Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

Simple: We need to acknowledge that the vision of a decentralized internet as it was implemented was a complete failure, is dying, and will probably never return.

Robots went out of control, whether malicious or the AI scrapers or the Clearview surveillance kind; users learned to not trust random websites; SEO spam ruined search, the only thing that made a decentralized internet navigable; nation state attacks became a common occurrence; people prefer a few websites that do everything (Facebook becoming an eBay competitor). Even if it were possible to set rules banning Clearview or AI training, no nation outside of your own will follow them; an issue which even becomes a national security problem (are you sure, Taiwan, that China hasn't profiled everyone on your social media platforms by now?)

There is no solution. The dream itself was not sustainable. The only solution is either a global moratorium of understanding which everyone respectfully follows (wishful thinking, never happening); or splinternetting into national internets with different rules and strong firewalls (which is a deal with the devil, and still admitting the vision failed).

I hate that you're right.

To make matters worse, I suspect that not even a splinternet can save it. It needs a new foundation, preferably one that wasn't largely designed before security was a thing.

Federation is probably a good start, but it should be federated well below the application layer.

The great firewall, but in reverse.

What other choice do we have?

Countries, whether it be Ukraine or Taiwan, can't risk other countries harvesting their social media platforms for the mother of all purges. I never assume that anything that happened historically can never happen again - no Polish Jew would have survived the Nazis with this kind of information theft. Add AI into the mix, and wiping out any population is as easy as baking pie.

Countries are tired of bad behavior. Just ask my grandmother, who has had her designs stolen and mass produced from China. Not just companies - many free and open source companies cannot survive with such reckless competition. Can Prusa survive a world where China takes, but never gives? How many grandmothers does it take being scammed? How many educational systems containing data on minors need to be stolen? The MPAA and RIAA has been whining for years about the copyright problem, and while we laugh at them, never underestimate them. The list goes on and on.

Startups are tired of paying Cloudflare or AWS protection money, and trying to evade the endless sea of SEO spam. How can a startup compete with Google with so much trash and no recourse? Who can build a new web browser, and be widely accepted as being a friendly visitor? Who can build a new social media platform, without the experience and scale to know who is friend or foe?

Now we have AI, gasoline and soon to be dynamite on the fire. For the first time ever, a malicious country can VPN into the internet of a friendly nation, track down all critics on their social media, and destroy their lives in a real world attack (physical or virtual). We are only beginning to see this in Ukraine - are we delusional enough to believe that the world is past warfare? For the first time, anyone in the world could make nudes of women and share them online, from a location where they'll probably never be taken down. If a Russian company offered nudes as a service to American customers with cryptocurrency payments and a slick website that went viral, do you think tolerance is a winning political position?

A walled garden where each a real, vetted human being is responsible for each network device. It wouldn't scale but it could work locally.

Luckily the decentralization community has always been decentralized. There are plenty of decentralized networks to support.

I mean, it wasn't even that security wasn't a thing: the earliest incarnations of the Internet were defense projects, and after that, connections between university networks. Abuse was nonexistent because you knew everyone on your given network. Bob up the hall wouldn't try to steal your credit card or whatever, because you'd call the police.

I think a decent idea is, we need to bring personal accountability back into the equation. That's how an open-trust network works, and we know that, because that's how society works. You don't "trust" that someone walking by your car won't take a shit in your open window: they could. But there are consequences for that. We need rock solid data security policies that apply to anyone who does business, hosts content, handles user data online, and people need to use their actual names, actual addresses, actual phone numbers, etc. etc. in order to interact with it. I get that there are many boons to be had with the anonymity the Internet offers, but it also enables all of the horseshit we all hate. A spammer can spam explicitly because their ISP doesn't care that they do, email servers don't have their actual information, and in the odd event they are caught and are penalized, it's fucking trivial to circumvent it. Buy a new AWS instance, run a script to setup your spam box, upload your database of potential victims, and boom, you're off.

A lot of tech is already drifting this way. What is HTTPS at it's core if not a way to verify you are visiting the real Chase.com? How many social networking sites now demand all kinds of information, up to and including a photo of your driver's license? Why are we basically forbidden now by good practice from opening links in texts and emails? Because too many people online are anonymous, can't be trusted, and are acting maliciously. Imagine how much BETTER the Internet would be if when you fucked around, you could be banned entirely? No more ban evasion, ever.

I get that this is a controversial opinion, but fundamentally, I don't think the Internet can function for much longer while being this free. It's too free, and we have too many opportunistic assholes in it for it to remain so.

Me too.

Federation is indeed a good start, but DeFi helps spur adoption by having a broader scope.

> no Polish Jew would have survived the Nazis with this kind of information theft.

I'm not sure this is a good is a good example. I believe a majority of Polish Jewish survivors were those who fled into parts of soviet union not occupied by nazis(some were sent to gulags but this was still much better chance to survive then those who stayed in Poland). Another large portion were in concentration camps and hadn't been killed yet. And I believe 60,000 or less are estimated to have hid in Poland through the war. It's unlikely many remained in their pre war identities and simply concealed their Jewishness and managed to survive.

> Can Prusa survive a world where China takes, but never gives?

Can Prusa survive in a world where they only may operate in CzechNet, with the rest of the customer base being firewall off?

You’re assuming we couldn’t have mutually agreed upon interoperability treaties.

> It's too free, and we have too many opportunistic assholes in it for it to remain so.

There's some truth in this, but I think there is a lot of room for improving things as far as making life much more painful for opportunistic assholes in general.