Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web

[Frankie Pancakes]

With an ambitious decentralized platform, the father of the web (not Al Gore ) hopes it's game on for corporate tech giants like Facebook and Google. Al was my addition to the sentence.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936...world-wide-web

In fairness I found the link to this article at Jim Stone's site.

[meeradas]

Posted by Frankie Pancakes (here)
https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936...world-wide-web

Thanks for posting this! BIG stuff... can't wait.

What i liked best in the article is the closing statement:

>>[...] Berners-Lee says flatly:
“We are not talking to Facebook and Google about whether or not to introduce a complete change
where all their business models are completely upended overnight. We are not asking their permission.”<<

And we need sth that makes Bayer/Monsanto and their ilk obsolete in the same way... [Ciba Geigy have it in their vaults since the 1980s]

PS:
May all protective forces keep Tim safe.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Frankie Pancakes (here)
With an ambitious decentralized platform, the father of the web (not Al Gore ) hopes it's game on for corporate tech giants like Facebook and Google.

Excellent - thanks for starting this thread.

As I just posted over on one of the Q threads:

Those interested in pursuing a less centrally controlled Web may find this latest blog post of Tim Berners-Lee, one of the "Godfathers" of the Web, to be of considerable interest: One Small Step for the Web....

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Frankie Pancakes (here)
https://www.fastcompany.com/90243936...world-wide-web

Here is a sample quote from this article, to tease the reader and invite more to follow the link to the original article:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This week, Berners-Lee will launch Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Dennis Leahy]

And, here is a link to Solid, the platform? or platform development tool? that Inrupt is promoting/catalyzing/backing.

https://solid.inrupt.com/

"Solid is the technology that underpins a movement, being lead by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to re-orient the web to its original vision. To understand the ‘why’ of Solid, it’s important to understand the evolution of the web and how it’s diverged from Sir Tim’s original and inspiring vision.

The first web browser was also an editor. The idea being that not only could everyone read content on the web, but they could also help create it. It was to be a collaborative space for all mankind.

However, when the first browser that popularized the web came along, called Mosaic, it included multimedia and editing was taken out. It was considered too difficult a problem. This change was the first curtailing of the web’s promise and spawned an effort lead by Tim and others to get the write functionality back. It was dubbed the ‘read-write web’ and lead to Richard McManus' seminal article published in 2003.

Solid has taken 15 years of development work to finally deliver this.

..."

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)
And, here is a link to Solid, the platform? or platform development tool? that Inrupt is promoting/catalyzing/backing.

From https://solid.inrupt.com/docs/intro-to-solid-spec

Solid is a set of modular specifications, which build on, and extend the founding technology of the world wide web (HTTP, REST, HTML). They are 100% backwards compatible with the existing web. Each spec, taken in isolation, provides extra features to an existing system. However, when used in combination, they enable exciting new possibilities for web sites and applications.

The Solid specifications are on GitHub at https://github.com/solid/solid-spec.

The main enhancement is that the web becomes a collaborative read-write space, passing control from owners of a server, to the users of that system. The Solid specification provides this functionality.

In order to write data as well as to read it, and to protect privacy, it is important to control who has access to what. This is managed using the web access control list specification.

For permissions it is essential to have a concept of identity, for which the WebID Identity spec is used. This is a minimalistic identity spec, which allows a URI to denote a user, and return back machine readable data.

Authentication of that identity is provided using WebID-TLS and WebID-OIDC right now, but other strategies, such as key fobs, or two factor authentication, could be added to depending on system needs.

Discovery is the final piece, and allows the ability to tie all of these things together, and enables both humans and machines to participate in a rich ecosystem, leading to emergent and self organizing growth. The key tool for facilitating this is the URI specification. This forms the basis of the Linked Data philosophy which glues all of our data together, to create a complete Web Operating System.

~~~~~~~~~~~

From (the above github link) https://github.com/solid/solid-spec

Overview

Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible. It relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols.

~~~~~~~~~~~

That Linked Data URL, in turn, goes to a 2006 paper by Tim Berners-Lee describing the rich, permissioned, linked data concepts, spanning the cloud, underlying this work.

[ThePythonicCow]

My initial, off-the-cuff, paranoid tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory nutcase take on all this:

This looks to me, at first glance, to be a major undertaking, supported by very powerful interests, to create a World Wide Web of all our "data" ... everything that any computer or mobile or server records about us, in a way that provides all us peons, both individuals and corporations (except the most powerful) fine grained, secure control over who has what data when.

The end result is that only you (if you can trust and become competent in using some sophisticated tools) and the deep state operatives can track, and control, your digital existence.

It's like having a gun -- good for keeping the next door neighbor from robbing you, but useless in preventing the entire force of the US (or above) Military from converting your residence (and everyone in it) into pulverized dust, like the WTC twin towers on 9/11.

Thus, it will become "safer" to move more of your life "onto the Web", including sensor data that can track your movements, expressions, activity, ...

[Justplain]

Posted by Paul (here)
My initial, off-the-cuff, paranoid tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory nutcase take on all this:

This looks to me, at first glance, to be a major undertaking, supported by very powerful interests, to create a World Wide Web of all our "data" ... everything that any computer or mobile or server records about us, in a way that provides all us peons, both individuals and corporations (except the most powerful) fine grained, secure control over who has what data when.

The end result is that only you (if you can trust and become competent in using some sophisticated tools) and the deep state operatives can track, and control, your digital existence.

It's like having a gun -- good for keeping the next door neighbor from robbing you, but useless in preventing the entire force of the US (or above) Military from converting your residence (and everyone in it) into pulverized dust, like the WTC twin towers on 9/11.

Thus, it will become "safer" to move more of your life "onto the Web", including sensor data that can track your movements, expressions, activity, ...

Paul, you seem to be saying that this new paradigm may not be of any great advantage, cuz even if you have the tools to control SOLiD (which the vast majority would not), you'd still be subject to tracking by the deep state, thus removing any real advantage. Would it be better to just have a really good encryption technology for communicating with, and spend as little time on the web, at least for important things, as possible?

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Justplain (here)
Paul, you seem to be saying that this new paradigm may not be of any great advantage, cuz even if you have the tools to control SOLiD (which the vast majority would not), you'd still be subject to tracking by the deep state, thus removing any real advantage. Would it be better to just have a really good encryption technology for communicating with, and spend as little time on the web, at least for important things, as possible?

I'm guessing that this new paradigm will be a huge advantage, toward creating part of the "nervous system" of a new world order.

As with any previous system of large scale population control and manipulation, a few geeks will be always be able to work around or go outside the system, such as those preppers who go "off the grid" these days.

The level of consciousness of our civilization as a whole, such as manifest in our most powerful members, is what ultimately matters. Such details as how this little bit of Solid data sharing over the Web work are only a small part of that.