I have a feeling this has to do with AI and all the lawsuits regarding content and copyright, storing and displaying the contents of a third party website to the end user might not be the best idea right now (I know the way back machine exists but they’re not a for profit company like google).
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." -Winston Churchill
A paradox of politics is that the desire to not talk about politics favors the status quo, necessitating the need to talk about politics.
It's obvious to me that AI is being rolled out in just exactly the wrong way at multiple levels, creating misaligned incentives and a perversion of original goals. But the knee-jerk reactions to it that drive the creation of draconian policies were predicted almost a century ago.
It seems that everything we hold sacred is under attack in these times. The smart bet seems to be on ensh@ttification. Because the organizations that were formerly stewards of online freedom have abdicated their responsibility.
I find it helpful to remember that every misstep by established players creates an opportunity for newcomers to compete.
Instead of "AI"(be real, llms and stable diffusion) being developed openly and studied without a profit motive, it's been thrust into the cheap world of VCs looking to extract any profit whatsoever from it, nearly immediately.
This has caused these "AI" tools to be used to steal and rehash artists work(cheapening artists because tech bros and MBAs resent art and the time it takes to perfect). Cheapening human labor(why pay a person to understand anything when you can have an llm do 20% of the job and worse).
These AI tools were thrown in the deep end with a singular purpose: Cheapen what was thought to be protected from computers, while not providing any real value to the layperson.
The average person can maybe get a funny joke, a bad few lines of code, or an ugly bespoke AI image for their medium article, but the true winners are the ones cutting jobs en masse before the tech has even matured, so both the employee and the customer gets a worse product while the MBA's show a solid quarterly report after they ran a knife across their workforce's neck.
Those with power and money have continued to show they will not use technology for any positive societal purpose until they are forced to with regulation. So we're forced to neuter the technology before it can really develop. It's like one child playing violently with a toy, forcing the teacher to take the toy away from everyone else.
There should be no surprise that "those with power and money" will not willingly apply "technology" for social good. It should be expected, rather. Your comment brings to mind Edward R. Murrow's speech in 1958 about the direction of television (certainly would be "high tech" back then!) He and others envisioned education, information, and enlightenment from this technology. Well, you know what we got instead. Here is a summary of the speech, and you can hear the whole thing on youtube if you like- still absolutely relevant.
We can see the same thing with other newer media; Ex. video games. I don't have solutions per se, though I wish this pattern could be different. The profit motive and appealing to base instinct seems to always "win".
The target of my comment is specifically the "well profit=good" crowd on here.
It's to point out the innate contradiction in how we speak about technology compared to the guaranteed outcome in our system.
We're doomed as a species if we keep believing in the magical market as a primary mover for said species. We'll stall in a circlejerk of ads and stock buybacks and never accomplish anything, because any good use for technology is locked behind a gate due to the lack of profit.
Any improvement in medicine is behind lock and key because the pharmaceutical companies "need to make back their investment" despite massive gov funding.
We're killing ourselves here with the spectacle that this system is either working or worth saving.
True points, and I apologize for missing you actual point and wandering off a bit. We probably need another social model for technological development specifically- but I am not sure what it might be. If there is anything useful to salvage from my previous its that this issue has been with us for a long while.
I think amazing gains could be made if we ripped the bandaid off and took all the weapons manufacturers and other gov contractors and used that brain power entirely for darpa style public works projects.
Our current military industrial project is just a self fulfilling fantasy. Stop the contracts for war, create contracts and research for moving humanity forward without the need to strap it to a missile 20 years before it hits shelves. Keep IP rights publicly owned, license them to anyone and use the licensing fees to fund new research.
One could make a similar argument about every other major technological advance in history.
I’m not sure why people seem to believe AI is different or special or what leads them to believe you can stop it anymore than the automated loom or the combine harvester.
Given the invention of the cotton gin, the slave owners should have been clubbed to death and the technology not used to make slavery more enticing but to improve productivity to reduce level of effort and provide more free time.
> "Hey, does anyone know why the web has become so boring and useless???"
Yes, I know. Some companies have abused the social contracts of the web which were in place since its inception, and told that they are doing something amazing so they need no permission to do what they're doing.
They already are, with content platforms clamping down on public access, with more and more content locked away behind exorbitantly expensive APIs (mostly thinking reddit and twitter here)
MaidSAFE afaict is just another IPFS which you can pay to get your data hosted on.
HyperCore apparently got acquired and they are a company seeling solutions to businesses.
Freenet 2023 is a FOSS project. I'm watching the matrix server for a while. Ian says they're launching the network in 2 weeks. It is a decentralized data store + runtime. So while the original Freenet was analogous to disk, Freenet 2023 is analogous to an entire computer. See https://freenet.org/
They encrypt every chunk of data, using "self-encryption." They don't require a manual market for hosting (like IPFS) so people can't be intimidated into not hosting something.
They even have their own implementation of the DHT which removes IP addresses after the first hop, so you can't discover the whole network and DDOS it / block it (which is not true of HyperCore, IPFS, etc.)
>> You're likely to want to store data on the Network. Why? Because in return for a very small one-time payment, your data will then be stored forever, encrypted and accessible anywhere in the world and only by you—unless you choose to share it.
No different than IPFS.
>> Safe Network Tokens are the incentive mechanism that encourages individuals to provide the computing resources that the Network requires: storage, broadband, and CPU resources. ... Individuals who choose to supply the resources that the Network requires have the opportunity to be rewarded with Safe Network Tokens. This work ensures that the Network rewards those who provide it with valuable resources.
> They encrypt every chunk of data, using "self-encryption."
>> Next, let's talk encryption. Imagine you want to store a photo. That data is protected by a number of layers of encryption. Your photo starts by being broken into pieces which are then encrypted with the other parts of that same file. This 'Self-Encryption' happens before the data ever hits the Network. So, unless you choose to override it, none of your data touches the Network unless it is encrypted. And it’s designed so that you're the only one that ever holds the key.
If you hold the key, why bother encrypting the data with itself? TBH the entire thing reads like a new crypto.
> They even have their own implementation of the DHT which removes IP addresses after the first hop, so you can't discover the whole network and DDOS it / block it (which is not true of HyperCore, IPFS, etc.)
This also makes large parts of the network unreachable. Freenet achieves DDOS protection without this extreme measure[2]. It also allows development of all sorts of apps, it's not only for data storage.
You’re wrong. SAFE is autonomous, meaning no one has to agree to host your thing, and no one has to agree to pay you for hosting. You just spin up a node and earn coin. With IPFS there are manual deals, it’s not clear how to actually get paid for your file space, and they even opened up a new tier that pays 10x filecoin block rewards for hosting data they consider “important”, but the hosts for that data don’t charge any fees and despite being quite tech-savvy I couldn’t figure out how to start earning FileCoin for hosting, using their program at all! Do I just pin the IDs of data which is going to possibly earn me 10x block rewards, or do I need to advertise and get someone to whitelist me for a “deal”? (Did anyone here do it successfully?)
> This also makes large parts of the network unreachable. Freenet achieves DDOS protection without this extreme measure[2]. It also allows development of all sorts of apps, it's not only for data storage.
Not that kind of DDOS. If I know the IP addresses of all the nodes on the network, I can flood them with traffic via the DHT leaking their IP.
Freenet does antiflood tokens on the level of their protocol, but I can DDOS their ports and subnets without conforming to the protocol. SAFE doesn’t let you even send a message to the end-computer’s IP because there is NO ADDRESS on any protocol (including BGP) that would route it there. That makes the network harder to block.
Also, I fail to see how this makes parts of the network ureachable. It’s just that I need the neighbors of a node to agree to forward info to that node. Unless you mean eclipse attacks?
> If you hold the key, why bother?
That’s a very good question… this is the only patent their team ever made… the data is encrypted using its own contents instead of relying on an external key, to aid in things like deduplication as multiple people storr and encrypt the data, while each has their own key to access it:
https://youtu.be/Jnvwv4z17b4?si=oHM96fBjCVGaGmSN
It’s not a “new crypto”. That video is 9 years old, and SAFE network started before Bitcoin! Just a bit after Bittorrent. They started in 2006 and are still working on it.
Can you be more specific about which proofs you want to see?
Self-encryption patent? Or the functioning of the network in general?
Im new here so unsure of the policy on links, but please search for safenetform.
Folks there will be delighted to answer your queries. This project is very different from most and it can take a little effort to grasp it. That effort is very much worth it.
"AI is doing a thing which we have already been doing for most of the internet's existence; this thing is central to the internet as we know it works today."
Versus
"AI is doing a thing that we stopped doing proactively because we thought it might be illegal, which also means it's clearly not that important to the web, please let us keep doing it for AI training."
Probably more to do with google hating maintaining stuff and they probably lose money showing you stale websites with stale ads instead of a live one with live ads
It could also be security related. I know occasionally companies accidentally make things public they didn’t intend to be public due to misconfiguration. Once this happens, those pages are available in the Google cache even when they’re no longer accessible. You can request the cached results be removed, but this takes time.
