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The Web began dying in 2014. André Staltz writes about how and why. In a nutshell, traffic from mobile and tablet devices now surpasses that from regular desktop computers and of that traffic the overwhelming majority goes to either Faecebook or Google. Amazon is also in there. None of them have any interest in defending the open Web any more. Rather the situation is the opposite, they are aiming to carve out a section and establish very isolated walled gardens. Net Neutrality, or the lack thereof, lie at the heart of their plans based on the direction they have moved since 2014.
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What the Web Was and What It Has Become
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @11:28PM (8 children)
According to www.eternal-september.org it started dying in September of 1993.
According to many of us, it started dying during the first dotcom bubble/crash between 99 and 01. Others might peg its death during the mid 2000s when all the current shit social media sites started their meteoric rise and IPOs.
Each generation is to a degree correct, and each generation is to a degree wrong. The real conclusion however is: The internet is continuing to evolve, and much of it is not for the better.
The free market solution is to create better internets that cater to the different kinds of niches. Much of this can overlap with the traditional internet, but be done as a series of separate network protocols relaying their traffic encapsulated in IP. That means centralized hubs however, much like what happened with the physical infrastructure of the internet.
The only real future that will retain some of the 'old' internet, would be mesh networking with decentralized routing based on subnetwork key hashes with each subnetwork providing a public key that can be used to verify changes to it. A solution which was unavailable in the early days of the Internet Protocol due to the complexity of the equipment, but is completely possible to do in solutions architected today without the need to support limited performance legacy networking gear.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Friday November 03 2017, @11:43PM (7 children)
You got your email, IRC, Usenet, Tor, Freenet, etc. You can communicate with others using PGP. If you don't want to use GOOG/FBOOK as a gateway for news content, you can use RSS. It all works to a degree. If you have email spam list problems, you can write off certain services as walled gardens/prisons. If sites block Tor or make it a bitch to use, you stay on onion sites.
Decentralization and mesh networking is a good thing but not because they solve some huge problem with the corporatization of the Web. What they do is make traffic more resistant to surveillance or getting choked off by "kill switches".
Because of declining hardware and bandwidth costs, it's cheaper than ever to eschew the corporate Web, especially if you are interested in text and not video. The biggest practical problem is the inability to operate your own servers on many consumer ISPs, but if you want to pay for a little freedom, you can.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:51AM
You have to pay more than a little. Even if I were a billionaire I'm not sure how I would go about getting decent service here. There are two nominal ISPs and I have no sign either actually retains the expertise in house to provide the service. Regardless, they have no interest whatsoever in doing so, either of them. That would interfere with wringing every last penny possible out of the private information of their customers, which they are busily doing, while thinking deeply on how much their current customer base sucks and how much better life would be with a good customer base, one that is happy to pay, never tries to use the internet, only watches ads, volunteers personal info, and then goes to bed so to be sure and be fresh for work tomorrow. Because being late to work could lead to being late for the cable bill. Can't have that. YOU HAD ONE JOB SUBSCRIBER!!!
And there is no security in the absence of physical control of the site. That's the foundation, if it isn't there the best security just crumbles into the surf the first time it's tested.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:47AM (5 children)
Change for the sake of breaking things sickens systems. They may recover, or they may die. However, this article is hysteria. The web is NOT dying.
The one irksome change that occurred sometime this summer was port 80 being blocked somehow. I have no explanation for why my web site is no longer visible, and suspect the ISP made a quiet change of policy. Flipped the kill switch, so to speak, on port 80. There's been this big drive to switch from http to https. Guess I'll have to operate on port 443 from now on. But I'm not convinced https should be used everywhere, and I ought to have the option to stick to http if I want. Whatever the merits of https, forcing everyone to use it it does push tiny websites running on marginal servers further to the edge.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:15AM (4 children)
https: any chance it's being pushed by people selling certs?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:27AM (3 children)
It's not the CAs. Let's Encrypt makes domain-validated certificates available without charge through an automated service.
HTTPS is pushed in part by people selling domains. If you don't have a fully-qualified domain name for the router, printer, or NAS on your home LAN, you can't run HTTPS over your internal network with a certificate that house guests' devices will recognize.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:15PM (2 children)
Thanks for that info.
Could you use a generated self-signed cert. for your LAN https?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Sunday November 05 2017, @01:44AM (1 child)
Yes, provided two things:
1. All devices capable of accessing resources on your network are capable of bypassing unknown issuer warnings or installing a private CA's root certificate.
2. All your users are willing to take such measures.
Say you store videos on a NAS on your home LAN, and you've invited friends or relatives to enter your home and view videos. If they are non-technical users, an unknown issuer warning might scare them off.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday November 05 2017, @02:06AM
Thanks again.
Or, they may do what most people I know of do: "Sure, I'll accept that certificate! Certificates are a good thing- I have many I'm proud of!"