Category: Decentralize

  • Why decentralized social networking never makes it — ever heard of Crossing the Chasm?

    Every now and then, the “why hasn’t decentralized social networking succeeded” discussion pops back up. And inevitably, that motivates somebody who thinks they can do better. They proceed to design a new set of decentralized networking protocols, write lots of code, and get early adopters to enthusiastically adopt the New Thing. Which then, inevitably, never…

  • Help me articulate the value of user-centricity, privacy etc

    Even after all these years working on user-centric identity, privacy-protecting technologies, open source, code in the hands of the user instead of the overlord … I’m still struggling with articulating the value succinctly. Case in point. I’m going through the strategic marketing exercise of describing for whom these kinds of products/technologies/services are, and what unmet…

  • In other news, Dezinformatsiya has been democratized

    Many of the countless mesmerizing stories in the Mitrokhin Archive deals with the KGB’s disinformation campaigns, mostly to sway public opinion in various European countries. We, in the West with upper-case Freedom-of-the-Press were outraged to learn that the press sometimes was printing deliberately falsified information, planted, for money or otherwise, by the KGB. How Could…

  • The Ethereum/DAO attack — what’s the message being sent here?

    So some guys say “code is law, this time it’s for real, and it sits on the Ethereum block chain”. Then, oops, the code does not do what it was intended to do, and … well, the only thing that comes to mind is Douglas’ Adams “so God said: ‘Oops, I didn’t think of that’…

  • Trying out IPFS — it was easy

    Sitting at the decentralized web summit today, there’s lots of talk about IPFS. So I played with it while they were talking. It was much simpler to set up than I thought. Here are my steps: I run Arch Linux (in VirtualBox, on my Mac) pacman -S ipfs-go ipfs daemon & Created a file called…