Supporting all of Apple's functionality was one of the reasons for not supporting Flash that Steve shared in his post, but I think you're right that Adobe not being able to get Flash working on iPhone was the main reason. Thanks for the correction!
The power of websites is that they run cross-platform. If your website works on chrome on windows it’ll work (for the most part) on Firefox on Mac and safari on iOS. Apple is against this philosophically because it doesn’t take advantage of the unique capabilities their devices provide. It’s the same reason why Apple stopped supporting flash https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Handshake has built-in mechanisms to prevent squatting. All TLDs are won through an open vickrey auction (if you win you pay the second-highest bid for the TLD). This prevents squatters from being able to easily buy up all the good names at once.
There is an issue though — the auction system gives early advantage in buying names for cheap. If only 100 people are buying names on day 1, they’ll be able to buy a lot of the names without competition. Handshake has a mechanism to prevent this. Names are released for bidding over the first year so that people who learn about it six months late can still register good names. The release schedule is basically a hash(name) % 52 to determine which week you can start registering any name.
Yes! It's funny you mention that I just bought The Sovereign Individual — haven't read it yet but from cursory glance I think there is a lot of intersection. Would love to discuss more — we have a discord I can invite you to if you're interested, just ping me at the email in my profile.
We're trying to improve the security of the Internet by replacing Certificate Authorities with a distributed root of trust.
DNS is currently centralized and controlled by a few organizations at the top of the hierarchy (namely ICANN) and easily censored by governments. Trust in HTTPS is delegated by CAs, but security follows a one of many model, where only one CA out of thousands needs to be compromised in order for your traffic to be compromised.
We're building on top of a new protocol (https://handshake.org, launching in 7 days!!) to create an alternate root zone that's distributed. Developers can register their own TLDs and truly own them by controlling their private keys. In addition, they can pin TLSA certs to their TLD so that CAs aren't needed anymore.