Meep to Meep Websites
June 7, 2017 5:27 AM   Subscribe

Beaker Browser is an experimental decentralized browser that lets you create (and fork) websites whichl exist on a peer to peer network insteaqd of a traditional server. "It creates sites on demand, for free, and then shares them from the device. No servers required." Here's a video talking more about it.
posted by Just this guy, y'know (8 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Pretty sure Gavin Belson has a patent on this.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:47 AM on June 7, 2017 [5 favorites]


Next up: a porn-specific variant, named Penis Beaker.
posted by acb at 6:19 AM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Naive question: Would Beaker provide more or less anonymity than using Tor?
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:11 AM on June 7, 2017


"No Blockchain required" is a hilarious tagline.

It's interesting this is implemented with Dat. I've been keeping an eye on that project since it started positioned as "git for large data files". They've been doing solid work for three years now but I haven't seen many applications of it. I don't think Beaker Browser will ever be a huge thing, but it's definitely interesting.

And nice to see people exploring peer to peer ideas again. Beaker reminds me of Freenet (previously) in application goals.
posted by Nelson at 7:32 AM on June 7, 2017


I don't mean this as a criticism in any way, it looks like Beaker has some slick tricks, and I hope it is a success. I think de-centralizing and de-advertizing social media and the modern web - or at least offering that possibility to those who care - would be healthy changes.

But I feel compelled to point out that Opera had something a bit like this eight years ago and nobody seemed interested. Opera has changed a lot since those days and I don't use it anymore, but it amazes me that so many slick web features that we take for granted today started with the same little company. Which somehow never became more popular.

One issue I don't see discussed often in connection with client-side peer-to-peer ideas (like Napster or BitTorrent or Beaker or Opera Unite etc.) is energy consumption. To offer your data in such a system, your device has to be turned on. Suppose some descendant of Beaker were a huge success, and attracted 5% of Facebook's user-base, about 100 million users. 100 million client-side devices each consuming 20 watts of power on average adds up to 2GW of electric power, the entire output of two large coal-fired power plants. More than was produced by both reactors at Three Mile Island. More than the average daily output of the enormous Robert Moses hydro plant at Niagara. It adds up to 17.5 billion KWH per year, if I'm not dropping a decimal somewhere.

Keeping this stuff in the cloud is hugely more efficient. Facebook does a ton of analysis and tracking that doesn't even serve your personal Facebooking goals, and they claim to have used only used 0.5 billion KWH in 2011, when they had "just" 800 million users or so.

Maybe this seems like a petty point to make when some enthusiasts are trying out some new ideas, but it has lately become clear that ideas like this - when they do take off - have the potential to scale up to the point where such things matter. I think a server-side peer-to-peer system like Mastodon sounds more like the future. But then again, I say this as an ignorant outsider, a non-user of Facebook, Twitter, or Mastodon.
posted by Western Infidels at 8:14 AM on June 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Installing Beaker. Preliminary impressions:
1) Have to build it from source? Wow. Haven't done that in years!
2) Ah, but they give nice clear instructions and list the things you need to install via apt-get for the build to work.
3) Hang on, not all linuxes use apt for package management. That's rather careless.
4) And apparently I need npm, which wasn't listed in that apt-get command.
5) Great, npm is working! Whoops, that looks like an error. I need to install node.js too? Wait, apt is telling me node.js is already the latest version. Might be an issue with "electron" and... I'm supposed to contact the maintainer of electron to file a bug report?

Nope, not in the mood for testing something that acts like a pre-alpha. Sounds like a cool project, though, so I'll try again in a few months...
posted by sibilatorix at 5:28 PM on June 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think de-centralizing and de-advertizing social media and the modern web - or at least offering that possibility to those who care - would be healthy changes.

I don't think many will care about the option - unless/until net neutrality is shot to pieces, and people have to pay an extra $10 or $20 per month to get to any site that hasn't contracted with TimeWarnerComcastATT, and when they do, it'll have abysmal speeds.

This won't have faster speeds, but if the "real internet" throws roadblocks that significantly hamper people's access, we're going to see a massive return to the pre-WWW days of "who's got a router and wants to host some content?"

(I loved &TOTSE, and all the other cheerfully anarchistic sites hosting text-only bootlegs of the Anarchist Cookbook.)

Since there's no Windows version yet, I'll hold off on this one; I am not geeky enough to even give it a try.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:36 PM on June 7, 2017


Is Dat usable as a decentralised, private Dropbox-alike?
posted by acb at 8:47 AM on June 8, 2017


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