| ▲ | RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020)(mnot.net) |
| 80 points by notarobot123 4 hours ago | 24 comments |
| |
|
| ▲ | dlcarrier 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Inevitably the internet will have two types of users: 1. The anti-bot bots that must stop you from proceeding, because they aren't entirely sure you aren't a bot
and 2. The bots that can get past them, which we all must eventually deploy, if we want a chance to visit a web page
|
| |
| ▲ | ACCount37 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why would anyone ever want to solve 99 Cloudflare captchas a day if you can get a bot to do it instead? | | |
| ▲ | iso1631 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Literally used an LLM to answer the latest one 20 minutes ago, which was "what can climb a tree". Cloudflare is a blight on the internet, but HN loves it. | | |
| ▲ | dormento 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things. It is akin to a disease. The question is, what is the alternative to cloudflare? We've tried (to various degrees) user id, micropayments, device attestation... I'm not hopeful we can actually solve this. Maybe if there was a neutral, "NGO-like" cloudflare of some sort? | | |
| ▲ | eqvinox 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things. How about an internet where we don't need CloudFlare? One without zillions of AI crawlers and script kiddies with Terabit DDoS capability… (the latter being the harder problem) |
| |
| ▲ | pocksuppet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Cloudflare just started blocking Googlebot, so maybe we'll see an exodus away from Cloudflare by people who want their sites indexed? Hopefully? | | |
| ▲ | warkdarrior an hour ago | parent [-] | | I thought Google Search is dead, everyone is using ChatGPT now to find information. | | |
| ▲ | fl4regun 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | but how does chatGPT find information? | | |
| ▲ | tempodox 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | With bots that break through cloudflare captchas. As a human, I immediately close the browser tab when I see one. If you make your site inaccessible for humans, only the bots remain. | | |
| ▲ | fl4regun 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I was more so asking how does it know where to look to find information, if things are no longer being indexed. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | ivanjermakov an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > but HN loves it There is popular sentiment on HN that CF is making internet worse by being a core infrastructure element most websites use. | | |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | aftbit 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The internet is for whoever wants to send bits to each other and is willing to pay for transit to do it. The WWW might be for end users, though that seems less obvious by the day. |
| |
| ▲ | pocksuppet an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Right. The RFC is attempting to clarify the IETF's official position. The IETF is not the internet police, and can't make other actors obey. We can make our own internet though - with blackhack and jookers. | | | |
| ▲ | supermaurio2000 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | what you write is excactly the problem the RFC tries to address.
And not only for http but for the whole internet protocol family. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | Atlas667 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is why ideology is so important. Is the end user viewed as an ISPs client? a consumer of tech companies? The idealistic language is fine but isnt based on any scientific approach to society. Its neutral at best. The internet is for end users, but how if its not "by end users"? If most protocols and standard implementations depend on adoption by ISPs and tech companies what does it mean to be "for the end user"? Is prison architecture "for the prisoners"? So how do we solve the "by end users" dilemma? |
|
| ▲ | iso1631 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Who's an end user. Unless you own your hardware, you aren't the end user. When your phone, tv, camera, or even laptop on a non-free OS is on your network, you can get some semblance of control by controlling what network services it uses. Things like DoH are part of the removal of my control as a home user and give it to Sony, or Apple, or TPLink The most obvious thing is it becomes harder to block adverts. Throw in internet-centralisation through HN darlings like cloudflare and you're screwed. You have no idea what anything is talking to, as it's the same destination IPs, so the choice is either block it completely, or allow it with no control. |
| |
| ▲ | 1718627440 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I do share your actual concern, but I think the term 'end user' applies to any human sitting in front of a computer, trying to achieve something, independently of whether the effective sysadmin works against his interests or not. | | |
| ▲ | __MatrixMan__ 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Right, it's not about property, it's just about whether the computer is helpful to the immediately available human or whether it serves some remote one. |
| |
| ▲ | remix2000 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Who's an end user. I think in this context it'd be any netizen who does not hold a significant amount of power to influence other [unrelated to them] netizens? | | |
| ▲ | iso1631 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | So me. The only influence I have over what "my" phone does is monitoring and blocking what it connects to when it's connected to my network. DoH works against that |
|
|
|
| ▲ | paulddraper 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This is an awkward read, the result of trying to convey an idea while couched in other language. That idea being that AI is less important than humans. |
