Amin Bandali: LibrePlanet 2022: The Net beyond the Web
Today I gave a talk at
LibrePlanet 2022
about the internet and the web, giving a brief account of the
web's past, its current state, and ideas for better futures.
In this talk I go over the old web (of 1990s and early 2000s)
and how websites looked back then, fast-forwarding to the present day
and the sad current state of the web, and some possibilities on where
we could go from here if we would like to have a better net/web in the
future for user freedom, privacy, and control.
Here is the abstract for my talk, also available on the
LibrePlanet
2022's speakers page:
The modern web is filled to the brim with complexity, no shortage
of nonfree software, and malware. Many, many people have written and
spoken at length on these issues and their implications and negative
effects on users' freedom, privacy, and digital autonomy. With the
advent of technologies like WebAssembly, the modern day web browser
has effectively become an operating system of its own, along with all
the issues and complexities of operating systems and then some.
Opening arbitrary websites with a typical web browser amounts to
downloading an executing [mostly nonfree] software on your machine.
But is all of this complexity really necessary? Is all of this needed
to achieve the web's original purpose, an information system for
relaying documents (and now media)? What if there was a way to do
away with all of these complexities and go back to the basics?In this talk we will examine the Internet beyond the modern web,
some possibilities of what that might look like with concrete examples
from protocols like Gopher from time immemorial, and more recent
experiments and reimaginations of it in today's world, such as Gemini
and Spartan. The talk will give a brief tour of these protocols and
their histories, what they have to offer, and why one might want to
use them in the 21st century.
Presentation slides:
txt |
pdf |
bib
Speaker notes:
txt
I will add the
presentation video once the conference recordings have been
processed and published by the Free Software Foundation.
You can watch the presentation video below:
Source: Planet GNU