[HN Gopher] Subvert network effects and encourage adversarial in...
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Subvert network effects and encourage adversarial interoperability
Author : walterbell
Score : 106 points
Date : 2022-04-18 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.promarket.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.promarket.org)
| TimPC wrote:
| The idea of giving random parties immunity from civil action for
| maximizing interoperability is downright dystopian. The direct
| effect would be something akin to an open access version of
| Facebook's API preventing lawsuits over another data breach like
| Cambridge Analytica.
|
| The entire article seems to border on ignoring the idea that we
| have data in silos that we want to be protected by more than just
| user permission to access that data. Especially when users can
| give those permissions to various parties who undergo changes of
| ownership.
|
| Open access is not as straightforward in the current web as it
| was before big data. This article did nothing to reassure me that
| those who believe in access have any sort of realistic plan for
| data privacy. Facebook is not an actor I want to trust with data
| and as a result I put very little data on it. But I trust the
| random apps made through their API by borderline unknown
| developers far less. I don't think someone getting access to data
| I have set to either friends of friends or friends because they
| played a quiz game is something I want an endless expansion of.
| yccs27 wrote:
| I don't think the author is envisioning anything that
| compromises privacy and data protection. "Immunity for
| maximizing interopability" means the right to ignore anti-
| interop ToS, not privacy.
|
| There are many use cases where either there is no privacy
| concern in the first place (think public Facebook pages locked
| behind account creation) or the user explicitly consents and
| enters their login information (e.g. in alternative WhatsApp
| clients).
| bsedlm wrote:
| At this rate (on the trend that this article also denounces), I
| feel like considering giving up computation altogether is on the
| table (like supposedly happened in the Dune fictional universe).
|
| RMS has been right all along, although he may not be delivering
| his message in the most effective way possible, the core of this
| ideology is the understanding that when software does not
| encourage freedom, is all but restricting it.
|
| (IMHO) Software is a development on par with writing itself.
| Writing as a technology provides the basis (the foundation) for
| all of what is considered "civilized", the law (in general, any
| and all law) is a written artifact.
|
| Hence, I conclude that as a society we need to acknowledge what
| software enables for the concept of law.
|
| However, unlike law which can (and has been) used to curtail
| freedom all through history, when written laws are used to this
| end they require a police or another kind of violent-if-necessary
| "enforcement". The critical point is that software does not need
| this kind of enforcement. Software can accomplish a comparable
| freedom-reduction much more softly; but not less effectively
| (arguably, software can be even more effective).
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| "(IMHO) Software is a development on par with writing itself.
| Writing as a technology provides the basis (the foundation) for
| all of what is considered "civilized", the law (in general, any
| and all law) is a written artifact."
|
| This is ... great, combined with the observation "software is
| eating the world".
| no_wizard wrote:
| This reminds me of another writer that's been writing about open
| and closed systems, Tim Wu.
|
| In his book _The Master Switch_ [0], he makes a similar argument,
| though in the case of this, it was open access and net
| neutrality, but I think the overall message and patterns around
| that he talks about, it is very much similar to whats being talk
| about by Doctorow. The sum of his argument maintains that
| basically open systems allow for high periods of innovation,
| experimentation, and ultimately new markets, and eventually, when
| those open systems start to get dominated by a few players, they
| tend to close and become entrenched, until they stagnant, and
| become open again. He also suggests, as part of the conclusion of
| his book, that if as society it is encouraged, for instance, for
| base systems to be open, you don't have to sacrifice interim
| innovation and growth that come with open systems, and therefore
| encouraging innovation across all affected sectors.
|
| Think about it like this. Large companies were once small, and
| when they were small, they built their backs on reverse
| engineering proprietary protocols and using open access systems,
| in which they were able to innovate in these spaces, while also
| able to _maintain_ that innovation catalyst by inter-operating
| with common systems (e.g TCP /IP, HTTP) and reverse engineering
| proprietary protocols. In the case of Apple, for instance, one of
| their primary motivations in investing in AppleWorks[1] is that
| they actively reversed engineered the Microsoft Office formats,
| which afforded interoperability with PCs. Arguably, without open
| access systems and the ability to reverse engineer these formats,
| Apple would not be where it is today. However now, legislation
| and legal precedent has been set that would be it, at best,
| dubiously legal, for a competitor to do just that.
|
| [0]: He gave a talk at Stanford based on the ideas of the book,
| which centered around net neutrality and open protocols, you can
| see that talk on YouTube:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij76dh_340w
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks
| cdoctorow wrote:
| It's not entirely a coincidence that Tim and I sound alike on
| this subject! We grew up together at the same hippie
| alternative school in Toronto and then both came under the
| influence of Larry Lessig in our adult lives.
|
| Tim and I got a chance to catch up at a Brussels antitrust
| conference last month and it was great to go over all the ways
| that our backgrounds contributed to our work in adulthood:
|
| https://www.cra-brusselsconference.com/home/Programme
| no_wizard wrote:
| That's amazing, such a small world! I been following Tim Wu
| since I first heard of him way way back when he was a guest
| on an early video series produced by _The Verge_ (the video
| series unfortunately, is now defunct, these were the Josh
| Topolsky days). No idea you guys were connected in any way.
|
| He's an amazing writer on the subject of information systems
| and broader society, in my opinion. I was drawn to your work
| via _Factually!_ of all things.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Wow hello famous person.
|
| This weekend I got back to doing a little bit of work on my
| TerseNet concept, inspired by one of your articles
| "https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-
| about-n..." and things like the Gemini Protocol with the idea
| of combating monopolies by making protocols simple enough for
| the average programmer or small team to implement them.
|
| https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet -- still just some ideas,
| not an actual prototype.
| pfraze wrote:
| Going to take a moment to mention - though I shared a
| disagreement elsewhere in the comments, I respect the work
| you've been doing Cory and I regret not saying so in my
| comment. I'm glad you're make a case for adversarial interop
| and I hope people do give it a shot.
| pfraze wrote:
| Doctorow is arguing for adversarial interop but also observes
| that companies shut down APIs due to them becoming data leak
| vectors and then use that concern to make circumvention illegal.
| The dilemma is real. You end up with a sense that fair access and
| security are meaningfully in conflict. Perhaps a bit like the
| anti-cheating DRM conversation in the RMS state of FOSS thread.
| I'm also reminded of the free speech vs moderation debate, where
| the common retort to decentralization by Twitter employees is
| "you don't know how impossible moderation will become."
|
| Im inclined to think the system has to be rearchitected to solve
| the dilemma such that interop is the default easier option. (And,
| ideally, makes data security default easier.) Nobody has
| succeeded at it yet but it's always the theory I've chosen to
| pursue.
| drewcoo wrote:
| The only thing missing in the "dilemma" is someone, teary,
| begging us to "think of the children."
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| "The dilemma is real."
|
| Um, authentication?
|
| The issue with API mass data leaks is unauthenticated access to
| the data.
|
| Facebook HAS a web-wide authentication service, to heap the
| irony. Which of course would be sabotaged, but there are of
| course other means to do basic authentication. The users
| presumably know their passwords.
|
| That is a fake issue, IMO.
| pfraze wrote:
| Is it fake? The relationship isn't just between the user and
| facebook (thus, auth) it's between the user, facebook, and
| the third-party app. The concern is that the 3rd-parties act
| maliciously; see the challenges with browser extensions.
|
| I'm not making excuses for the big companies -- I'm just
| trying to evaluate the challenges properly. If the core of
| the problem really is the behaviors of 3p apps, the security
| model for them is what a solution needs to address.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Then you get into... authorization.
|
| Yes, facebook and other social platforms have issues with
| people snagging account access, usually by shared password
| vectors, but come on.
|
| This is still basic meat and potatoes auth for a more open
| social "pan-platform".
| pfraze wrote:
| Well I'm more thinking of the problem that browser
| extensions had, where people would make something handy
| or fun, be granted perms by the user, then get sold to
| people looking to mine user data. Extension authors get
| solicitations for these sales constantly, and the sale
| prices can be really tempting for devs. A friend of mine
| just made a silly "cursor sparkles" extension and he's
| mentioned multiple of these emails.
|
| Regardless of how you feel about it, the Cambridge
| Analytica ordeal was entirely about using benign quiz
| apps to mine user data, and the pressure that Facebook
| received was to fix their security. That's a huge
| incentive to lock down fair access. So if this is the
| situation, we need to address it if we're going to fix
| the technical pressures that create monopolies.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Okay so they have wide authentication infrastructure, that
| much is obvious. However consider this:
|
| If users, say, want to use an alternative application to view
| their Instagram posts and Facebook posts, or an alternative
| application to interact with TikTok, you would, of course,
| need to authenticate the user against their service to read
| the APIs, and thats fine, applications can do that with user
| consent, and of course, if you do that, you can reverse
| engineer the platforms formats, as described in this article.
|
| The dilemma isn't being able to authenticate a user against
| an API, its that, if you actually go through and do this,
| Facebook, TikTok, Slack, or any other service, can use the
| courts to shut down your business. They have, effectively
| made this illegal, or at best, legally dubious, through case
| law and legislation. This was not always the case however, it
| hasn't always been this way, see Apple reverse engineering
| Microsoft Office document formats, or Airbnb scraping
| Craigslist to build their listings.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > the system has to be rearchitected to solve
|
| If it was obvious how to, we'd be talking about that, but it's
| not even obvious how to. A process to solve a problem no one
| knows how to solve can get co-opted and yield something awful,
| so I am _not_ inclined to start one yet.
|
| Moreover, there must be plenty of room for innovation.
|
| We're all using TCP/IP, which is a great win for
| interoperability, but also an enabler of proprietary
| application protocols above it because it didn't try to
| preclude them. We've missed out on some things though, in the
| CNLP/OSI side of things, but I'm not familiar enough with them
| to know just how tragic, if at all, that is -- we're pretty
| happy with TCP/IP anyways. Do note that no one forced TCP/IP on
| anyone. The best interop is that which arises w/o the use of
| force.
| pfraze wrote:
| >> the system has to be rearchitected to solve
|
| > If it was obvious how to, we'd be talking about that, but
| it's not even obvious how to
|
| We're in agreement, both on that and on your points on how
| innovation does happen. Basically all of the decentralization
| projects in the past ten years, from federation to p2p to
| blockchains, have been taking a stab at the greenfield
| approach. None of them have worked in the sense that they
| displace existing approaches, but I remain hopeful that
| something useful can come out of it all.
|
| As a fun aside, one of the more interesting semi-adversarial
| approaches I've seen was Delta Chat [1] which basically put a
| chat interface on top of email.
|
| 1. https://delta.chat/en/
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| This is somewhat semantic, but I think it's more accurate to say
| that adversarial interop leverages network effects, not subvert
| them. By enabling interop, you're expanding the network --
| sometimes enormously so, if interop lets you bridge otherwise
| closed networks. What you're subverting is rent sinking,
| monopolistic exploitation by network owners.
| munificent wrote:
| I suspect interoperability is fundamentally at odds with ad-
| driven business models.
|
| When your business is run on ads, you are essentially serving
| users a mixture of information they do want to see (content) and
| don't (ads). If your system must allow interoperability, then
| it's inevitable that a competitor will come along and separate
| out the content from the ads to give users the experience they
| want, but killing your business model as a consequence.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| Doctorow is correct here: interoperability is necessary, from a
| social perspective. Governments should mandate it.
| sofixa wrote:
| That's one of the things the upcoming Digital Markets Act is
| trying to tackle.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| the means advocated for here seem kind of strange though. He
| correctly points out that the biggest advantage social media
| incumbents have is their users data and network effects.
|
| His "comcom" methodology consisting of "reverse engineering,
| scraping, bots, and other improvisational techniques", is not
| exactly something I want near my personal information because
| unlikely the old days you're not reverse engineering hardware
| schematics, you'd be scraping people's private information.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| No, it think it's got to be something more than that. I have
| no idea how you'd do this from a legal perspective. But a
| base level of "core-functionality must interop". Social media
| federated by fiat.
| nine_k wrote:
| It's fine to scrape _your_ private information under your own
| control.
|
| Many people have the problem that their life's information is
| sitting in a proprietary silo, without a nice way to extract
| it. (Truth be told, Google does offer the "takeaway" thing,
| kudos. FB apparently does not.)
| bryan_w wrote:
| 1) FB does have a takeout product
|
| 2) Scraping your data for your use might be fine, but what
| about the private data of friends and family that you have
| access to? Do you want grandma to be able to scrape all
| your posts/pictures/etc just because she wanted to take the
| "What kind of harry Potter broomstick are you?" Quiz?
| nine_k wrote:
| For (2): Whatever you've one made available, is
| available. You _lose control_ once you make it available.
| You can ask nicely not to do certain things with what you
| divulge, but you cannot enforce it.
|
| So yes, as long as grandma has access to my pictures,
| it's fair use for her to collect them. Republishing them
| to a wider circle than originally posted is a different
| matter.
|
| This is the reason I only post online such things which I
| can repeat under oath, or see posted on the busiest
| crossing.
| Crespyl wrote:
| > FB apparently does not
|
| At least as of a few years ago (~2015/2016) they did; when
| I deleted my own FB account I found an option that allowed
| me to download a zip archive of my photos and posts. No
| idea if they still support that now, or where they've
| hidden the option if so.
| carapace wrote:
| Yeah. I went in swinging with a chip on my shoulder but I
| couldn't find fault with the article. Solid as heck for the
| internet. (IMO)
|
| The one major problem I see with all this is mass adoption: it
| feels like most folks just don't care, and most of the folks
| who do care wind up using the "bad stuff" anyway (mostly out of
| convenience, but also due to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).)
|
| Even the right-to-repair and "comcom" mandates rest on popular
| support, eh?
|
| To me that seems like the "800 lb gorilla": how do you get the
| average user to care about this stuff?
| sbazerque wrote:
| The Internet became mainstream because folks could use modems
| and phone landlines (circuit switching technology, that the
| new TCP/IP end-to-end packet switching stack would eventually
| replace) to get online.
|
| The path for mass adoption of the new, p2p and interoperable
| technologies is the same: make them work on web browsers
| (using the browser as a full peer, not a client). It is the
| ubiquitous VM: JavaScript, WASM, IndexedDB,
| WebRTC+WebSockets, all the pieces are there.
|
| The building blocks for a representation / data model are all
| in the air as well: CRDTs, Merkle-ized structures, content-
| based addressing, etc.
|
| I'm a believer.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > it feels like most folks just don't care, and most of the
| folks who do care wind up using the "bad stuff" anyway
| (mostly out of convenience, but also due to FOMO (Fear Of
| Missing Out)
|
| They do care, but most of us lack the understanding and
| vocabulary to change. All these things can be overcome. FOMO,
| worship of convenience, lock-in, or fear of being different.
| Never give in to bullying by weak-minded naysayers and
| defeatists who shout "resistance is useless", or demean
| others by presuming to know "what they want" or saying that
| "ordinary people are too stupid..." etcetera. These are the
| vestiges of the 20th century hacker that we must shake-off as
| a culture.
|
| These are mild obstacles in the end. People can be educated.
| Please help spread the word about Digital Vegan [1] which is
| an attempt to make a case for "healthier technology". Spread
| the word about Humane Tech [2] and the harms inflicted by
| incumbent monopolies
|
| As an ordinary citizen. speak your mind and remain true to
| the values of what you think technology can be, not the pale
| imitation offered by so-called "Big Tech". I personally
| refuse to use any big-tech products and I use what influence
| I have to convince others to drop them too.
|
| Interop will not happen by legislation alone, it also
| requires awareness, dissent and self-determination. People
| must be reminded that it is their right to be masters of the
| technology necessary for modern life, not slaves to it.
|
| [1] https://digitalvegan.net
|
| [2] https://www.humanetech.com/
| manesioz wrote:
| Or at the very least, not criminalize competitive compatibility
| attempts.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Imposing interoperability has other costs than switching costs:
| mainly the opportunity cost of stifled innovation.
|
| All costs must be taken into account.
|
| Cost of opportunity is immeasurable.
|
| This is not an easy task.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| Perhaps. But all the core protocols of the web were done
| using government money and standardized as a public good. I
| don't see why social media protocols should not have some
| base level standard of interoperability, given their
| importance in society.
|
| I don't begrudge FB and Twitter their success. But I think
| that, as with the previous generations of captains of
| industry, it is time that the winners take into account the
| public good.
|
| Something like the living web standard for social media would
| be nice.
| capableweb wrote:
| Wouldn't imposing interoperability be the opposite of
| stifling innovation? It's forcing companies to allow others
| to innovate as well, as they'll actually have a chance of
| breaking into the market of the dominant player. If Twitter
| can (and will) act without interoperability, they can
| shutdown anyone who tries to interop, stifling innovation in
| the space at large, while if they are forced to allow
| interoperability, other players can also enter the market.
| cryptonector wrote:
| It depends! For example, IPv4 did inhibit some innovation
| (think CNLP, OSI, IPv6, etc.), and TCP did too (probably),
| each at their respective layers, but TCP/IP produced a
| great deal of innovation at layers above, and that's easily
| worth the opportunity cost of missed innovation at the the
| network and transport layers.
|
| But now suppose we standardized on Java or Ada or something
| for app dev. That would _not_ be good, and the opportunity
| cost of inhibited language development would be awful.
| Standardization in APIs is worse even, if you disallow
| extensions, but is less nasty if you do allow extensions.
|
| So, yeah, "it depends" is the best I can do for an answer.
|
| Sometimes it's possible to reduce the opportunity cost of
| innovation inhibition by standardizing in mature technology
| spaces, but sometimes a sector that appears mature is ripe
| for disruption, so it can be really hard to predict. And we
| cannot know what we've lost for quite some time after the
| standard is imposed.
|
| So on the whole I'm disinclined to have standardization
| forced on the market.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, it may stifle innovation in the _protocol_ , while
| encouraging innovation in the _implementation_ and /or _use_.
| In my book, that 's a net win.
|
| Why? There's less room for innovation in the protocol. Take
| TCP, for instance. Could it be improved? Probably. But how
| much gain are you going to get by innovating there? On the
| other hand, how much was enabled, on both ends of the wire,
| by everything standardizing on TCP? Far, far more than we
| could ever get by a "better TCP".
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