oscargrouch

Im doing a "browser-based something" that can mostly be reasoned about as a web-over-rpc-services where the primary pitch to start it, was exactly based on the thinking generously expressed by this article (albeit i had to start it much earlier).

The first thing is to expect the app devs to define a api in RPC so that what they app serve it transparent to the whole platform.

That way, users and other apps can reuse that api and integrate tools and other services without worrying about if the node is online or not.

Given they are RPC (over TCP or IPC), they can be used as a peer node in a distributed computing flock or in the app service process the application can serve the RPC requests not locally if it wants or needs, but going over the network.

But even in the case it goes straight to the "cloud" for resources, in the node it will always go through the RPC-api first. (How the application handle the RPC request is defined by the app developers).

There are a lot of others important details actually, for instance the UI sdk, window management, its already there, the storage layer (files and key-value db) are distributed over p2p(torrent) and everything is accessible/bootstrapped through a DHT address accessible anywhere.

But imagine if you had this architecture before, and Twitter, Facebook or Google search had to install a api-based application, where they need to ask you for permission to index content, or store locally your list of friends.. where later other apps could extract that information from your machine.. For instance you could change your search to DDG or export your Facebook list of friends and post to some other social network(this is actually the primary reason almost no one could compete with a popular social network).

In the end, things that should be yours are yours and third-party apps will have to be installed and granted permission by you to manage that digital property.

But overall i'm very glad to see that this is starting to become some sort of a trend, that people are finally waking up, because despite of all technological implications of it, it also have a lot of political and social benefits to this approach.

There are 11 or 12 supreme court judges. While one or two may present some "tastes" here and there, overall, all of them together are doing a good job til now.

Gilmar Mendes sometimes free their rich pals from prison here and there, but in other matters hes not that bad.

Dias Toffoli also do some shady things here and there but some bad things he did got reverted back by the other judges.

I dont think is fair to say they "represent the other side", first because this gives a dichotomistic way to see things that are far too simplistic.

Also because as a Brazilian too, im very thankful for what the two other powers; judiciary and legislative, have being doing to put the executive at least in check.

The president is nuts, and the country is without any sort of leadership, and if it were only incompetence, but the problem is that this guy is trying by any means necessary to do a takeover move over the republic..

And if those other powers weren't in opposition, trying to defend the democratic institutions, we would be heading to some sort of Putin state.

So of course that nothing is perfect, but overall i've been positively surprised about what they have done so far.

The individuals in question, after being blocked on portuguese language, just changed their profiles as they were in english. It was just a matter of people that follow them changing their preferences making the court order ineffective. (Again their content were being delivered to Brazilian followers)

Than the court sent another order to block the content for Brazil of those specific profiles, in a way the content were not delivered to brazilian citizens.

This is exactly what the court order is saying..

Now if Facebook or Twitter cant act on geolocation, its a technical problem, that they need to solve, as its just a matter of blocking based on geolocation of the people who are seeing that content, the target, and not just the source.

I've read the court order, and it does not cover people from other nationalities, as if we follow whats being said on the court order, they are not the target.

Now if Facebook cant deliver this, they are just asking to loose the battle giving its pretty easy to destroy the narrative.

BTW, Brazil are more akin to Europe's convention to free speech, as to remediate things like "hate speech" learning from the past with the way fascist regimes spread out over Europe.

I dont know why Facebook feels entitled somehow to think the US way of seeing and working with free speech should be forced on others sovereign nations.

The Supreme Court asked them to block the delivery of content inside of Brazil, for brazilians in Brazil's territory.

It doesnt matter where the original account is stored.

Those accounts are part of a large network of fake news spreading, with a lot of cash apparently originating from the country government itself..

The individuals themselves keep all the free speech rights.. they can go to newspapers, social media or speak on the streets. The only thing that is blocked its the accounts that are bounded to this fake news network process being judged by the supreme court.

Free speech cant be used as an excuse to constantly commit abuses and crimes that menace to demolish democratic institutions.

Democracy must have means to protect itself from malicious actors that are massively lying in a industrial scale fomented by big money from populists that dreams becoming dictators.

If part of this money is public, this is even worse.

We should have learned at least one or two about how the proto-fascists used every immoral and even illegal trick in the book to turn a democratic society into a fascist nightmare.

You know there is this movement called open source software right? With it not only a lot of strategical pieces of software are available to anyone to modify, but it also allowed people all over the world to contribute to them. This means that not only Europe but other parts of the world have people with enough knowledge to not only contribute, combine and use those things but also to 'push the envelope' in research and development.

BTW, a more decentralized, organic tech world, is something we should try to achieve, because as we are seeing now, there are no safe heavens for anything, anymore.

We should think more like human beings and less with nationalistic mentality, because all i've seeing til now, is nationalistic values being use not just to undermine other countries, but also undermine the nationalistic's own country.

If there's one valuable lesson history teach us, is that even the Rome empire, comparatively much powerful than anything we have now, started to fall when they corrupted the core values that served as a foundation of the Roman empire.

And nationalistic, the "we are better than everyone else", walls, stupid wars, etc..

But lets not forget an important difference here, right now all the achievements, the culture, the universities, the internet, the knowledge is widespread all over the world..

This is a pandora box effect, that once opened, cannot be closed anymore.

So even if the US totally closed itself to the world, im pretty sure the world would keep moving forward, and once this Donald Trump version of US lost it all and tried to become part of the world again, im pretty sure, it would be welcomed with open arms, and a catch up path would be offered to try to recover what was lost along the way. A sort of "Marshall plan" only that this time it would be to put the US back on their feet.

I hope the US dont keep going through this path that only leads to self-destruction..

But if its because of safety, why only JavascriptCore VM allow write execute flag? If that was the real reason then, dont you think it should also be disabled in JavascriptCore?

Or the real reason, is as it was pointed out in the other comment, is to cripple other browser engines that offer a platform that could actually be competitive with AppleKit's turning their control over the App store (and what people are allowed to access according to their own taste) irrelevant?

And if that's the real reason behind it, its clear the end user best interests are not being taken into account, as in not having access to possible better options according to your own tastes, contrary to what a lot of people in the comments here are trying to make we believe its true.

They don't need to support, they just have no right to forbid. There's a big difference between those two things.

Imagine if windows crippled Netscape by forcing them to use Internet Explorer engine on Windows?

And this is just one thing Apple are doing that is unbelievable they are getting away with it.

I think this analogy would work if you think in terms of opening a Apple franchise, and being able to sell only Apple products.

The problem here is a centralized point of control, that basically controls, or can eventually exercise this control to define in the end how you experience your life in the digital realm.

As the subtraction, or whats left out, will happen before, people wont even notice whats being taken from them.

That's why its hard to compare to anything that happened before, because its unparalleled.

Using your analogy, there's is a boundary that can even be considered reasonable. In the example you gave, you know the limits, when you bought and you thought they were reasonable.

But suppose that they define which cars you need to have to live in that neightborhood? You would start to think that now they are being unreasonable..

The thing is, Apple can change those "ok, now this is unreasonable" things behind your back without you even being aware of it. How can you know that you would want that car that the "owners" of your neighborhood did not allowed that car seller to offer you? (And no, this is not a stretch, remember that your digital life is a whole big dimension of your life, imagine a centralized point of control)

You wont feel as you would if they forced you to a limited set of cars, but there are a lot of damages happening by allowing them to do as they please, and not only about your rights as a owner of the product, because there are developers and other technological, social and political issues happening with those decisions being made like that.

Unfortunately it cant be compared as just a house that you have not full control of it, because in that case it would most "damage" you in the end.

The decisions Apple are making hurting digital and material property rights have broader implications to the society in general.

No problem about someone doing a good job in a product and making tons of money with it. With people wanting good things, this is also expected. The big issue here is control of our digital life and all the implications that comes with it. This looks a lot like people living in Leibniz "Best of all possible worlds" or living in a slice of that world not minding to the side effects.

> Apple should be able to do this - but they shouldn't be able to do it without those companies being able to represent themselves independently, through another app store.

I dont think they should. They should only do enough to comply with the law. eg. child pornography

Each human being has its own moral standards and should be allowed to choose and not let others choose for them, unless as stated before, its considered illegal.

> It's just that Apple aren't going to spend their time and money developing software to let you do things they aren't interested in. Why should they?

They are spending time and money to prevent that. Or you can create an app store as an app and expect Apple to allow your "app store app" to ship in iPhones? The features are already there in the OS, they use them themselves. They dont need to do anything more.. but instead they work to cripple or prevent others from using it.

This is in essence the spirit of a monopoly.

Ok you personally dont mind for whatever reasons, but there a lot of other harms to the society and civil rights in general going on here. And that was the reason countries and laws exists.. To prevent people or companies in position of power to abuse their power.

The MacDonalds its not yours, while your iPhone is.

There's a big difference between the two, and the key difference here is ... Property.

But i like your example because its shows the mindset that the iPhone you bought, is in the end the property of Apple, not really yours, and that you are "fine with it".

I think you are missing the social and political implications of your choices.

Its not just about being a monopoly in the economical sense, which is bad per-se, but to let a private company to control what you have access or not based on particular moral, political views.

To forbid you to access technology that can compete with what they offer on the basis of "security".

If you do not get it, they control the only app store allowed where they also control what you can or cannot access to. You are implying they are good actors somehow that are doing all this thinking on you, while in reality they will do whatever they can to maximize their profits, and as long as people like you are fine with it, nothing will change.

Your current government might yet be democratic enough as this can not YET represent a threat to your civil rights or the ones you love, but things changes constantly. (Who could have predicted that the 30's Weimar Republic Germany would fall like that?)

Once your government do not respect civil rights anymore the way it should, a private company with this amount of control on your digital life can represent a big threat that unlike in the past, would be pretty hard to get rid of.

What about the concept of digital property? Should you have choices? Can a private company bar your choices? Can a private company own the things that were bought by you and are in a phone that you have pay for?

Imagine if after having bought a vehicle, Wolkswagen could tell you who can you transport: "We dont allow dogs in OUR cars".

Now imagine someone saying: "I like what Wolkswagen do, its for my safety, dogs will damage my car".. "Just buy a Mercedes then!"

Or what if Wolkswagen did also sell vehicle parts, and even if you know there are pieces for your cars that are better or cheap, you wouldnt be able to buy them because the stores would be closed for you.

But then you would say: "But apple dont bar me from buying apps, i have choices.." and its a illusion of choice, because the apps were not even allowed to enter the store in the first place.

So there's a real danger into letting any private company to choose things for you before you are able to choose them.

We should have by now a good legislation about digital rights, digital property, etc, that could regulate this source of thing.

Because as i've witnessed here in the comments, you cannot let people on their own, because they can be emotionally manipulated into want things that will harm them and their rights in the long run.

It should not be just about being good for you at this particular moment, we should always take into account the collective and social implications of our choices.

I have a subjective and still esoteric(be warned) theory about attention span. As someone who have learned to play an instrument at my early teens, i've learned that to be actually good at something, you need to learn to deal with the primary discomfort feeling. You are learning to fighting your natural 'cavemen nature', the more primitive parts of your brain that are more inclined to satisfying immediate pleasures. As i've said, is a subjetive observation, but in my experience at least, people that tend to have lower quality results in what they do, apparently have lower 'attention spans'. Their effort to concentrate into something is faster, and if you see a puppy dog, or a cat, or even a human baby, you can see they are distracted easily, jumping from one subject to another very fast.

Now if we think about humans that we regard the most, like Newton, Beethoven, Einstein, Curie, Rodin, etc..

The research or the product of their labor require a very big attention span, as in, they need to meditate over long periods of time on the same subject.

Now, getting back to the point, i've learned that things like learning a musical instrument, programming, learning some math, or reading classics, helped me into acquiring long attention spans, resulting in a improvement on the quality of my thoughts, ideas and products of the thinking process.

Maybe just learning music alone wont prove anything, but i bet that if you mix the right kind of activities, you can have at least, a starting point to sophisticated human beings.

This is really well made. Congrats!

Maybe you should write a book. It would be about yourself, no matter what.

I think is weird that Microsoft uses security as a feature for customers who pay more. I mean, security, if universal in their platform, would only give more prestige to the Windows brand, so why to let some of their users unprotected, specially when lack of security features, virus, etc.. have hurt so much the Windows brand?

They should give other kind of features and apps instead. Never negotiate security, and made it universal, giving more strength to their image.

Think of it, in the end you will be paying to be protected from the insecurity that is only there because of the flaws in their platform.

Its like a mob rising the crime levels on a neighborhood and at the same time asking to be payed to grant you security for the troubles people are only having because they are creating those same troubles in the first place (even if/when indirectly).

Sorry @dang. Your right.

This is the best place to discuss about those same topics, BTW, even when from my perspective, some of them look to have a little more bias than others.

Not a downvoter but you have reached into one of those unwritten rules:

You shall not criticize Apple, Rust and Elon Musk.

HN is super cool for any other topics, except when there's some sort of tech cult involved in it.

I'm afraid how this kind of stuff can be used to create some sort of DNA signature, lets say, for people of a giving country. A government could do it through vaccines for example.

This later could be use to spread biologic weapons that would be engineered to not attack hosts cells with that particular signature.. as everybody else that were not "marked" would die..

We need to advance a lot morally and ethically as a societies, because i'm pretty sure atomic bombs will look like child stuff compared to the harm we could do with the things being discovered.

And giving the current trends, im very pessimistic about our future prospects. We have too much corruption by design, embedded in our cultural systems.

Im almost finishing something that can do this, and my hope is that it can be a "browser dissident".

The storage can be shared through bittorrent with applications and data(files and key-value database) already layed out on top of a userspace filesystem layer (the key-value goes through a sqlite btree).

All the data blocks can be shared thought bit-torrent, and everything, including the ui apps and the service application are also shared the same way.

When the dev application is launched, there's a middle-man that works like a server instance (the developers have total control into what is handled via RPC and the RPC api layout), and will launch rpc services, where the embedded application will consume by opening a url served/routed through the central host process (that centrally manages applications, processes, ipc, rpc, data, etc)

I've made this starting from a Chrome codebase, so its multi-process, with a web engine embedded (that will only be used by the ui application) but that you can control much better through your application api, aka the UI process.

The first language that have access to this is swift.. so the devs will deploy in their shared storages code/binaries for the rpc handlers (the app instance or service process) and the ui applications that happen to have full access through an api to the web layer/renderer.

It was hard to get where i am right now, but im almost finished, and even now, it looks pretty cool already.

I think that with a little more work, it can even serve to create not just p2p applications, but also distributed with pools of servers working through RPC with a help from the p2p layer.

> The reader is dumped, unceremoniously, back into the big bad web, but could never know this before clicking the link.

Ok, but you know the big majority of the users dont care were the content come from, or how its delivered to them. They care about what is being served instead of how.

If you guys manage to have some 'killer apps' on this protocol, where people will try to reach it no matter how its is implemented, than there's a chance.

IRC killer app is IRC itself, and they manage to push themselves as alternative in the nineties where a lot of popular protocols and alternatives like the web were still in the beginning.

Anyway, if you convince people over time to serve their content through this medium, with enough and interesting content, the user will try/learn to reach them.

But i dont know, i think at least they should be trying to use some p2p DNS system, making it easy for people to serve their own content, or revisit BBS and serve contents in tree-like structures akin to directories..

I feel that there must be something to really differentiate it from everything else. Some things that are unique, and that the web + others are not covering. Because if you think about IRC or Email, they have distinct features that web could never cover even being a mammoth protocol, while this doesnt hold the same way when you think of Gemini proposal.

Anyway, people trying to do something, to change things for what they perceive as the better is a good thing, and it should always be celebrated, because even when the thing doesn't stick it might need adjustments, incremental evolution or just to serve as a influence to something else or through experience inspire the creators to create something even better.

If think what the parent is trying to say is; if this protocol is a subset of of we have today with HTTP and HTML, why not to create more of a political movement cheering for this subset to be use, the same way Google does with AMP?

On the technical side of things, it looks like its an old battle replayed with older weapons, just to get go through the same path of HTML. "Oh, but we will not put more features". Ok, but people wont use it then because they can also serve text, markdown, etc... and can chill out, because they know if later they need to serve images, videos or graphics, they can do it with HTML.

And i say this as a person who is also trying to create some alternatives to the web. But instead of going back to the nineties, i tried to think how the technology of 10 years ahead would look like. I've probably not maded it because its really hard to push the envelop when things are almost in the state of the art as Web is. But i also don't think the answer for the future will be in the past.

You know what i think would be a really badass movement. To create a simple spec of the Web, even without Javascript. Because with "feature creep" Google through Chrome is making impossible for others players to create competing browser engines.

So if two folks decide that they will create a web engine in this new language they like, it wont be an impossible goal. Because there's this simple version of the spec, with much less features.

The people behind this might be very good at convincing people and real believers, this thing can float for some time working real hard for this.. But it will be really hard to get this out of a small niche.

Anyway i love the thinking behind this. The meditation, the koan, is really on the right track. We need more rebels and fighters on this front. But i just can see it, how this can compete as a subset of a massively popular and deployed protocol with clients everywhere? How can it really differentiate itself, apart from what the web today already can serve to people?

Basic was also my first introducing to programming. And nowadays i still think its probably the best language to teach programming. I don't think it should be used to create professional programs, as its pretty limited for that, and doing modifications to turn into an able environment for this would only create a creepy language, inflicting misery in people that have to maintain large codebases of such a thing.

What i really want to point out, is that, if you look into Basic for what it shines, i think things like "GOTO line" are very good, because it teach you how the computer works under the hood (the native code will point to memory, stack, registers, program offset, call hard defined OS syscalls, etc..)

You could deal with the soft/logical and hard/physical paradigms at the same time, understanding that the logical ones are built through abstractions over the hard ones.

Later if you decide to code, than you can choose if you want/can be spoiled and use more abstract and easy languages like Python or Javascript, but also with a good understanding/intuition of how things work under the hood.

And all of this can be done in a easy way, like with jumps to a giving code position. (It alsos teach you to think over indirections, why some things are good or bad, and have the power to teach you to move on to better things, but only after you really know whats going on).

The basic GOTOS and other techniques might be bad for coding in real life, but im against taking them out of languages that can serve to teach programming to kids, and even creating more of this sort of instructions, that teach how to reason about code, where you can start with "bad practices" but that are pretty easy to use at a beginning level.

Stupid little things like taking graphics and sound for granted and not having to import libraries, using things like 'CIRCLE' or 'BEEP' or 'GOTO 10' is what your eight year old self would think its pretty cool and would run to your parents to show them with confidence in yourself.

I guess one thing that Python and later other languages like Go got right, is this "batteries included" mindset, where a language can be used without much dependencies on other codebases.

I was following Go in the beginning (2009/2010) and the team behind Go had a great architectural understanding of how to make a platform library in a "cathedral" fashion. This is one of the big reasons Go did great as a new language.

People from Python and Ruby could use Go as a alternative on server/backend software because the core platform was there together with AOT compilation, GC and its was a much faster alternative to those languages. As people from Java could be released from the burden of too many abstractions, heavy runtime and the big memory pressure on servers.

Go was a good savior back than, and still is a good alternative to the infrastructure kind of sofware.

Giving the crowds using Go were distinct, each one of them missed different things in their former runtimes.

A parent comment is calling Chrome/Blink as IE6, but for the is evident that is actually Apple (yes, the whole of Apple) the new IE6 force.

The IE6 concept i think is now something that transcends just the browser, because it describes very well a trick to maintain market dominance.

Once you get into a position of platform control, as Microsoft did in the IE6 days, together with Windows.. and note here how you have to circle around the whole platform, not just the browser to get the whole picture. To maintain your control, you keep others from telling what the next steps for that particular platform should be.

So its clear to me that its Apple with its OS market share that through Safari will try everything they can to stop the Web to become a competing platform to their "kits". And in their case, this strategy is more clear, when they dont let any other browser engine to be used except the one they control and will never let to become a competing platform to their own app kit.

Because they know that once developers create more multi-platform apps, their distinction as something different, unique and better starts to vanish.

They will play the card of security, and about how they are thinking in they users well-being (and this is whats Apple does best). And of course that "for the sake of security" will be also right, because more features means more ways to exploit. So this is a 'joker card' that they can always use to resort to some excuse their users will believe.

Chrome for instance also use a trick, but its the total reverse of 'IE6', they put in a lot of features, and with this 'platform bloat' its pretty hard for the others engines to follow, requiring a lot of engineering and money to keep playing this expensive and exhaustive game,

People complaining about Blink here, didn't see that other players let go the infernal mission to keep their web engines in sync with the "modern standards" that are mostly proposed by Google, and where almost only them have the engineering and money resources to spend in this "platform bloat" game.

Yes, if i create a memfd, populate it with with a reference from vmsplice, that maps to a mmaped file memory chunk, open it with dlopen through procfs in the child process (that i've passed through pipe) will make it happen without any copy.

This is what i've been looking for, as the child process is sandboxed and it's good to have a option where there's no need to access the filesystem to work some things out.

This is pretty good, thank you. I've passed through vmsplice here and there.. but as i didn't need to use it, i've completely forgot about its existence. So thank you for this good reminder of a great syscall.

Actually i have access to a mmap'ed file that happen to have the DSO payload among other things. In practice i dont need memfd_create(), as passing the payload with the right offset within the mmaped file would do the trick.. But given its a file with much more data then just the DSO, by using something like memfd_create() i could make it easy for the OS, passing just the content of the DSO file.

Note that in my use case i will/can pass the file descriptors to the child process, so that's why memfd_create suited me well. But if you happen to know how i can just use the mmaped file, as long as i can point the exact offset to be readed, it will be much better, because it will be basically a zero-copy implementation of it.

(If memfd_create() could be created by passing the memory address, without the need to use a write() in the created fd, it would also be much less expensive)

Thank you for your tip, that is a really nice trick!

Speaking of this. Do someone here knows any way to open a DSO in Linux not by passing the path, but by using a file descriptor or fd?

I know FreeBSD has such a call, but not Linux, and the only place i've found this was an implementation in Android, in its specialized linker that will manage to do this, but by meddling directly with the elf headers within the file.

Why i cant use the one who just uses the path? I want to load from memory (without resorting to create the file in temp fs), and for this i would use the memfd_create().

Anyway, i just want to know if there are any way to do this in Linux without having to "manually" do this by using libelf, DT_HASH, etc..

(Also in case i need to resort to elf, i bet i will be forced to do dependency resolution by hand, which will be pretty nasty just to be able to have this feature)