It’s difficult to exaggerate the damage that has been caused to the original vision of the web through the commercialisation of domain names. Imposing artificial scarcity and the complexity of commerce systems on a fundamental identifier makes it orders of magnitude harder to self host. Domain names should be a public good. We should embrace https://www.opennic.org/ in the EU and mandate that all browser vendors implement support and get Let’s Encrypt to provide TLS support.
@aral Under what legal theory can a liberal government micromanage all browser vendors?
@aral And how do you avoid that same legal theory being applied by less liberal governments to force browser vendors to include CA certificates used to impersonate domains?
@freakazoid @aral under the same theory that allows them to micromanage the ingredients in food, or medication, or.... regulation is common
@walruslifestyle @aral Food safety is explicitly included as a regulatable category. So far software has been relatively untouched.
And we're not just talking about commercial entities here, but open source developers as well.
Food safety laws have been used to squash independent food production fairly effectively. The same will happen with open source once we start regulating software.
@freakazoid @aral the majority of web users use Chrome, from Google, or Firefox, from Mozilla which takes large corporate donations. literally what's being proposed is regulating these large corporate entities to stop them from leveraging their power to wrest money from individuals. exactly what regulation is intended to do. I fail to see the issue, nor the novelty, in this aside from being astounded that it hasn't happened sooner given the level of harm caused
@walruslifestyle @freakazoid @aral
You are pretty naive if you think that regulation constraints big existing players.
The problem with regulating software now ia that it is still too primitive. We would hurt innovation that occurs on free software.
The solution for these issues is very simple: cap company size. Split Google, Facebook, Amazon and friends in a few thousands little company. Problem solved.
@Shamar @aral @walruslifestyle I would certainly prefer splitting up the big players to passing regulations that cement their power by making it too costly for upstarts to grow past a certain point or maybe even exist.
Plus, once you go down the path of regulating software without a pretty strong Schelling point, you will immediately see less liberal jurisdictions doing the same for their own purposes. Use our root servers, use our CAs, insert our spyware, use our blocklists, etc.
@walruslifestyle @aral @Shamar I am willing to accept the possibility that there is a strong Schelling point for a regulation that requires support for a given set of root servers, I just don't know what that is and would like to hear what others think it is.
@Shamar @aral @walruslifestyle Incidentally, I am open to the idea of software regulation if I can figure out how it's not going to harm free software in ways that don't provide clear benefits on the other side, and if I can convince myself there's a clear Schelling point that's going to prevent the same justification from being used for some really harmful regulation down the road.
@freakazoid @walruslifestyle @aral
I'm open to regulate software corporations but regulating software is regulating speach.
Software #programming is a fundamental method of human expression that today is still too primitive to realize it's potential as a force for human #freedom.
So we have most scribes/programmers serving the Pharaoh/Capitalism, a few trying to contrast it but on it's rules and a handful studying how to make everybody write / code.
@Shamar @aral @walruslifestyle The form software regulation seems most likely to take is just an extension of what software regulation already exists: it'll apply to *users* of the software for particular applications. So government users, users in safety-critical applications, public schools, etc. That's also how patents work against open source software today; it's only using the software that infringes, not publishing it.
@Shamar Removing the other folks since we're getting into software philosophy here, but I find this topic super interesting.
I kind of wonder if many of the people getting sucked into serving capitalism would really be making a difference, though. Being able to program doesn't necessarily mean you'd be helping increase freedom if you weren't serving the man. For that I think about Alan Kay and the people around him who are focusing on research into revolutionizing how people use computers.
They would be irrelevant.
When everyone will be able to code and debug their own software, software corporations will be much different from now.
@Shamar @freakazoid I'd add that they'd still be very different if everyone had software freedom but didn't necessarily know how to code.
@Shamar @freakazoid The non-programmers would be able to choose who exercises their software freedoms on their behalf.
I think that's perfectly acceptable.
Would you accept to just be able to decide who can write for you? Instead of being able to write yourself?
I know that I wouldn't.
And don't say that writing is easier!
I've seen how hard is to learn on myself and my daughter. It's not easy at all! But over a few thousands years we managed to make it accessible to the whole humanity.
Informatics will be a serious discipline when we will reach this level of accessibility.
@Shamar @freakazoid If, say, it's writing legal documents I'm happy to defer to someone specialized in that field. As long as I have a decent understanding of what they wrote.
I think that's very comparable, but I'm guessing you're going to disagree.
Yes, for several reasons.
For example, even if you can't write a legal text from scratch, you can read it, understand it.
People who can't program, can't debug.
So they have no way to see if what is written is really what they want the hardware to do for them, even if they have the whole multi gigabytes codebase available.
When everyone will be able to code, all programs will be small and composable, by market selection: crap won't survive.
@tleydxdy @Shamar @freakazoid Well, personally I'd try to find a lawyer who can write a legal document I can read.
But yes, too many legal documents are like the programs novices write to show off their skillz. Or businesses might write because they can't be bothered refactoring.
Heck, I've heard Apple's legal documents used to have an issue that's all too familiar to us programmers.
@Shamar @freakazoid I think we're back on the same page.
People do need to at least see what the computer's doing (e.g. any network activity). And I don't think that has any real conflict with usability at all.
There is no conflict with usability.
On the contrary, I think we will see new wonderful metaphors that will raise software usability at new levels.
BUT knowing what the network is doing is not enough. Debugging the networking stack, being able to trace a bad packet back to the line of code that forged it, is what people need to be able to do.
You cannot ask a friend this.
He will never have the time to do it.
People need to be able to do it.
@alcinnz @Shamar This is an interesting point. It seems likely that a much larger fraction of the population can learn to read code that's written expressly for that purpose (as it should be) than could learn to write it.
I would love to think that everyone could learn to write code, but I suspect that would imply pretty fundamental changes in our society that made it very difficult to grow up as an intellectually incurious person.
This is why computers need to force people to learn to use them
Nice question. I have to think about it.
Not that reading a manual (or a book) is bad.
It's another act of rebellion actually.
But how complex video games manage to not need them? Note: complex _video_ games, because every tabletop game need you to read something.
@freakazoid @Shamar As a professional I certainly find I can read just about any programming language right away, whereas writing it requires some study.
I imagine it'd be a similar dynamic to a layperson.
> I would love to think that everyone could learn to write code, but I suspect that would imply pretty fundamental changes in our society that made it very difficult to grow up as an intellectually incurious person.
I can't parse this sentence, sorry.
Mind to elaborate?
People don't learn to write because they like it, but because they are forced to at school.
@Shamar @alcinnz Sorry, common problem with stuff I write.
I think that a lot of people end up as intellectually incurious adults, and once they're at that point, they're just not going to use anything that requires them to learn. Maybe there's some way to fix this without fundamentally changing society, but I don't know what that would be. Heck, I don't know how to fundamentally change society to do it either, except that I think that it happens far less in cultures that value learning.
@Shamar @walruslifestyle @freakazoid @aral Isn't this what Anti-trust is for?
How I long for that concept to be taken seriously again.
@alcinnz @walruslifestyle @freakazoid @aral
The problem is that people don't want to see.. the sky.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Mozilla... are weapons. Weapons that sometimes backfires, but that are hield very well from the same country that... well... defines what #Capitalism is.
How they can split their own weapons?
China is in no way better, but it's the only nation that resist to become a US colony.
We need alternatives!
@alcinnz @Shamar @freakazoid @aral yes. regulating monopolies used to be done more ime, but barely occurs now. when it has, eg to Microsoft, it had a beneficial effect
@walruslifestyle @alcinnz @freakazoid @aral
Such as the raise of #Google Chrome monopoly.
Great effect! :-D
@Shamar @alcinnz @freakazoid @aral applying antitrust law to Microsoft did not result in the dominance of the Chrome web browser. that is a historically false suggestion. can you please at least try?
@walruslifestyle @alcinnz @freakazoid @aral
No wait, I was there.
IE6 had 92% of the market.
Without that "antitrust" sentence, today #JavaScript would still be a toy to do little to nothing on the client side and all elaborations would occur server side. The #Web would be completely different simply because #Microsoft was actively hurting it as an app dev platform.
I hate to admit this, but had they won we wouldn't have this dystopia.
@walruslifestyle @alcinnz @freakazoid @aral
Also, please don't threat me as a neo-liberal or something. ;-)
@Shamar @aral @alcinnz @walruslifestyle No, we'd have a much worse dystopia where every site uses ActiveX and you can't use most of the web without Windows.
@freakazoid @walruslifestyle @alcinnz @aral
ActiveX weren't doing much well back then. The two contenders for the "#Web as a Application Deployment Platform" were #Java Applets and #Flash.
And later, Microsoft moved to .NET and WPF: they didn't consider the Web as a viable architecture for a distributed operating system. They were right, but nobody want to admit this now (not even them).
But mostly, back then, there was a huge movement towards the #Accessible and #SemanticWeb that #JS killed.
@Shamar @aral @alcinnz @walruslifestyle WASM turns the web into a viable application deployment platform. Or will when it finally escapes JS's broken security model.
@freakazoid @walruslifestyle @alcinnz @aral
No it doesn't.
What make you think that executing a #WASM binary that a stranger serves over #HTTP (which is designed to serve cacheable hypertext) and potentially customizes for you can be safe?
To me it can only be worse, from a #security perspective, than #JS because any unintended behaviour is way easier to hide in a binary.
@Shamar @aral @alcinnz @walruslifestyle It seems like the goalposts have moved from what application deployers view as a viable application deployment platform to what YOU view as a viable application deployment platform.
@freakazoid @walruslifestyle @alcinnz @aral
You said
> WASM turns the web into a viable application deployment platform.
This is not a theorem proof or a scientific result. It's just YOUR own opinion.
An opinion that is very hard to sustain technically (at least if you give a shit about users' security) but if you want we can discuss the matter: it's possible than in 20 years of Web development / deployment practice I missed something.
@Shamar @aral @alcinnz @walruslifestyle I'm curious how the alternative you think we'd have had MS won their antitrust fight would improve on any of the things you've mentioned?
@walruslifestyle @alcinnz @aral @Shamar And again, we're still talking about what YOU think is a viable platform versus what app deployers would be willing to use. I'm not arguing that it's not a shit show; just that WASM is an improvement over JS that in app deployers eyes will make it sufficient for their needs.
JS is no more transparent than WASM; obfuscated JS is no easier to read than disassembled WASM.
@Shamar @aral @alcinnz @walruslifestyle I guess what I'm really trying to understand is why/how you think the computing world would have come with something better than the web for application deployment rather than just inventing an equally bad shitshow. All the other popular ones, they're all a shitshow on one or more axes.
@freakazoid @aral @alcinnz @walruslifestyle
> I'm not arguing that it's not a shit show; just that WASM is an improvement over JS that in app deployers eyes will make it sufficient for their needs.
And again I'm saying that App deployers do not think so (except if you mean #Google #Facebook or #Amazon to which WASM can save tons of bandwidth)
> obfuscated JS is no easier to read than disassembled WASM.
You don't know what you say. ;-)
@freakazoid @walruslifestyle @alcinnz @aral
Oh... that's simple.
By now we would have a #SemanticWeb of human readable and machine readable #HyperText. Probably we would have an easy to strip #HTML tag for #Ads, better Web #typography, better #CSS and way, way more browsers simply because #MS didn't care about the #Web.
OTOH, people would be more used to buy applications to install, probably through systems like APT on Windows too.
1/
@freakazoid @walruslifestyle @alcinnz @aral
Note: there would still be issues in the world.
Famine, war, low quality software...
But at least the Web would still be an immense public library that people would be able to consume through a browser AND through any other application they could conceive.
But the applications wouldn't be customised on the fly for the user knowing EVERYTHING about him and without leaving any evidence.
@walruslifestyle @Shamar @freakazoid @aral I've heard a few reasons for this. One being the Nixon/Thatcher ideology that only price matters when it comes to anti-trust. Another compares it to when railways were proliferating, then too most people thought the technology had a natural tendency towards monopolization.
Whatever the reason I want antitrust to be enforced again so that it will be easier to compete against MAGAF.
@Shamar @freakazoid @aral well it's cool you come out the gate calling me naive when you know nothing about my background, but I can tell you firsthand that large companies do indeed respond to regulation, and regulations can be crafted to minimize impact on small players and exclude individuals. you realize these are laws and can be written in a variety of ways.
@Shamar @freakazoid @aral large tech companies have spent decades trying to convince anyone who would listen that government is bad, regulation is bad, computing should be free, etc etc. with backing from industry lobbying groups like the EFF. today we see what happens when a unfettered unregulated industry gains outsize power. the equivalent of robber barons
@walruslifestyle @freakazoid @aral
Meanwhile they lobby all Governments around the world... except their own.
