Cloudflare, CAPCHA's, and possibly web 1.0 are the
real dystopian technologies. I, for one, would be
much happier if they never existed.
On 2/21/22 11:48, Greg wrote:
Blockchains solve some problems that existing tech doesn’t solve, and
HTTPS + DNS insecurity is one of them.
Video explaining how and why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLDlEgzZB7eyJ0_Y2U2Y3Vv5kjj7DmeBIM&v=u1IIK8e3A6Q
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLDlEgzZB7eyJ0_Y2U2Y3Vv5kjj7DmeBIM&v=u1IIK8e3A6Q>
It’s a shame that so little progress on this has been made, and that
Brave, the only browser to do ENS resolution, chose to send it by
default through CloudFlare, defeating the entire point of blockchain
resolution.
Cheers,
Greg
On Feb 21, 2022, at 8:02 AM, Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I thinks it’s not “to give up” but rather to keep it in the tech realm
and not to expect it’s a “silver bullet!”
Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Yakoke,
Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
+1 (817) 754-0431
On Feb 21, 2022, at 9:07 AM, Richard Brooks <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
So. Your suggestion is give up?
I find web3 has some interesting aspects. I do not think
it has found the right applications yet.
Will it kill capitalism or reform social media, no? I do
think it has potential to do more than other things evolving
right now.
On 2/21/22 09:36, Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes wrote:
Right On.
It’s a political issue. Technology just obfuscates the whole thing,
the mirage of progress. Techie Messianism.
Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Yakoke,
Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>>
+1 (817) 754-0431
WACHÍČIŠ’AKE | BLIHEIC'YA YO
On Feb 21, 2022, at 8:06 AM, Yosem Companys <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote:
I found this to be an interesting post, especially in the context
of Liberationtech's having supported the development of Diaspora,
one of the most successful federated social networking sites.
Elon Musk is right. Web3 is BS.
By Maciej Baron
Jan 9 2022
<https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7
<https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7>
<https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7
<https://maciekbaron.medium.com/elon-musk-is-right-web3-is-bs-1cdafc3f96f7>>>
To put it mildly, I am not Elon’s biggest fan. He’s an ignorant,
narcissistic, reckless, self-indulgent buffoon who treats his
employees like crap, and who just happens to be amazing at
marketing himself, which helped him become a billionaire, despite
running unprofitable companies.
Musk however, recently tweeted something that I wholeheartedly
agree with: “Web3 sounds like bs”.
Web3 is an idea, which even Bloomberg admitted is a bit hazy, which
suggests we can achieve a decentralised World Wide Web using
blockchains. The proponents of this concept like to talk about how
Web 2.0 became centralised and controlled by big corporations, and
how blockchains, crypto and NFTs can help “give the power back to
the people”.
This all sounds wonderful and looks good on paper, but in reality,
it’s simply bullshit.
WebBs
Web3 is bullshit on several different levels, but most importantly,
it confuses a political and power-relationship problem with a
technological one. According to Web3 believers, blockchain is the
technology that can finally allow the Web to go back to its
decentralised roots. The truth is, blockchains are not only useless
in achieving that, we already have the technology to do that.
ActivityPub is a protocol that has been available for years, and
which inspired the creation of fairly successful decentralised,
federated social networks such as Mastodon. Any community can
create their own ActivityPub instance which is controlled by them —
even a single user can create their own server instance if they
want to, and federate with other instances. It’s a beautiful
architecture that allows people to control who has access to their
feeds, and what sort of feeds they are exposed to.
So why haven’t we seen a mass exodus of people from Twitter and
Facebook to Mastodon, or similar platforms? The technology is
there, the platform is there — all it takes is to register and switch.
The reason for this is that platforms like Twitter have already
achieved enormous power and influence, and a large user base that
simply stays where most of the people they follow are. There are
plenty of stories of people switching over to Mastodon, only to
return to Twitter shortly after, because that’s “where all the
action is”. Companies like Twitter spend millions on “customer
retention”; they help big brands improve their presence online and
give users plenty of reasons to stay and stick to Twitter.
The monopolistic nature of the biggest social media platforms is
also beneficial to other companies, which can streamline their
advertising and marketing campaigns — this benefits the wider
capitalist system. The monopoly of the big players is a natural
result of the system we have in place.
The Web3 thinking is based on the naive technocratic assumption
that technology and “smart ideas” can solve most of our societal
problems. Its naivety also expands to the belief that free-market
capitalism is the solution to the encroachment of monopolies, and
not the system that is in fact actively creating and enlarging them.
There isn’t a technology that will solve this, and this isn’t
happening because of a lack of a certain technology. We already
have tools to create a decentralised web, and blockchains aren’t
even the right technology to begin with.
Blockchains, NFTs and crypto-bullshit
A blockchain is a form of a digital ledger, which consists of
records called blocks. Such a database is managed autonomously
using a peer-to-peer network, meaning there is no main, centralised
machine controlling the whole infrastructure. Instead everything is
controlled collectively by all the nodes connected to the network.
The main purpose of a blockchain, and really the only reason it can
be made useful, is to record transactions. It is admittedly a
fairly clever way of avoiding the double spending problem — when a
digital token is spent twice (or multiple times), that is,
transferred to multiple destinations at once. This is also why, so
far, the only major use of blockchains is for digital currency, and
artificially scarce digital assets (Non-Fungible Tokens — NFTs).
Some people have suggested that NFTs could be used for recording
things like deeds and property titles, but it makes little sense to
use blockchains for recording anything physical or anything that
requires off-chain validation, authorisation, authentication or
confirmation — even if we consider the use of oracles. Blockchains
only make sense in a digital-only world, and only for transactional
data — and so far nobody came up with a compelling dapp idea
(decentralized application) that is not tied to cryptocurrency in
any way.
This is why when some Web3 evangelists talk about how social media
is centralised and how blockchains can help, you know they’re
bullshitting you.
Social media posts are not transactional data. You may have “likes”
that you can give to posts, but the double spending problem is not
relevant here, because you have an unrestricted and unlimited
supply of “likes”. We already have decades old technologies like
PGP which can prove the authenticity of a post. We already have
distributed, peer-to-peer technologies allowing for
censorship-proof, decentralised storage of data (such as WebTorrent
used by PeerTube).
Unstoppable Domains looks okay on paper, but it’s a for-profit
solution that isn’t really as decentralised as it pretends to be:
you still have to go through UD to purchase domains. Moreover,
getting around a DNS block is quite trivial, and “unstoppable”
domains won’t solve the problem of a hard IP block by your IPS if
used as a DNS provider.
Projects like the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) are
interesting, and were already used to fight against censorship.
However, the pricing model is slightly obfuscated, the cost of
“pinning” (permanent storage) is a few times higher compared to
regular storage solutions. If you’re using a company like Pinata to
host (“pin”) your content and guarantee its permanence while you
pay a monthly fee, you should start asking yourself how much
decentralisation you are really left with if you still rely on your
hosting provider and on the caching policy of independent nodes.
Moreover, we already have magnet links, Tor Onion services and
platforms like FreeNet, which is nearly 22 years old now (the web
itself is only 9 years older).
The technology is already here! We have had similar technologies
for decades now! …and new technology is not what we need to fight
the enormous power of the biggest platforms. That’s bullshit.
[snip]
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