Last week it was reported that GameStop, a clown show of a company peddling meme stocks and cheap video game merchandise, had unceremoniously and without notice shut down Game Informer, a magazine and website that had been publishing in some form since 1991. The decision was a terrible one for many reasons. For readers and […]
Maybe the Web should look more like Freenet or like BitTorrent.
But using a technology working the known way and trying to force conveniences by law seems sisyphean and harmful in many aspects.
If someone wants to keep old versions, let them. But forcing companies to host something is I dunno.
This is a strawman towards the actual issue which is the loss of information.
The least they could do is just provide a copy of their material to internet archive or some torrent site.
I think similarly about digital services stopping or hardware no longer getting support. Thats a fine and reasonable economy wise but at least have the moral decency to open source it instead.
The customer always gets screwed and the company somehow gets to keep the money. This case is slightly different, i don’t know if you had to pay for access but my sentiment of future use holds.
If someone had to pay for it, then sure, laws should address the issue. If there’s been some access time paid for remaining.
Look into maidsafe.
According to the site you have to buy tokens to use the network. Despite stating that the maidsafe network is decentralized, nobody controls it, etc., etc., having to buy tokens seems to be a barrier to entry.
I don’t know, I guess I have a hard time with a network that reserves access via a coin that fluctuates on a market price. Seems like they’re playing a “it’s like bitcoin, but not, but kinda is” type of game.
My understanding of its system is the following:
Hosting data costs money, so in order to have a decentralised hosting system there need to be an incentive for people to contribute hardware. Developing apps/websites costs money.
In the current internet, the incentive is that you can make money by harvesting people’s data (selling them to advertisers) and displaying ads to users.
What maidsafe proposes is that users use some of their hardware to host data, get paid in a dedicated currency that they then use to access website/apps which remunerate app developper. In this manner everyone has an incentive: users have an incentive to host data to not pay anything, developpers have an incentive to make apps in order to get paid, company and stakeholders have an incentive to invest into the system in order to have a presence/visibility.
I know nobody wants to pay to access the internet, but the truth is we already are paying for it, we just don’t realise it. If we want an ad-free internet there needs to be some other way users are paying for content, I think contributing CPU and HDD is a nice solution because it wouldn’t feel like paying.
The site is atrocious. I’ll look at it another time and try to get what it’s really about. But it seems really ADHD-hostile.
I’ve made another comment underneath my original one explaining my understanding of it.