Comment by userbinator
3 years ago
Not sure when this article was prepared, but it doesn't mention WEI and other related technologies (remote attestation) which is IMHO the biggest current threat to interoperability. Sure, the "standard" is open, and theoretically anyone can implement it, but when the only "trusted" keys are those owned by Big Tech, it's hard to argue that's actually open.
Doctorow is a co-author on this EFF article from 2023-08-07 discussing WEI and remote attestation: "Your Computer Should Say What You Tell It To Say" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-s...
EFF's series on adversarial interoperability is also great.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
The biggest threat against the open web are the malicious actors on it like spammers or fraudsters.
If spammers and fraudsters are the price of freedom, so be it. Have corporations and banks eat the cost. God knows they can afford it.
Eh, I'm barely able to run a search engine due to all the bot activity. Less than 1% of my traffic is human, the other 2.5 million queries per day is from bots. It's only by the grace of Cloudflare it works.
Your mindset ensures the big corporations will be the only actors able to host anything with any level of interactivity. Doesn't sound very open to me.
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Do you want anything but static websites to only be possible to be run by a corporation?
Everyone suffers from this.
Spammers and fraudster are a problem, sure, but the biggest? By what measure?
If we're trying to predict which threats are "big" enough to lead to system failure, the analysis is quite different. In natural systems, parasites tend to fill niches and can persist for lengthy periods, often as long as the host. Or longer.
Think of it as a historically situated evolutionary battle. Thinking over many scenarios, there are many failure modes. One way to tease apart the likely causal threats involves thinking through a lot of scenarios.
Under what conditions you think spam/fraud would (more or less) 'destroy' the open web? And what does that destruction look like to you?
>By what measure?
Time and money lost to them. The idea of creating a web closed from those people starts to look very attractive when you have to spend time multiple times a day cleaning out spam from your site.
>Under what conditions you think spam/fraud would (more or less) 'destroy' the open web?
It's already happening.
>And what does that destruction look like to you?
The destruction looks like more websites able to offer free or cheap services. A great reduction in spam comments. More effective ads. For good actors nothing really changes.
Yes so let's let one giant company hold the keys to the castle to fix it.
Since nobody is proposing alternative solutions that actually work, people are looking to Cloudflare and Google for help with the real problem that impacts them right now.
People are looking for solutions to:
- How do we only allow real humans to access it so we stop wasting money on handling spam requests?
- How do we permanently ban a known malicious individual from accessing it?
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The biggest threat against the open web is Google who wants to turn the web into yet another AOL with vertical integration.
It is the corporation who wants to put malware on your computer under pretense of "verifying content integrity", just to force people to see their ads from spammers and fraudsters.
Google ads often promote scams in Google search.