Comment by marginalia_nu
3 years ago
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.
Well, your mindset ensures the computing freedom we enjoy today will be destroyed. Google is on the verge of introducing remote attestation in browsers so that servers can cryptographically verify any number of things about your client. It's essentially guaranteed that none of those things being verified will be in our best interests.
I'd rather have a static web where I have the power to choose my own browser, inspect source, block ads or even just use curl or Python to scrape something.
What mindset is that, actually trying to build alternatives to FAANG?
I honestly think remote attestation is a smaller problem. At least then we can still build alternative services. I'd rather have a free web and a locked down browser than a free browser and nothing but an endless digital mall to browse. Remote attestation will only lock you out of that endless mall to begin with. It will find ways of sucking regardless of what Google does.
The mindset of sacrificing computing freedom for user convenience and corporation profitability. We should be absolutely uncompromising on this one value. The alternative is the destruction of everything the word "hacker" ever stood for.
> nothing but an endless digital mall to browse
Funny, that's essentially what the web feels like to me in 2023. Escaping it is the number one reason why I visit HN nearly every day. It's like the only sane website left. I don't even open the links posted here anymore, websites are just unbearable these days even with uBlock Origin turned up to the max. I just assume whatever's important enough will be directly quoted in the comments.
The "static web" you and the commenter below mentioned? I actually kind of want it.
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