A More Humane Web

Sep 25, 2022

Internet disruptions have been registered across Iran this week amid protests over the death of Mahsa Amini. Per NetBlocks, mobile services have been shutdown and major social platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp have been restricted. Governments continue to rely on the internet’s major chokepoints as a means to keep both their citizens and the rest of world in the dark.

As the crypto community considers new ideas for the internet around ownership and composability, it’s important to remember that the web still fails to provide basic access to the most in-need communities at the most in-need times. The internet can be a place of great freedom or great censorship, of great privacy or great panopticism.

The DWeb Principles remain an important North Star for aligning builders of a new, decentralized web. I’ll share two related points below:

01. Technology for Human Agency
(5.) Our technologies must minimize surveillance and manipulation of people’s behavior, and optimize for social benefits and empower individuals to determine how and why their data is used.
04. Humanity
(1.) The objective of building a decentralized web is to protect human rights and empower people, especially those who experience systemic inequity and prejudice.

May we move towards a more humane web.

🤝 What’s Shaking

This Week in Handshake

How to use Certy Steps to creating your own SSL certificates for simple peer-to-peer domain security with Handshake and DANE.

Varo The public nameservers formerly known as HS Hub has rebranded to Varo. Previous domains will continue to work and will be renewed so no need to update nameservers.

Namebase An update from the team on ongoing sync issues. They recently hired HNS core devs to address this problem and increase capacity to help avoid future outages.

FxWallet Mobile wallet from the miners at DxPool supports bidding in Handshake name auctions plus their own non-custodial secondary market.

TheShake/Demos