And it shouldn’t have been, SSL PKI is an intentionally rigged architecture. It’s intended for nation-states to be able to abuse it.
I’d like much more some kind of overlay encryption over HTTP based on web of trust and what not. Like those distributed imageboards people were trying to make with steganography in emotion.
It’s a trap. Everybody is already in it and it has already been activated, so - the discussion would be of historical interest only.
If they split Google, MS, Apple, Meta and Amazon all simultaneously, with some condition for the splinters to not merge back, and that contaminating the results of their allowed mergers, there may be good outcomes.
Or there may not. It’s about people, not laws, after all.
Hierarchies are bad for honest people. Honest people take work and meritocracy seriously and try to follow them.
But hierarchies are never about meritocracy. Hierarchies are always built by people who have connived their way up. Those who have worked honestly don’t build hierarchies, at worst they are pressed to do that by outside pressure.
In any case, the market economy I’m in favor of doesn’t include big businesses. As in “at all”. Big cooperatives at the maximum.
For the obvious reason that the bigger a business is, the less it’s about market and the more it’s about power and hierarchy. Big businesses are the way human nature with jungle law and such fights markets and rules. By making the space untouched by market mechanisms and rules into something continuous inside one subject - the company.
It’s the same as siloed services in the Internet. A thousand and one web forums are free, despite open despotism of webmasters in each and every one of those. A three or two big social platforms are not, despite their owners trying their best for their policies to appear impartial and professional and depersonalized.
And I guess that’s where I can agree that the “market economy status quo” has been broken by such evolution showing itself both IRL and in the Web. You can’t make something like 1999 Web and expect it to not turn into 2024 Web. And you also can’t make a functional market economy old-style and expect it to not degrade into what we have.
I like solutions touching upon the root of the problem, so - in my opinion personal responsibility (one can even say sovereignty, pun intended) is key. You don’t lose responsibility for your decision just because you’ve paid someone else or have been paid by someone else. You are both responsible, since it’s a common endeavor. The responsibility is not divided, it’s copied. Also personal responsibility excludes companies as subjects of the law. Only a person can have responsibility, property, make decisions.
That and fully protected free speech and right to self-defense and transparency of the state. I’m not talking about forcing others to give you platform, I’m talking about shadow bans, about state secrets not being something you’d care about if you hadn’t signed anything, about state official’s decisions being only contestable in court, something like that. Anything forcing you to keep your head down.
OK, done dreaming.
Some people would want others’ lives to be embedded into one hierarchy, and that only.
So that everything of importance were decided by people on top of those hierarchies.
Ex-USSR countries show full well why this shouldn’t be allowed. It, of course, was done there accompanied by a different ideology, but.
It seems that modern society has made “standard” things more standard than they originally were.
At least people having special arrangements and working, say, one job 2 days a week and another 3 days a week, and the third sometimes on-demand, seemingly was more normal 100 years ago.
Of course not the majority, the majority would work their asses off by the clock even more than now.
But there are upsides to a non-synchronous, irregular life schedule. Say, more even load for utilities and transport. Weekends not being special days when half the things don’t work.
And, of course, the ability to pick something you like most. Say, if the pay for 3 days a week somewhere is good enough to keep you floating, even if barely, then why the hell not, it’s worth it.
Was he sired on a weekend?
No good clients.
And no clear intended usage scenario. That’s also why IPFS is not very popular.
Last 16 years of my life have taught me (though I had read that stated before, just without such experimental confirmation) that even such obvious mechanisms humans don’t understand.
I mean, if you show the world as consisting of negotiating groups exchanging value in different dimensions, it’s pretty clear.
I have an objection.
You can build processes so that enthusiasts would be able to combine their effort into a project that everyone can use.
Just the model Linux and Chrome and other big projects have is not that. They are complex and centralized.
It is more efficient, yes.
At best? We are looking back at the dark times where anyone doing ANYTHING “web” related needed to have like twelve different browsers installed and fix specific bugs for internet explorer and netscape and so forth. More likely? We are seeing massive stagnation and you can bet that every single blackhat (and most of the greyhats) are gonna be out for blood.
Maybe that’s for the best. Some frugality with using standards. Web is a planetary library more than it is a platform for applications.
I think black irritates me less.
That said, I’d really like to have a fat-fat beige (maybe darker beige) laptop with a sensible keyboard (not one that can be heard from across the street, but one that still feels like one), which you can disassemble without even unscrewing anything (maybe a couple of bolts you don’t need a screwdriver for), with enough space inside to put anything, and with a bloody antenna port and a transceiver.
It also should survive falling from my table a few times a month. And have water protection good enough for it to be normally usable at countryside during rain. Being outside.
Should have an AMOLED display or something like that.
A trackball.
And, of course, it should cost not more than MacBook Air.
The beige color here would help one really feel that this machine fucks.
I’m joking really (not in the part where I say I want that).
Yes.
I’d also want a standard, so that it wouldn’t be monopolized into one bigger platform, like with GMail.
And probably servers should have some kind of zero-knowledge protection, so that such a client-side filter would be the only one applied to the information. Maybe with ability to subscribe to filters published by someone else, of course, or kill lists, but always preserving transparency and choice.
EDIT:
I think NOSTR is kinda similar, only it has public keys as identities, just so. In general its cryptographic mechanisms are used as intended, but in a very ancient way. It’s too simplistic.
New Freenet (Locutus), I think, is going to be a platform where one can make such an application and a thousand others.
An engine component separable from the UI (which was XUL and thus Firefox initial advantage that gave it popularity), deeply extensible via plugins, tunable (it would be so frigging cool to be able to turn off sections of EDIT: … what’s currently called web standards, say, drop HTML5 or JS).
What it was needed for when it was popular.
Not a Chrome alternative with a different engine.
Somehow every time I mention XUL and XULRunner people mention that one can use PaleMoon or that XUL is incompatible with some security and stability changes and so on.
I know that. I don’t mean literally XUL, I mean low-level access to the engine. Allowing it to be used for things like old Conkeror and such, or just customizing Firefox as deeply as it was possible in olden days.
Ideally everyone would be able to set up rules as to who and what they see.
Something like (pseudo syntax initially like SQL, but went off track):
IF sum(this.poster.posts.karma) < -100 OR this.score < -10 OR sum(this.poster.opinions.rating WHERE this.poster.opinions.source IN me.friends) < 0 THEN false ELSE true END.
I thought they were the same bar
Well, working from home it still requires discipline to optimize distractions, but it’s at least possible.
Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
That would be ASPD.
The impostor syndrome and such are crazy though, when working remotely from my dust and cockroaches box.
When talking about people with ASD that’s called unmasking and is one of the main goals of therapy.
Always has been
There were, you know, Torvalds-Tannenbaum and “cathedral vs bazaar” disputes either of which combined with this would show the way in the direction opposite of what Linux people consider the winning one.
Exactly about complexity and centralization and independence, even though it may not seem so.
Linux is more complex than it has to be. Its main advantage over a few other operating systems, which is hardware support, has nothing to do with its unjustified complexity in everything else.
I dunno, this seems to work against the point you seem to be making.
There’s a clear concept of what the Web is. A secure browser for that is not so complex. Also look at Gemini.
However, there’s also commercial demand for functionality which has been pushed to browsers instead of, well, anything, a Java applets alternative or Flash alternative with good sandbox, for example.
And now we can many times see that the reason this has been done had nothing to do with it being a better solution.
Just a certain company making one of the browsers had a long-term strategy of making their own competitor of Flash and Java applets (and what not, there were many other such plugins for embedded content) the standard.
Do people have to spend hours to optimize loading of an e-book? Again, there’s a clear concept of what Web is. It’d be just good tone to treat it as that and “platform for applications” as something secondary that shouldn’t impede the primary goal. Something like street traders squatting on a church square.
My position is that anything else should be embedded content handled by various plugins.
One can refactor the existing “HTML5, modern CSS with complex DOM and all that crap”, maybe even JS. functionality into a plugin based on Chrome released by Google, why not, of course removing those things from the Web itself. I know this reads as if I were smoking weed right now. But suppose that happens, you know as well as I do that people would mostly prefer websites not using that.