The author is talking about owning a domain and how having that domain gives you ownership over your data... But I can't but think that, at least in the US, domain names are rented from private Internet service providers. There is no ownership involved. One way or another, we are still paying a company.
The assumption of the article is that ISPs are stable and net neutral enough that one would not worry about the ISP going under or seeking some personal vendetta against you and booting your domain. A separate entity may no longer be hosting our data, but a private entity is the gatekeeper of whether anyone is able to see your data.
All that to say, if we want true ownership of domains, ISPs need to be a nationalized, democratized service.
While I agree with the sentiment, I think it confuses ISPs with registrars. There are still many ISPs that do that service as well, it's less common than it used to be.
It is quite common for national TLDs (like .de, .jp or .cn) to be managed by not-for-profit entities, under contract with their respective governments... which might also not be great wrt censorship.
There is also the general issue of equal access, where shorter, more memorable domains get more expensive and hodling domain names is only disincentivized for people without enough funds. I would very much like to see an alternative system to domain names, probably something more in the web of trust space.
>The author is talking about owning a domain and how having that domain gives you ownership over your data
I've actually tried to separate the two in the article although it might be subtle (because I didn't want to make it confusing).
Owning a domain means you own your handle. Not data. In atproto, a domain is just a handle — you can swap it out without breaking links. (This relies on a centralized auditable repository which is currently being moved out of Bluesky as a separate independent entity. If you don't want to rely on that, yes, you'd have to tie your identity to the domain.)
Owning "data" is not related to owning the domain per se. It has to do with the fact that you can point your identity at a different physical server over time without breaking links. So your hosting doesn't have any real leverage over you. That's what I mean by meaningful ownership.
I've sort of conflated domains and persistent identity in the article to simplify the picture a bit. Your identity is not tied to a domain, but a domain serves as a bidirectionally verified user-friendly alias for it. If you lose control over the domain, you can tie a different one to the same identity later. This doesn't break links between records or functionality.
The most safe way to accomplish what you want is using postal pigeons, made stealthy with black spray paint.
All jokes aside, an educated guess on what to trust (or not) is necessary. Otherwise you wind up on a slippery slope that goes in circles and always results in 'we need more laws'.
Long way to say that I think 'owning' a domain name and publishing on there is way better than the silos we're accustomed to nowadays. The open web never stopped working as intended, the genie is out of the bottle for 30+ years yet, make use of it if you want.
Easy. Trust cryptography. I generate a private key and sign everything as me. This takes out all the BS. Of course you cant age verify and anonymous accounts and spam become easy. But that is your trade-off. Nostr allows relays to filter out shit they dont like. So you can have your 4chan but also your more moderated sites too.
Governments can and do censor domains. A theoretically censorship-proof system is impossible; even communication over bluetooth or radio can be shut down by signal jamming and physical persecution.
Also, you technically "own" your data on any social network. If you put a public key in your bio and archive every post, you can move to another network. Then use friends and close followers to broadcast your new location; those who care will probably find you without much effort, but if not, Open Social doesn't solve this problem either.
However, I still think Open Social is an improvement. Most social networks are really bad these days: manipulated engagement-driven algorithms, locked-down data accessible via poor UI, toxic community, and inconsistently-applied unspoken rules. These issues all have workarounds, and can still happen on Open Social (BlueSky's community is toxic, I don't know if its algorithm is gamed or its global moderation is reasonable). But it certainly makes them harder to form and easier to avoid:
- If everyone's data is available raw via API, it's easier to create your own algorithm and frontend (or realistically, use someone else's which is better designed and more suited to you personally than what a generic social media company would make)
- With all data available, it's more likely people will develop better algorithms to filter out toxicity and discover interesting posts. At minimum, it's more acceptable and easier to create whitelisted groups, where one person maintains an "algorithm" that simply selects posts they (and others who are granted invites) have determined are not trolls.
- If data access and ban lists are separate, the same network can have multiple ban-lists, so being banned isn't "all or nothing". You can choose a ban-list with rules you agree with and continue to see posts that most others would prefer banned. If no ban list is dominant, there's a good chance the rules that the ban-lists share are reasonable; you can worry less about being banned inconsistently or for a widely-considered unfair reason (e.g. upsetting a specific moderator), because in those cases you'll only be banned from one list.
- If having a public key and archive of your data is the default, and your followers' frontends automatically recognize the key and find your new domain/hub (e.g. if someone links it to the old hub), it's easier to move. If BlueSky shuts down tomorrow, some clients can just be updated to point to another domain with all the data and continue working as if nothing changed. Whereas if Reddit shuts down, in theory one can develop a clone from scratch and populate it with the archived data, but users would have to re-register and it would be a huge mess (+ legal issues).
There are clearnet websites for flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, cults, hacker groups, classified document leakers, nazi groups and terrorist organisations. Finding a registrar that lets you say what you want is a solved problem.
Currently most people publish stuff on big platforms so governments, activists and billionaires will go after these platforms to influence or control what's being talked about. I worry that if we never had big platforms, or we moved past them, all of the focus would be on going after registrars and hosts instead. It's not a bulletproof system unfortunately
I was hoping to get some commentary about the project and what lessons you learned from it. You wrote an OS in 1000 lines of Zig, but... So what? What should I take away from this? Are you posting this to encourage people to use the OS, or learn from the project? How was Zig helpful or a hindrance for this? Why limit to 1000 lines? Why did you post this?
You might want to look at the author's comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290591) posted at about the same time as the link itself, which largely answers these questions.
Sometimes I look at the way C macros are used to simulate generics and wonder to myself... Why don't y'all just put templates into the standard? If the way you're writing C code is by badly imitating C++, then just imitate C++! There's no shame in it!
C++ doesn’t force you to pay for anything you don’t use so you can just use the C++ compiler at that point and change the few incompatibilities between C and C++.
That said…I agree that there is a lot of syntactic sugar that could be added for free to C.
That seems unlikely, the code to do that would be part of the OS or maybe even part of the hardware, not really trivial things to hack.
Plus, what could a hacker really do with voice recordings that they couldn't do more easily with keylogging? It's not exactly common for people to say their credit card info or passwords aloud, much more common to type it
I work at Microsoft, so I'm biased, but C# may be my favorite language I've worked with compared to C++, Python, Type/JavaScript, Java, C, etc.
I see/hear jokes often that it's Microsoft Java, and yeah definitely granted that it comes from the same origins, but it's got some of the greatest tools I've worked with, best documentation, and best support I've seen. Anytime I've asked myself "Can I do this with C#?", the only times the answer has been "no" is when looking for a C++ constexpr equivalent (closest you get is build-time code-gen, which ain't half bad), or discriminated unions (inexplicably).
I'm convinced that anyone who complains about C# has never used it.
This is exactly right. DOGE deserves no praise. Their goal is not to cut spending to bring money back to the people. Their goal is to gut the government itself and make it ineffective in improving people's lives. They don't actually care whether these departments are "wasteful", and anyone who thinks they do has bought and drunk the snake oil.
