now. It was the low stakes. It was the fact that very few people knew how powerful the Internet could be, so those few of us could use it sporadically as we felt like it. It was the fact that the participants had little ambition. Well, the internet has met the same fate as the old American west. The cattle ranchers that moved in got established and built resources, and then they started building fences and killing outlaws to make their empires more stable.
If you want the old internet back, drop the stakes. Slow things down. Our basic needs haven't changed; internet access does not feed and shelter us. Let it be a little game that we all play on the side. But that's not going to happen, because many of us do make our living off of the Internet. Big business pays us big money to make big money with it. When it comes down to it, every system we build is doomed to mimic the economics of our day-to-day lives. So go ahead and make the next toy network where we can pretend to be liberated. It will go the way of Bitcoin. I give any such network 2 years tops before the profit-mongers move in and twist it to serve their ambition.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?