What does "drop a book on the internet" mean?


Full documentation

In the early days of the world wide web things were pretty simple. You put a document on a server, you marked its permissions read-only and then you linked to it. You allowed other entities to come index it; for search; for analysis. The trust of the small internet community was implicit.

But as the internet evolved rafts of security protocols came with it, but trust did not necessarily come with them. By 2020, everybody who knew how stuff had to work. Don't download an executable unless you know who provides it and what it does. Don't put executables inside of text; don't allow a link invoke a command or executable on your network. But legacy providers only now are willing to concede that macros and plugins and scripting languages that are given the ability to invoke compute resources are much more of a problem than a benefit.

Thesis is built on the 451 Project. An effort to describe an open, flexible way to publish information with distributed security and open audit trails. The goal is to take a complex security problem and make it easy again, just like it was at the beginning of the world wide web, to drop a book on the internet.

Where are we going in the future?

The 451 Project is pretty aware that the way people create content with LLMs is moving very quickly and that new ways of working will emerge in the next few years. We hope to be flexible and to morph with those changes so that Thesis stays relevant and interesting.