Can someone please summarize what the hell this is supposed to be? Sure, DDOS attacks, hacking, etc are bad. What else, exactly, am I supposed to pull away from this horribly designed site?
> Google Ideas builds products to support free expression and access to information for people who need it most — those facing violence and harassment.
> Google Ideas is a team of engineers, researchers and geopolitical experts who build products to support free expression and access to information, especially in repressive societies. We focus on the problems faced by people who live in unstable, isolated, or oppressive environments, including the billions of people who are coming online for the first time.
> With the right tools, we can make the internet more free and open. Many of us take the internet for granted, but for human rights activists, journalists, and artists living under censorship, a free and open internet can be a matter of life and death.
1. Google builds stuff that lets lots of people have access to information. Already knew that.
2. Google has a team of engineers that build stuff to let lots of people have access to information, including people in developing countries or countries that have restricted internet access. Yep, knew that, too.
3. An open internet is good. Check.
....So what? At the risk of sounding like a marketing douchebag, where's the call to action here? Is this supposed to be some kind of new Google product? Or is it just a bunch of PR?
The United States Department of Defense is doubling down on investment in the tech sector for national security and strategic purposes.
One of these investments is into something called "Civil Society Apps" - applications that support exporting American culture and values to certain areas of the world.
The United States benefits by being the center of entertainment (Hollywood), for example, and by having US Social Networking sites filter the content according to American values and ideals across the world.
This is a form of 'soft power'.
The DoD's investment in the tech sector, while also focusing on defensive and offensive cyber capabilities, is putting money into culture export apps.
While some of this work is already done, the governments and civil societies and organizations of other countries do not always like this export, and the US has been known to 'weaponize' some of the networks to stir revolution, dissent, etc (e.g. ZunZuneo).
Google Shield is a project whereby these cultural export apps can be given additional protection.
i can't thank you enough for making this comment and the above one ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9681482 ). people, especially tech/culturally/bullshit literate americans need to focus and _see_ what is happening. international citizens, especially from certain parts of the world, eat whatever the US feeds them, but i've noticed that americans tend to be _very_ good at spotting bs when they are paying attention. the only thing needed is for their hearts to be in the right place. that will determine whether they decide to play along or help.
now, i beg the above user, or someone with an equally clear and analytical mind, to take a long and hard look at india, and what's happening with the urbanised (aka westernized) and so called sophisticated society of india, especially the youth. key words : whatsapp, instagram, mass message forwarding, hollywood, atheism, gender equality, sexual liberation, 'jesus christ', delhi rape, us kashmir india map vs indian govt india map; eventually you'll spot the pattern. we need help from the outside, urgently.
read on the internet.org initiative. google is not alone. they are out to get everyone.
also, (imo) anyone upvoting, commenting, and (probably) even viewing this page is on a list, and their preferences and moral leanings are being analysed. i can't be sure if that is individually, or in a grouping of data. so comment and upvote with care, and try to ensure anonymity.
- an international student with lots of american friends, who loves weed, flirts with other drugs, and tries to keep an open mind
ps - best of luck to us all and thank you if you sincerely read the whole message
Perhaps you could speak some more about what's happening in India?
Here's what I understand: the United States and the West are partnering very heavily with India to get it to rise in tandem with China. India doesn't have a goal to be a global power, and its economy is much more closely integrated with the West, so it's a very kind strategic ally in the changing global economic situation. Its growth and its rise is an area of balance for the West in a world where trade and economy are shifting away from the old world and into the Asia Pacific.
India, with regard to geostrategy, is uniquely placed for growth. Of course it has a large population, which is a huge help, but it also likely to benefit from the trillions of dollars of investment being made by China's investment in Eurasian oil pipelines and trade routes (and Russia's attempt to galvinize a Eurasian Union).
That is to say India will benefit both by West and by East investment.
Now, in support of this Modi (which is in large part the 'West's man') has agreed to Westernize a very great deal and to grow India in very specific and strategic ways.
An example of this is China's investment and experimentation with "Smart Cities" - cities that are designed so that every piece of socioeconomic data can be recorded and adjusted. The idea with a smart city is that this level of insight allows huge boons in the study of, governing of, and changes to the municipality.
With the West's encouragement and investment (through multilateral investment groups) India has not only performed huge amounts of financial reorganization but also promises to build 100 smart cities of its own.
And interesting twist on this is that the smart cities invented by the West have an investment clause: the West wants to 'own' the city - to have equity in it - so that the cities are privately owned and that when people pay to live in the cities and as the cities produce surplus this money goes back into the pockets of private investors.
This is a kind of scary prospect for those who have traditional Western grounding as it makes these cities seem more like giant corporations (or maybe 'fiefs'?) than democracies.
But this probably isn't what the poster above is talking about?
Could you speak more about what trends you see in India?
this and more. i actually had no idea that something like the smart cities you mentioned was planned. and neither does any of the general public here. the idea is terrifying. i wonder where and how will they build these entire new cities and how will they cajole working ckass people into moving there, since villagers are definitely not part of their hifi money techno compounds.
it is very interesting to see your perspective on the global economic position that india occupies. think about how one country can actually 'own' shares of the very cities of another free democracy.
please do not take offence when i say that i can't tell you anything concrete at this stage, except harp about the evils of culture domination, about history repeating itself, and about researching more on my previous comment (if you are so inclined). this is in part because i haven't grasped the pattern fully myself, and for the safety of my dear ones. i just believe as much as a mind can, that there is evil afoot (apologies for being dramatic but i fully believe that a lot of countries including india face grave, long term threats).
"Neo-colonialism" may be the term you are looking for, along with "soft power".
Russia and China in particular are upset with this form of cultural domination and export by the West. Both have stated quite frankly in real terms that they seek to maintain and spread their own culture instead and in fact both Russia and China have begun programs for culture export based on the US model.
China is heavily invested in working in Eurasia, Africa and South America at the moment. They are a bit careful about the Middle East.
A more productive and charitable way to enter this conversation would be to engage it with fact-based and evidence-laden argumentation, and citation where necessary.
On that end if you have any fact-based questions I'm willing to unpack various claims and to discuss issues and ideas on their own merits.
I'm sorry that you are so dismissive, especially post Snowden, of the idea that the US has strategic partnerships with US companies.
This is not new, shocking or crazy information. It is not an unreasonable or alien claim.
If you do start reading serious journalism, paying attention to cyberwarfare, read up on current US propaganda efforts, or pay attention to US legislation or anything else that may turn your interest you've discovered that I'm willing to blather quite verbosely and would love to chat more.
From the company formerly known for requiring 'real names'™ for its shove-it-down-your-throat social network product.
I'd be wary. I'm sure there's lots of technical talent at Google, I'm sure they do interesting things. But they are not white knights, protecting the internet. And if I either would be afraid of harassment (see previous policy above) or a journalist with sources to protect, I'd look for more .. independent support, I guess.
Google is such a strange company. Don't they participate in the suppression of free expression in places like China, justifying it as a cost of doing business?
edit: in an effort to not spread bad information, I'd like to retract my statement. It was based on outdated information.
This reality of the censorship appears to be well documented[1], and I don't think it's quite as simple as that. Here's the TL;DR
Google filtered terms the Chinese government required (by law), but did so by returning results saying that some items were filtered out specifically so users would know their results were filtered. Google never gave any information on who searched specific terms, but after some attacks on their servers in an apparent attempt to get this information, Google announced they would no longer filter searches for China. Talks on how to accomplish this broke down, and Google redirected their China site to Hong Kong, which has no censorship restrictions, but the Great Firewall seems to be filtering results.
They stopped the redirect[1] and now just show a link to Google Hong Kong.
They also removed the warning that the user's search results were being filtered [2].
To the best of my knowledge, the current status:
User visits Google China - http://google.cn
- This is a hyperlink to Google Hong Kong on the front page
- IF user searches via Google.cn, the search results will be filtered by China not self-censored by Google. They will NOT be presented with a warning anymore.
- IF user searches via Google.hk, from mainland china, the same thing will happen and the results will still be filtered. [3]
At this point, I don't believe the link to .hk Google serves as much use as it does a political statement.
I agree, I think their original stance, showing results and noting where they had to filter, was much better. But if that makes them a target, and can reverse and good they think they are doing if they are hacked by China and any identifying information (correlation with the Great Firewall seems likely) is found, I can see their reasoning. If you truly want to do the right thing, is making yourself a target that makes the situation worse the right way to go about it? It's a complex situation, and there's probably lots of information that we aren't privy to. At least it got press and there was some awareness.
So Google has tried almost everything and has broken into China's Great Firewall. They even were warning users if the content was politically controversial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China
It seems to be a collection of things to help fight against evil. I couldn't navigate the site (firefox), so I just looked at the source. What I see is:
-a reverse proxy
-service to scrape various business records, helping journalists analyzing records
-anti-phishing tool (browser plugin?) that verifies you're not putting your (Google) password into a wrong site.
I don't know. Taken from a sort of "Digital Poverty" point of view, these seem like good sane items to try to reduce that, and they aren't all aimed at one area. They are supporting both human rights (from the internet access as a human right perspective, which may be controversial, but is at least arguable), and fighting corruption. Both noble goals IMHO, and areas where Google's possible contributions line up with their core strengths and values.
Google Ideas is a means by which US outreach, propaganda, narrative, voice and news sites and apps can be protected when it broadcasts to populations around the globe.
US investment in organizations and outlets that align with its strategic goals (or when they are fronts for one department or another) are looked very poorly upon by some countries around the world, which will attempt to take them down - either by legal means, cyber attack or network (e.g. DNS) level blocks.
It is a geopolitical project and a very valuable investment for the United States overseas power projection.
It's a shame this has been voted up so far up the page. For a poster engaged in supposedly "fact-based and evidence-laden argumentation", you forgot your facts and evidence. The only bit where you seem to even approach specifics is
> Google will, in all likelihood, very selectively give protection to news outlets.
> For example those from the Board of Broadcasting Governors, or from the BIIP, or from USAID, or from US sponsored NGOs are definitely going to get support.
But that "in all likelihood" is just you making things up and is not, of course, actual evidence. Everything else you've provided in this thread is handwaving.
> But that "in all likelihood" is just you making things up and is not, of course, actual evidence. Everything else you've provided in this thread is handwaving.
Not in the least. Is there anything you'd like corroborated?
Allow me to add some information here, as the commentor hasn't asked for anything specific.
The United States disbanded USIA (the agency in charge of US propaganda) after the end of the Cold War in 1999. USIA was split into a couple components. Overt programs were given to the Department of State, covert ('black') programs to the Department of Defense and the Board of Broadcasting Governors were split off into their own organized body.
During the Bush administration there was a lot of turmoil about how to organize efforts - they found that splitting the efforts caused confusion as various programs weren't coordinated with the same messages. Bush created Policy Coordinating Committees for "Strategic Communication" to help interdepartment and interagency cooperation. Mostly during this time efforts were focused on the Middle East, and indeed today the US heavily blankets the Middle East with propaganda.
Things have evolved since Bush. There has been a growing role of social media analysis and interaction. The Department of State has a Digital Outreach Team where they will engage on forums in the Middle East (it's an overt program, so they will identify themselves) - but the goals as can be seen from FOIA requests and strategic documents are to confuse adversaries, 'get in their heads' and to engage parties whose opinion may be swayed. Covert operations do much of the same, but under false flags and with persona management software (check out Earnest Voice). You can find out more about these efforts by searching for the Department of States "war of ideas" or congresses "Jihad 2.0", or generally doing due diligence and reading legislation and strategy documents.
Another big change in US strategy is that its audience is much wider. Strategy documents toward the end of the Bush Administration and through the Obama Administration focus on the need to counter anti-American ideas abroad.
Now the CIA especially runs NGO and CSO fronts, many times through USAID, and more generally NGOs and CSOs are invested in if they align with US strategic objectives. If you like you can find CIA reports on investment in NGOs inside of Ukraine as part of their long term plan as project UNITER and how this turned out with NGOs leading Euromaiden protests (if you read foreign media - Germany's Der Speigel is a good source you may trust). ZunZuneo is a very transparent example because there's been lots of journalism on it - in this case the CIA set up a fake Twitter network in Cuba where they were monitoring citizens and planning to turn their network (peaking somewhere around 60,000 users) into an outlet to stir dissent and organize protests.
Many countries try to quell this activity. Cuba, for example, banned smart phones at one point. Russia recently, after the Ukraine affair, kicked out all NGOs with funding from or ties to Western governments.
Aaannnyyway. There's tons of more details to be had (US research into manipulating social networks a la DARPA SMISC, Project MINERVA) but in reading through material and reports on the various task forces of Congressional meetings it's quite clear - though really not surprising as these have been longstanding US practices.
If you would like to read more about propaganda and CIA fronts in the Iraq war, searching for Rendon Group, the Iraqi National Council, and the Office of Strategic Influence.
The United States unequivocally funds and supports NGOs and CSOs that align with its strategic interests and invests them as operating fronts for special operations. This isn't really something that's widely contested.
The Department of Defense (just search for this using your favorite client/search engine) is right now investing large amounts of money through partnerships with Venture Capitalists into Silicon Valley and the tech sector. There is a call for both cybersecurity startups and for civil society apps.
Google is offering (and there are plenty of examples of Google's involvement with US national security investments, perhaps you'd like to ask about this) to protect news and human rights agencies. This will of course be providing protection to US and US-aligned news media organizations and NGOs (they can call my bluff by supporting Chinese NGOs - and China is now starting to try to have its own culture export, news organizations, and human rights groups in Africa, South America and Eurasia).
You just wrote an entirely irrelevant wall of text before finally addressing the question in the last paragraph. However your argument still remains that the US government has used NGOs to advance its interests in the past and this service is offering to shield NGOs from DDoS attacks. QED.
That's not an argument or evidence, that's classic handwaving.
What sort of evidence exactly are you looking for?
Understanding how the US operates, how US companies cooperate, and the context, timing, history and actor roles appear not to be enough.
I suppose you're looking for a smoking gun - a document from Google that explicitly states that Google's intention is to support American NGOs for the purposes of US power projection.
No, I don't have a smoking gun. I can not provide that for you.
It is established that America uses NGOs for culture export/soft power projection.
It is established that Google is a geopolitical actor.
It is established that Google provides investment for researchers who are funded by and for DoD programs.
It is established that Google aligns itself with US culture expansion abroad (they wrote a book on this).
It is established that the US partners with private industry to achieve its objectives. It is established that the US has been calling for more partnership on the cyber domain and with strategic communication.
It is established that Google will be protecting American NGOs.
If it is reasonable to conclude that Google's involvement protecting American NGO's is partnership with US foreign policy is bullshit or handwaving, how would you read the situation?
I think it's unreasonable to think that:
A company that is legally obligated to maximize shareholder profit, and which partnered with the US government for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, and whose executives fairly regularly meet in person with the president of the United States and who has a revolving door with the same Department of State for roles in under Public Diplomacy - that this company, completely separate from these details - on its own 'good will' - decided it would be a nice charitable thing to host US NGO sites and US news intended for foreign audiences.
a citizen from india would like to weigh in and say that I believe you and everything you said lines up with how the youth in our country are turning more and more to western ideals and ignoring their culture (facebook posts, game of thrones, popular pages making posts on iraq, posts on north korea, posts on russia, and a host of other things that you can only experience and observe by living in the country and having friends from that country). that's all i will say for now, if the opinion of someone in an (allegedly) affected country counts.
I do not know much about Cloudflare. It was my impression that they were a legitimate business on their own right. They very well may have a partnership to protect CIA operation digital assets, or partner with other departments for other purposes (protecting US assets during the cyberwar). This in itself would not imply that they are a 'front', just a partner. To claim a front you would have to have some reason to believe that CloudFlare was infiltrated by, bought by (like Condolezza Rice at DropBox) or started/managed by a gov't agency.
I would not claim to believe that they are a front or a partner. I'm not a good person to ask though, I don't know very much about CloudFlare.
The danger of making such jokes, even when they are funny like yours, is that it clouds legitimate and reasonable discussion about the ways in which US companies support US national security efforts.
There is no need to ridicule this poster, as parallel questions about national security efforts and how, where and when US tech companies help are topical, factual and technical.
Not sure what it's supposed to be or who it's for, but looks like the typical crap coming from a big corporation. I'm sure they had tons of synergy meetings about it.
Kidding aside, my first impression was wow, what a nice showcase for HTML5/canvas use. Whoever (at Google?) developed the website did an awesome job! Although knowing what's walking around at Google these days, I'm pretty sure it's been outsourced to an agency.
It protects by computing something from the way you type your password as opposed to knowing the actual password.
Edit: This raises an interesting question. Wouldn't it then be possible to use the same algorithms elsewhere on websites to identify who is even anonymously using the site?
I read some research a few years back where they were able to figure out passwords based on the small delays between hitting each key. eg. it takes me 100ms between typing an "s" and an "e", but 150ms between an "s" and an "8". Unfortunately I don't recall any identifying details. But yes, I think it's totally possible to identify people by their typing "gait" just like it is with people's walking gait.
The marketing copy : "Google Ideas builds products to support free expression and access to information for people who need it most — those facing violence and harassment."
The Reality : "WHAT IT DOES : MAKES DATABASES SEARCHABLE"
The page looks so nice but then they proceed to destroy usability with bizarre navigation schemes and breaking nearly every common design pattern - scrolling is just one of them.
For me it scrolls ridiculously slowly. And they broke the side scroll bar and arrow keys, so I have spin the mouse wheel a ton to get it to move at all.
I don't see what the point of breaking scrolling is.
In order to have automatic device compatibility we've built this whole web platform, paying huge prices along the way in speed, data size, etc, but it's all worth it because you can deploy your application instantly and everyone will be able to use it with a consistent experience across all devices and platforms.
Then they go and try to re-do something probably a dozen layers deeper than the frontend application code they used; scrolling - and will probably be surprised to learn there are compatibility problems!
Julian Assange believes that "Google Ideas" is, amongst other things, a channel for Google to get involved in geopolitics while maintaing political cover and distance - and Google Ideas often engages in surreptitious actions in concert with the US government.
http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279...
IMO, anything Assange say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But then again, the same holds for Google PR.
If your concept of human rights are not in sync with the US State Department because of where/who you are or what you think, you should not use a US-based service for your security.
Does Google have a team working round the clock to develop the most annoying webpages possible? For as many "cool wow amazing" CSS tricks as this site uses, it doesn't do a good job of explaining what it is at all. And what's up with the products page? Why does it scroll so slowly?
> Does Google have a team working round the clock to develop the most annoying webpages possible?
They certainly seem to try, don't they? to be horrible.
I tried using google maps today a few times and each time was filled with curses and WTF's.
They just, shouldn't be making websites or doing any kind of design work at all. Maker the backend technology, sure - get someone else to do anything front end. Across the board suckage.
Having a decentralized forum/chat/data system would be really awesome, even if that might be against google's interests. I really want the future to have more p2p systems.
There was edonkey, then bittorent, then the cloud, then git, then bittorrent sync...
I don't understand why systems like freenet and bitmessage have not taken off. The internet was built for p2p, but it's still mostly used as a broadcast system where everything is centralized.
Why isn't google trying to fund those projects ? Because they re so much invested in the web of HTML content they can't look eitherway.
Google makes money precisely because the web is centralised. If we moved to P2P systems they could still provide an index, but I'd wager far less data would ultimately pass through them. Not to mention that if people were more in control of their data rather than LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, I bet they'd be less inclined to having it indexed publically simply because they have a choice.
There's all sorts of network effects and shitty incentives at play, and it's a shame.
My twitter rant (not the whole thing even)
> though they have their place, centralised systems reinforce the role of the middle man, which is prime for rent-seeking and lopsided value
> in reality networks exist on a continuum between centralised/decentralised. The web makes it difficult to choose the correct degree per case
> both centralised and decentralised systems have trust issues, but they are different in kind not magnitude
> the incentives are wrong for innovation. Google requires centralised, so HTTP is fine. Ubiquity, so HTML is fine
> web developers have spent years becoming skilled in their corner and are incentivised to defend and perpetuate the platform
> if you think discoverability, zero-install and sandboxes are only possible on the web, I invite you to consult the literature
> we could have decentralised, secure, simple, efficient primitives, but network effects and incentives steer us away
> tech solutions are moot unless they incentivise behaviour that leads to better returns for everyone. layers on HTML/HTTP will never do that
"Google makes money precisely because the web is centralised"
I see it exactly the other way: Google makes money precisely because the web is decentralised, and hence you can create an invaluable service by crawling it and creating a centralised search index.
That's another way to look at it, but you're using decentralised to indicate there are many large nodes- I would say that's simply distributed. I'm using centralised to indicate that communications are via those large nodes, which mostly don't communicate with each other.
It's client/server on a massive scale. Just because the servers are public, doesn't make it decentralised.
That's a good question which deserves an honest answer but this comment box is really too small for that and essay sized comments are frowned upon.
For starters: navigating the web in the beginning consisted of clicking links which caused you to go from one website to another. This all worked well when (a) the web was small and (b) there were (hardly) no trash pages.
Search engines changed that, and once they got 'good enough' the link graph became a mere starting point for crawling the web rather than the way we navigated from site to site. For a little while the link graph was used as a popularity measurement but this too changed (because of the huge number of low value links).
Then we got silos. A 'silo' is a bunch of data locked up under a trade between users and large web properties. The trade is 'you give us your content and a bunch of information about yourself and we'll use that content to attract others and to sell ads'.
Examples of such silos are Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
Finally, if originally (and the internet itself) was strung together by a peer-to-peer approach it turned more and more into a division between producers and consumers, with the producers on the 'server' side and the consumers on the 'client' side.
Mobile devices accessing the net further accelerated this trend, right now the only internet (not web) applications that are still peer-to-peer are torrent applications. For the most part the division on the web is complete and hosting a web server on your very powerful cable modem or DSL line would be grounds for termination of your access.
Servers are hosted centrally and are operated by companies whereas clients are simply terminals that access the content stored on those servers.
I hope that answers your question in enough detail, you could easily write a book about this.
The internet is, by it's nature, peer to peer and decentralized. Cut a cable, or take out a large networks, the internet will route around it, either quickly (routes converging on a new peer) or slowly (a poorly connected network finding a new upstream to purchase connectivity through). That companies then build on top of this and implement services where they are the middle of both connections does not change this fundamentally, it just adds an optional layer. To assume our connections have upstream bandwidth that is never or rarely used is false. I would argue that we generate more content per-person than ever in history. The seer amount of pictures, videos, webcams, posts and comments is much higher than ever before. Are they hosting it directly from their connections? Usually not, but that's as much a case of being efficient and reaching an audience as it is in companies wanting control over the data. Even then, there are services which are decentralized from that, such as email. It's not efficient to host content yourself. Even the large networks use dedicated CDNs. For the end user, Facebook is a CDN.
That said, I agree there is a clear move towards our data and services being handled by fewer, and larger entities, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. But they aren't a single entity, and I don't consider that centralized. Any one of those providers could implode today, and very little of their services could not be picked up by some competitor easily. I don't consider that centralized.
And there are many of them, some owned by companies that use them exclusively, some conglomerations of many different providers but owned by yet another party. How is this centralization? I still think you're just arguing that we've compartmentalized certain services to sets of companies, for the most part, but even that isn't centralization, because there are multiple distinct companies using multiple distinct networks and in many cases they are presenting multiple distinct capabilities. Not having something handled at the end point does not mean it's centralized, there's a very large middle ground here, and that's where we are currently at. I'm not sure I see any evidence that we are moving away from that towards actual centralization.
> When I received mail in '95 or so the machine receiving it was the workstation I wrote the reply on.
And many people that used POP3 continued to do so well into the 2000's. It's silly to run a mail server on your workstation. I know, I did it for years myself. You run into all sorts of stupid problems related to your workstation not being always on, badly configured backup MX servers, and other issues. We don't do it anymore not because we were forced out of it (you can still do it now), but because there are solutions that are better for most use cases, and we opt for those.
We don't all wash our own cars, or do our own plumbing, or even clean our own houses. Some people do, some people pay others to do that work. The fact they pay others doesn't mean we've moved towards centralizing those services. There isn't some national bureau of plumbing that is our only recourse when the toilet is clogged and we don't want to fix it ourselves.
Ok. So you say we're not trending towards a more centralized internet because you discard all proof that that is exactly what is happening. That's fine with me but it really doesn't help to move the discussion forward.
The reasons why we are moving to a more centralized internet are what is interesting, such as - you rightly identified those - that stuff isn't always powered up and that keeping a mailserver up and running is work and so on.
But none of that changes that centralization is happening.
Multiple distinct companies != peer-to-peer internet. That's what a decentralized network infrastructure used to mean, where the 'peers' were equals.
Nowadays it means clients in one camp and servers in another, and large scale consolidation of those servers in the datawarehouses of a relatively low number of companies serving up the bulk of the data. If that trend continues it's not a bad or a good thing per-se but it would be good to stop and think about how desirable that is.
So from that point of view a lot of centralization has already happened.
Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming they can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any technical reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all your content (or google, or Yahoo).
In the end, convenience won over 'peer-to-peer', there are many reasons besides convenience (firewalls, for one) but the results are here and we'll have to live with it (except for a couple of die-hard hold-outs).
What I've tried to make clear, and either failed in or you disagree with this as well, is that I don't think saying we are "centralizing" or moving towards a "centralized" internet is correct, largely because that implies we are approaching, or event still moving towards, the end-point of that spectrum, which is centralization, and that implies a single authority.
I think it is correct to say we are, or at least were, decentralizing, to a degree. I think it's correct to say that we are not fully decentralized, which we were close to initially, but I don't think it's entirely constructive to say we are moving in a direction that leads to a centralized internet, and what that implies (a single authority, even if for a single service). I think we are moving towards, or have arrived at, what we see in many markets. Large dominant players that the majority use, but with a large market of smaller players that provide for the niche needs. Take the automotive industry, for example.
I think we are largely arguing over semantics, which is something I don't want to do, but at the same time it's hard to be sure I'm not just reducing your arguments to the point there's no difference and ignoring important points at the same time.
> But none of that changes that centralization is happening.
I think it's cyclical, and there will be periods where we move along the spectrum back and forth, but I doubt we'll get as close to the decentralized end as we started at, but for many reasons. I don't think we'll get all that close to the decentralized end either though.
My argument has not been "we are decentralized", it's been "we are not centralized". To that effect, peer-to-peer is irrelevant to my argument, and I've tried to make that clear.
> Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming they can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any technical reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all your content (or google, or Yahoo).
Because it's very, very inefficient. There are upsides to centralization (e.g. discoverability), just as there are downsides (e.g. homogeneity). I think the sweet spot that maximizes the upsides and minimizes the downsides is somewhere between decentralization and centralization.
I think the accurate statement of your opinion is not "the web is centralized" but rather, "Zipf's law sucks."
In decentralized networks there end up being accumulation points, and Zipf's law (which shows up in piles of different contexts, originally noticed in rank of words used in languages) gives a pretty good idea of how that accumulation plays out in basically an L-shaped curve. Point being that it might have a lot more to do with the structure of human networks and attention than with choice of wire protocols...
The nature of http and websites makes the web centralized: there's always a server, users don't really serve data, it's always stored somewhere.
It's true that it's decentralized, that's it's easy to create websites, but in nature, if you shut down dns servers, you shut down 99% of the internet, which inclues HTML website.
And I think that a decentralized web might be more easy to index (proof of work system, etc).
That's not centralized, it's just less decentralized. Centralized and decentralized or on opposite ends of the spectrum. It's possible to be less decentralized and still be very far from centralized. There are many, many different entities providing all sorts of services, so I'm not sure how that portion can be seen as centralized at all. DNS, as you not, is probably the most centralized single point that everything relies on, but they simply have authority because we give them authority. If DNS server adminitrators decided to use different root servers, there's not a lot they can do about that. But I'll concede that authoritative DNS is fairly centralized, given it requires checking with a single authority, but even then, man entities(TLDs) have a say in what that authority says (but not the ultimate say).
Well you're right, in nature and architecture the internet in decentralized, but the use most users make of it, is centralized.
If you look at what internet.org attempted to do, that's actually how the internet is used most of the time. For consumers and most small businesses, internet is centralized. Technically, most of the internet is just http requests, meaning that there will always be this duality of servers and clients. Without web servers and their admins, there is nothing, and that's a form of control in my opinion: you can easily shut down a website.
I still don't see that. A centralized internet, or event a centralized "web" as has been distinctly defined elsewhere here, implies a single authority. That doesn't exist, and I don't see it existing in the future. Which email provider do you want to use? Pick from hundreds. Which social network do you want to use? Pick from from the tens of candidates. Which blog platform do you want to use, pick from hundreds again.
> Without web servers and their admins, there is nothing, and that's a form of control in my opinion: you can easily shut down a website.
There are webservers, and admins. That hasn't changed. There's been a shift to larger sites, but there's still plenty of small ones. You sill have the options to put your site at many different locations, or use a platform such as Facebook, Blogger or Wordpress.
Look, here google is trying to solve the problem of government surveillance and security. Web servers are a very weak point because you can shut them down if you have the law on your side, and recently the law has been abusive. And even if you can change your DNS, the root servers are still an important part of the internet, and they're subject to control and legal issues. Control and authority makes those aspects of the internet centralized. This applies to your hundreds of mail and web providers, which are not free by the way (datacenters). Decentralized technologies are entirely free.
What I'm talking about, is protocols that make services impossible to shut down, like bittorrent or bitcoin. That's what I mean by a decentralized internet. Those technologies are different and were made especially with the goal of avoiding control, and they are exactly the solutions to breaches of privacy. Here every computer is equal, and that's a true decentralized internet, in term of hardware AND software. What I was talking about, is generalizing bitcoin and bittorrent to messaging or even hosting databases.
Such software would run on many domestic computers that want to use it and host chunks of data in a redundant manner. The issue is authenticity and signing of data. But other than that, that's where the future is.
I'm sorry but I can't trust the html/http web one bit. HTML and javascript are awful technologies, which are slow to parse, building web browsers have been a race that resulted in no interesting progress and the web2.0 has been a joke. All those techs have been the base google have been making its money on, which also makes easy to mine, so to me centralization is a privacy issue.
No, my browser doesn't. Google's public DNS has little bearing on how I reach sites, unless I've specifically configured it that way. Either you really don't understand how DNS works, or you are simplifying to the point of just plain being wrong.
You could argue that the root servers are too centralized, and that their control constitutes centralized DNS control, but since the only reason they have control is that all the different DNS servers use them as authorities, an argument could also be made that their control is more be convention than anything else, and all it would take is a competitor to ICANN that added some value, and eventually we could have multiple authorities. Whether that would be beneficial or detrimental is another discussion.
As much as people like to bandy that term about, I don't think of (less than) 68% of all searches as a monopoly. Two out of three people is a lot, but it's not nearly enough to force some sort of information control (whether that information is result, or other people exclaiming how much better their search engine is working).
Through a complex interrelationship of distinctly controlled networks that advertise routes and addresses and allow traffic based on complex business relationships (peering). The only case where that's not happening is where we both have the same ISP, and ycombinator happens to be hosted there as well. Running a traceroute from myself to news.ycombinator.com, I count two distinct networks not including my local one, and not including cloudfare. If those networks stopped talking to each other, my packets to hacker news would find another route, assuming my first hop had access to other networks (given time for the networks to determine a new route and my first hop had access to other peers).
We're talking about the web as an application layer protocol. By your definition everything that happens on the internet is decentralised. That's not untrue if you look at it from the point of view of TCP/IP, but that's tangential to the conversation we're having.
You seem to be conflating the web with the internet.
But even by that definition, the web isn't a single application, it's many applications, some of them compartmentalized (search, social), some of them not (email), and some in between (websites/blogs). If an application were centralized, I would expect a single provider you had to use, but instead, where it at least compartmentalized, you have a group or providers. Can you name a single service/application that you expect more than 5% of people use that has only a single provider? For search, you have Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other smaller players. Google is dominant here, but still has less than 68% of the market. For social, Facebook is the dominant player, but you yourself used a different social network to communicate on this subject, and there are many other providers with popularity that ebbs and flows. It's the same with anything I can think of. I'm not sure how this is considered centralized under any definition.
Yep, the web is a distributed system. Yep, the web offers many services, and many providers offer the same class of service.
However, each and every one of those services are centralised in a technical sense on account of HTTP. Why might an alternative be useful? Consider the solution the Google service we're addressing is putting forward cf. Content Addressable Networking systems[0]. I can't spend any more time explaining, sorry. This might help- note the levels of centralisation in each generation of P2P systems:
So, I think I'm starting to understand your argument, which is that the web is composed of many services which each is implemented relying on an underlying centralized authority, and you want that to change? If that's the case, then I understand the need, and agree with that poiint of view. But I think to say "the web" or "the internet" is centralized is very big stretch. I wouldn't call a bunch of decentralized services with little shared infrastructure and ownership "centralized".
I'm definitely not saying the internet is centralised! Perish the thought. I never mentioned it- the discussion was to do with the web specifically.
Forget the web as a whole and consider a single service such as HN. That graph has |clients| >> |servers|. More than the cardinality the client and server nodes are different in kind.
I consider a decentralised architecture to be one where the nodes can in principle participate equally.
You are arguing that the web is decentralised because there are many services to choose from. I don't disagree, but that's above the application layer protocol- which is what I thought we were discussing. In that case decentralisation happens above the application layer. So in humans? By that definition BBS's were decentralised because I could call a different one.
In other words, yes the web is decentralised because I can choose from many Forex APIs. But at the logical application layer of HTTP, OANDA is a centralised service. HTTP addresses point to specific nodes which may or may not be individual servers at the network layer, but from the point of view of HTTP that's what you address. In a decentralised application layer protocol I would expect to that not to be the case.
That Google is proposing this service is proof that individual web services are centralised. There's a single point of failure.
We're talking at different layers. It's just semantics from here on in.
No, I'm not arguing the Web is decentralized, at least not as you are using the term. I'm arguing it's not centralized. That's an important distinction, which I tried to cover in a response in a different thread[1]. We wouldn't be having this conversation if you had the web needs to be more decentralized, but you stated the web is centralized. not(decentralized) != centralized. This problem was then compounded by our discussion about services, where you are referring to services as individual protocol definitions, and I'm referring to them as implemented in the wild. While a protocol definition may call for it to be implemented in a centralized (n-1 client server relationship across direct communication), I'm referring to the ecosystem which provides many, many instances of this, which adds a layer of redundancy and decentralization to the service as it exists in reality. That's not as good as a well defined decentralized protocol definition, but it is a manner of decentralization. So again I think we were arguing points that are, for the most part, correct, but using confounding terms.
I think you would have communicated your intent better if you said the web is not decentralized enough. I've been arguing the web is not centralized, you've been arguing the web is not decentralized (but by saying the web is centralized), and the problem is that both are true. The current situation is in-between those two extremes. Arguing that the web is centralized, when it isn't unless you define your scope to be so narrow as to not really encompass what most people think of when you say "web" is counter productive, when your point is a good one, and whether the web is "centralized" is irrelevant. What matters is whether there are benefits to being less/more centralized (or more/less decentralized) from the current state.
Edit: As a suggestion for how to refine your original statements so they are more accessible and understandable to those reading them, I suggest changing "the web is centralized" to "the protocols the web relies on require single centralized authority". It's more verbose, but it doesn't require cognitive leaps in just one of multiple possible directions to get what you are trying to express.
To take Google as an example: 92% market share in Europe in 2014 [1], 81% of the global market for smartphones (Android) [2] - 96% if you also add the single relevant competitor iOS. None of this is technically centralisation. (And won't ever be, as you could always "decentralize" the web by running your own personal search engine on your home box. As long as someone is using it, google doesn't have 100% market share.) However, it doesn't make much of a difference when you want to develop an app that doesn't get accepted into the iOS or Android app store.
But all if this is obviously beside the point that the OP made. Even if you don't want to develop a search engine or a phone app, you still have to tie your users to a central "cloud" service and web site so you can get discovered by google. That's a huge disincentive for p2p services.
That's a great argument for how dominant Google is in the smartphone OS category, but that doesn't really say anything for whether the web is centralized. Even with 100% market penetration, there are people that opt to not use Google's included apps (such as Facebook and their messenger app).
> I don't understand why systems like freenet and bitmessage have not taken off.
I think the problem has been always the poor UX, but eventually something well thought out like popcorn-time could appear and cause a greater adoption.
I was on that site for 5 minutes and I still have no idea what it's actually trying to do. Looks like they spent so much time on all the fancy crap that makes the page load take forever that they forgot they had a message they were trying to get out.
or maybe their intent was to bore me off their site because I'm not a journalist. In that case they did well!
you're missing a lot if you're into web design. of course, content is king and google fucked up big times by not having a proper fallback. but that parallax scrolling is the best I've seen so far https://www.google.com/ideas/products/digital-attack-map/
The parallax scrolling on that page is mediocre IMO.
It's unnoticeable when not using smooth scrolling (my personal default). Not a huge problem for a design feature to be unnoticeable though.
When smooth-scrolling using the middle mouse button on Chrome/Linux, it doesn't update dynamically as it scrolls; the background snaps into position when scrolling stops. In Firefox/Linux, it does update dynamically with middle mouse smooth scrolling, but jerkily. It's noticeably bad in both browsers.
Google outsources a lot of design and build work to external agencies. Especially for projects like this, which are sort-of side-projects and not really core Google functionality. Also, quite a lot of paid client work for YouTube is/was outsourced.
I used to work for one of these companies, and we built quite a few highish-profile sites for Google and YouTube. The quality of work done by this company varied wildly between excellent and utterly dismal. Project management interactions with the Google side were haphazard at best and chaotic and disruptive at worst. Requirements would constantly change, and the designs would be all over the place. I don't think one time we thought about accessibility. A number of the projects were death marches, and I worked on at least one huge failure, which fell over on a live TV show with millions of viewers.
TL;DR - just because it's on google.com doesn't mean it was designed or built by Google.
I remember fondly the days when Google web sites could be relied on to be usable, well-designed, and easy to read. The Nexus page has been a bit of a canary, every time a new phone was released it got worse and worse.
How about no. Seriously. Google of all companies should know better than to rely on autoplaying any sort of audible multimedia, especially as what I'm guessing to be the preferred source of information (guessing since - at the point where people started talking - I simply closed the tab).
Some good ideas there, but mostly it's a collection of high-level tools and visualizations...my main objection is that journalists have a tendency to see data and documents as "magic" and making a slick Investigative Dashboard doesn't really dispel that. The main problem of data and document collection is not much different than in data science, where research and data cleaning/collection is by far the most time consuming part of the process. Improving OCR (and let's give Google credit for its work on tesseract) and creating a more friendly interface for tesseract (such as a training GUI) would be much, much more useful to the average investigative reporter.
And in terms of collection/research: if Google took up the work of reverse-PACER (for court documents), or furthered its work in election data (https://developers.google.com/civic-information/)...those would also be hugely beneficial initiatives.
I think any worthwhile investigative journalist will use what they see as a starting point for a deeper investigation. Writing about some visualization a tool showed you doesn't win you a Pulitzer.
Except that making vague accusations about large companies without evidence is possible more problematic than making them about people (which we get all the time now already). Companies can afford lawyers, and lawsuits for libel, even if not successful, will put a strain on a paper. If a paper is getting a double negative hit from an article, both in loss of reputation (if it has any left) and in legal fees in defending itself from libel, then it may be less willing to publish crap.
Of course, a well researched and written article will defend itself, and the last think a company that really has something to hide wants is to go to court when there's unflattering things that can be proven, not just reported.
If I was doing sensitive stuff, I wouldn't expect Google to protect me from anything in which the US has economic or intelligence interests.
I think these products are meant for journos and NGO workers who want some level of protection without knowing much about what they are doing.
The way I see it from under my tinfoil hat, is that this is a bit of protection paid for by making your work instantly indexed and searchable by the US for various purposes.
"Protect against hackers" I still feel bad when I see the word hackers used like that. Although words end meaning what the majority think they means, it feels wrong to see this usage in a Google website.
I miss old Google... Their UI was the simplest, most basic of all saas companies. My browser uses my GPU and my computer has 4x as many cores, and 4x as much memory. But googles web pages are unusable on my machine.
It may not make web designers swoon circle jerk, but a web site with 0 CSS (or close to) would give a better experience. In this case, and in many many many others.
It's not just Google. It has now become OK for developers to shift the burden of the app almost completely to the client. It has become OK to not care about graceful degradation if a user doesn't have JavaScript running. It has become OK to completely over engineer the front end, UX be damned.
Sidenote, but I'm taking a look at how googlers made this website. Reason for this is that whenever they create a webpage I can see how they've achieved an effect that people are blogging how to do efficiently. In this case the effect is the background parallax.
So... I see that they are doing this on their ideas page [1] with the following code on their background image :
Looks like hooli.xyz[1] got a better 'design' than Google. At least i can open their page.(Most HN users got a blank page when landing in goolge' IDEA.)
Fascinating. I'm not sure how long this has been around but feels like a nice counterweight to Tim Cook's critique last week about the importance of privacy and making the world a fairer/safer place.
Why is tracking radicalization in the Muslim world a bad thing for Google? The less conflict around the world means there are more people looking at ads.
Unlike the Cold War and the military–industrial complex, Google is actively pushing for 'peace'.
Google, like most other multinational companies inside the US, have partnerships with various parts of the US government.
Google is aligned with the United States State Department and DoD when it comes to investing and spreading American culture and values around the world.
This partnership brings the United States a lot of value, and those at Google also believe that it enriches their company, America and the world.
There is a bit of a paternalism to the conscious design of culture export, and it can be hard to think clearly about.
It which point the news agency could make a big deal out of it, probably not worth the hassle.
I mean you can search for bad stuff about google on google and find results - they havent filtered that either
ha, if they filter that, it will be the ultimate red flag. i read an article on prisonplanet.com that said they removed them, and cnet.com from search listings on the front page because they published some critical articles involving google and the 'see aye lmao' (three letters)
Google will, in all likelihood, very selectively give protection to news outlets.
For example those from the Board of Broadcasting Governors, or from the BIIP, or from USAID, or from US sponsored NGOs are definitely going to get support.
The website is a mess, but, I met a guy who works for this group a few weeks ago and it sounded pretty cool.
When I asked what the hell they did, he said that they did some Cloudflare like stuff for political speech in the middle east and spent a bunch of time on building and deploying infrastructure to link up a bunch of anti-human-trafficking agencies all across Asia.
Here's an idea for you, google: don't hijack my effing middle click. I use it to open the link in a new tab. It's not up to your website to override that.
> Being a corporation, it should not be allowed to be a player in geopolitics.
Says who? Corporations have been waist deep in geopolitics since (at least) the beginning of the 20th century. see British Petroleum & the Iran coup, or Hearst and the American-Spanish war ("You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.")
Here's a list of corporations that are also players in geopolitics
- Fox Media (and anything owned by Rupert Murdock)
My claim was a moral one. An entity like a corporation exists to make profit for shareholders and is therefore an amoral, psychopathic entity. Being subject to a corporation is fuctionally no different than being subject to a dictator or a king; it is a morally repugnant condition.
I was recently talking with my friend about Google and he brought up a good point.
Google had a really deep and good idea with PageRank for search, but what truly innovative ideas have they had since then? Scaling datacenters with commodity hardware? Giving people lots of free email storage? These were neat tricks (and huge engineering challenges) but they don't feel very game changing. Maybe I'll feel differently if I can ever get my hands on a self-driving car, but until then... I'm honestly curious what game changers Google has produced.
