On 2009-01-12, Dana Paxson <[email protected]> wrote: > > > True -- the Web gained immense leverage from its ease of access. But so > did a lesser example: CB radio. They created a commons, in each case: a > place shared for general good. > > And then began the rise of the hooligans -- in both cases. The commons > got raided and seized by those who only wanted to own them and exploit > others. CB radio became a useless fog of noise. The Web has become a > home for professional malware and financial exploitation.
But unlike CB radio, our economy would utterly collapse without the web in its current, stateless (one-way) form. And in any case, you might just as well have described early (or modern) cities: Homes for professional malfeasance and financial exploitation. Our hindsight > tells us that two-way links might have helped -- they might still help, > if we can find the geniuses who can implement them cheaply and usably. Implementation cost is no longer the issue, as it was with Xanadu (and OpenDoc, my other analogy). You yourself could invent a half a dozen more or less workable methods of implementing 2-way hypertext across HTTP with an hour's thought -- I've no doubt of that. You needn't even change HTTP -- you could use a layered approach to add meta-protocols onto HTTP. What is a protocol, anyway, but an agreement to communicate in a certain way? Just add new layers to that agreement. HTTP is dirt-simple; the result could be dirt-simple, too. The critical issue now is critical mass of acceptance: new protocols would not useful unless enough interesting pages used them that people started to regard them as useful. (Or that systems started to regard them as useful. People wouldn't need to be aware of their existence.) One of the benefits of using HTTP is that you need not even have the same 2-way protocol operating on all pages, as long as there was some means of inter-operating. A page could load a script, for example, that maintained a DOM object mapping Dana's 2-way protocol with, say, Tim B-L's. Or it may even be sufficient to simply add extra arguments to the same anchor tag: One for the Dana protocol, one for the TBL. Who knows -- I haven't heard of anyone trying it yet, but I'd be amazed if that was due to anything aside from my own isolation: People MUST be trying this kind of thing. (Aside: It seems to me that Jabber is likely doing something like a 2-way link, already, since it's essentially HTTP driven and session-bound.) After all, we've built spam filters and anti-malware code of great > sophistication and power; couldn't that same ingenuity be applied to > redesigning TCP/IP and fitting it forward to prevent what we suffer now? > > One-way links have the terrible weakness of anonymity of their source -- > a virtue in a trustworthy setting, but a weakness in the general world. A weakness, but also a strength, because it allows me to be unconcerned with getting the approval of anyone I link to. I regard that as a great boon to free society, by way of encouraging the free flow of information. Two-way links imply two-way approval: I would have the right to deny someone the ability to link to me. Personally, I think that's wrong, and I think it would be liable to kill network viability. There's an analogy that's liable to be drawn between HTTP linking and person to person networking. Metcalf's law applies profoundly to the latter, but not so profoundly ot the former, due in large part to the lack of 2-way authority on links. That's as it should be. Metcalf's law has been taken far too seriously for far too long, anyway. E-mail has similar weaknesses, also designing in the anonymity of its > source, and that took us into the tornado of spam and malware. Now > we've at least set up filters, but they're a major pain -- we're > addicted to convenience. "Addicted" is an interesting word, and certainly valid from one perspective. But another way to put it -- not contradictory -- would be to say that our economy is reliant on that arrangement. As with HTTP, though not as profoundly: We could restructure SMTP to remove many of the vulnerabilities and effect a swtich that took in most economically-active users without losing the essential power of email. It would cost, though. I think the real argument has been around who gets to reap the cost. It's funny how the idea of hypertext, as Nelson foresaw it, was > circulating in the 1960s across the computing community. I recall > discussing it with a systems architect who had worked at Univac in Blue > Bell, PA, back in the 1970s. We were both doing mainframe work. Back > then, the computing power to do what we were talking about was simply > nonexistent. > > ... >From what I can see, the key innovation that lead to the Internet we use today was simplicity through layering. I may be suffering from a layman's oversimplified view of networking protocols, but it seems to me that internetworking works so well because the grammar is simple enough to be universal. That's the lesson of TCP/IP, it seems to me. You're better situated than I to have a technical opionon on that, though. -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
