Tim Berners-Lee unveils plan to save the web
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-con...
I'm really sick of these "influencers" doing horrible things and then coming back and expecting us to give them blank checks as defenders of the web, when they only seem to do the right thing when it's convenient for them. Get your own house in order before coming out and trying to fix everybody else's.
I think that's a bit harsh. His invention is one of the greatest of all time, that's quite a legacy
I am not saying I would have done any better than him in the circumstances but let’s be honest: TBL didn’t invent hypertext and the WWW is just a poor knock-off of Englebart’s ideas. It has taken millions of people decades to turn the WWW into something that can be secured and scaled and actually be useful to ordinary people. TBL was in the right place at the right time but don’t overestimate his actual contribution.
I don't think it was as usable as we like to remember (he did develop it on a NeXT Cube after all, not an average everyday machine), as the spelling-out of domain addresses on the BBC was always a drawn-out lengthy "haych tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double-u double-u double-u DOT bee bee see DOT com forward slash..." etc etc etc because it was so new in the 1990s.
Of course I do look back in fondness before the unleashing of commercialism on the Internet and it turning into the world's leading cesspit of garbage, tracking and colossal webpages, but that's for another discussion.
TBL threw all of that out of the window in favour of a simple, lightweight, extensible decentralised system. This was not at all an obvious thing to do. Previous high priests of Hypertext were incensed that this toy system lacking so many 'essential' features became more popular and useful in couple of years than their systems had in decades.
None of this was inevitable. If it had been obvious, someone would have already done it.
The WWW he invented was HTTP+HTML+URL. Three things that may have already existed on their own in some sense. He took giant ideas, off others shoulders, and melded them.
I wonder, does his web contract apply to apps that use HTTP+URL but not HTML? Does he intend the word web to be inclusive of not website tech, or does he not care about the rest of the internet thats not "web."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...
Free speech? Fundamental rights? "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?
Yes, these are all good things. But also all in deep, fundamental conflict with each other. Moral and political philosophers have been debating how to resolve them for centuries... and the disagreements are just as strong as ever.
His plan isn't taking any strong stances at all, which would involve actually making decisions between competing values. Instead, he's just trying to have it all -- which sounds good, but provides zero actionable guidance.
"Free speech? Fundamental rights?" are what we want, but people who claim to want free speech and then claim they want "Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"? ultimately mean that they want censorship.
It's basically what happened to social media and the internet. Remember that everyone from Reddit to Zuckerburg to news companies claimed they supported free speech a decade ago. Then money/politics/etc got involved and they started talking about ""Support the best in humanity"? "Build strong communities"?" and we have a censored dystopia on our hands.
In china, they use "harmony" as a propaganda tool to justify censorship. In the west, we use "civility" along with "best in humanity", "universal human rights", etc to justify censorship.
Times that by 6 billion (and different cultural attitudes in different lands) and it's obvious we will never always agree. The World Wide Web won't solve the differences between people.
I think we should stop pretending it will, or expecting too much of a collection of computer-served XML. That's all it is, fundamentally. I would probably say that politics and social movements should stay out of this serving of XML, as you can't keep all of the people happy all of the time, so why try?
Increasingly the machines we use are sending data back instead of serving us, frustratingly.
> Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
> 1. By crafting policies that address the needs of systematically excluded
> groups
> a. Designing gender responsive and inclusive data plans targeting women and
> other systematically excluded groups.
> Make the internet affordable and accessible to everyone
> 1. By crafting policies that address the needs of systematically excluded groups
> a. Designing gender responsive and inclusive data plans targeting women and other systematically excluded groups
The fact that it is ambiguous leaves room for it to mean whatever the controlling party wants it to mean. As long as people can't agree on something as fundamental as the goal, it's doomed to fail.
> Give women discounted internet?
Somehow I don't think he was suggesting a "pink tax" or some kind of "ladies internet" that filters some explicit pictures. I think "inclusive" roughly translates as favorable in sentences like these.
Surely the fact that the internet is the exact same price for everybody, regardless of group characteristics, is the ultimate goal? I don't think it is sensible to begin adding bias where there currently is none.
It's my impression that the price of internet access is at least somewhat proportional to local cost of living. And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based discounts.
But, perhaps bizarrely enough, I do think that filtered internet access is a very sensible idea. I mean, it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their underage children. HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe search" settings.
So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?
> least somewhat proportional to local cost of living.
Typically as is the cost of food, housing, wages, etc.
> And I don't see why there shouldn't be income-based
> discounts.
Is it really the job of the ISP to account for such things? Not that I agree with this, but: Surely it would make more sense to balance income at the point of it arriving in your account, not when you go to spend it?
I don't think we want private companies to become political or biased in any way, I think this should be the soul responsibility of accountable politicians, rather than unaccountable corporate entities.
> it's not uncommon for parents to restrict access by their
> underage children
> HN has "maxvisit" and "minaway" settings so users can
> manage their usage. And many search sites have "safe
> search" settings.
> So why not let users set that up at the ISP level?
Firstly I believe people should have the ability to choose what filters they impose on themselves, such filters should never be on by default. I can fully understand and respect the cases for wanting such filtering, but it can also be extremely dangerous.
Secondly I believe in most cases that such filters do already exist - you can request such things from your ISP, purchase routers that filter such traffic, install software onto devices that perform blocking, etc. The options exist and are actively used.
One real example I remember was a parent installing a simple filter on their family computer (for their child). It would filter websites and key-words/phrases from websites, such as "sex". It so happened there was an incident reported by a local news website with something like "Local Child Sex Offender Still Not Caught", which of course was filtered to "Local Offender Still Not Caught". Their child was out playing in this quite high risk area and the parents were completely unaware of the risks.
The point is, that when acting in what we believe to be in the best interest of ourselves and others, we can actually cause more damage than good.
I do agree; you should not add such filters which cause those problems. But that is the customer's own decision what software to run on their computer, and not mine.
Because in a stereotypical household with 2 parents and 2 children, you still have 1 IP and 1 ISP connection.
But yes, perhaps at the router level, managed by device MAC.
It’s funny, if you look at the stats then you will see Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc are all majority female. The only social network that has gender parity is LinkedIn. HN may be predominantly male (no one knows for sure) but it’s a rounding error in terms of user numbers. There’s no male equivalent of Pinterest (Reddit isn’t even close)
Fast-forward to now and his new scheme is a sort of UN for Web 1.0? And, like the UN, one that is totally powerless beyond sternly written letters and is governed by some of the greatest infringers of the very rights it's claiming to protect?
I'm going to assume he isn't as naive as one would have to be to blindly push such a doomed-to-fail proposition, so on the same assumption this has to be some sort of fight for relevancy or mere publicity.
These all sound very nice, but I don’t think there’s any company or government that would claim not to do these things.
If so, then either they are lying, or the plan imposes so few restrictions that it is worthless.
We’ll see if that actually happens.
A goodly number of points are also left so vague that almost anyone can claim that their opponent isn’t abiding by them, providing a perfect environment for anarcho-tyranny.
2 sweeps:
1) How many of those words will actually be meaningfully different when their statements are released?
2) When will they pull the trigger to make that happen?
Does Berners-Lee have any form in policy? Did he have genuine inventive insight or just right place right time permissive license? These are genuine questions I'm asking to which I don't have answers - maybe he's saved the web before, and his inventive insight was utterly brilliant for all I know?
That does not mean that from a policy or prosecutorial perspective we should not continue to investigate and prosecute crimes as they occur, but crime will occur, and the best we can do is work to protect ourselves and others. That means security and privacy and cryptography.
Now there is the question, does the web need to be saved? I’m open to discussing whether it does, but the problem with this assertion is that it has never been easier to build and host a website containing all that you can legally host. If there are problems, they are legal, not technical. You can host webshit or family photos or pornography or your blog or a list of links to your favorite websites or a collection of selfies or a review site or a private reddit clone or your class notes or some personal research or any number of other things, because I could sit here all night typing out examples and probably find out of Hacker News has a character limit in the process.
You can serve JavaScript or ads or well designed style sheets or really really bad style sheets they make the blink tag look positively understated, or you can serve plain Jane HTML or even plainer text files, or even PDFs or DOCs or DOCX files or videos or sounds or any number of other binaries.
I’m not sure entirely what we’ve lost besides the websites that the owners have chosen not to host any longer. People have made bad choices about where to host the only copies of something they loved and built and hosted on someone else’s server, only to see those sites shut down, and will probably continue to make such choices. This is fine, an integral part of liberty is to have the ability to source enough rope to hang yourself with.
Enjoy the things you have now, for nothing lasts forever. Make that which you would like to see more of to seed the world and inspire others.
That´s just my 2 cents though!
The political and social arrangement of the U.S. Constitution, for example, is worth trying to preserve. It will only endure if most of us, and our leaders, agree to follow it.
Most such arrangements are shared illusions that are doomed, unless we agree to follow them. It really boils down to that, because we are all fundamentally free to act as selfish savages of we want.
This would apply to images as well with your likeness (ai-made or w/e)...though I'm not sure how you'd enforce that, unless the protocol also did facial reck/search online notifying you of images of you, that you can then force to be taken offline through legal means.
Of course there's the argument of who owns the copyright -- the person in the picture or the photographer even if they took photo w/ or without your permission/knowledge...etc...
I'm not sure how this would work in the wild, and it's just a concept idea... It would be nice though in the case of a true dystopian future to be able to pull yourself off the grid easier than it is today.
However, the one thing that I've always struggled with is how to handle apps that need write access to users' data in order to be useful. For instance, a messaging app needs to be able to write new messages onto the user-owned data store, but if we allow arbitrary reads/writes to some namespaced path to the store, an app simply needs to encrypt the data with some secret key that the user doesn't know in order to build a decentralized walled garden that stifles data mobility in the same way that centralized walled gardens do today.
To a computer there is very little you can do to distinguish between obfuscated and regular data but to a human/legal system the difference is clear.
Sans the encryption - it's been looked as, IIRC, but not there yet. I'm not sure whether that would actually make it easy to revoke access though; as soon as someone has a key to decrypt it, they can just copy the decrypted information elsewhere, right?
(Disclosure: I work at inrupt, TimBL's startup that exists to stimulate Solid adoption. Opinions are my own.)
I don’t think you will see any large scale movement to micropayments until at least the EU and the various US states change their legal frameworks for digital goods to characterize these transactions as being solely under the jurisdiction of where the site resides.
I'm keen on the idea that a vibrant portion of internet commerce should be opaque to governments. Perhaps not the best place to start a formal business in; where you have to think about accounting and taxes, but it will be a boon for ad-hoc informal businesses.
I'd like to think of it as facilitating the primordial soup that will give rise to new ways of doing things.
Add this to the black markets for exploits, data dump leaks, and skimmed CC info - I'd say that certainly there is a healthy shadow market on the webz out there.
The only thing - it's not as visible as it was, say, 10 years ago, when Silk Road was well known, and we all know how that ended.
The digital financial system is too big a stick in terms of political soft power for any government to willingly give up on principle. Any concession thereof will also be used as the basis for black market/illegal transactions/tax evasion purposes.
AML/KYC exists as it does for a reason, and it isn't going away any time soon I'm afraid. I've worked in the industry for far too long to even entertain a fantasy that a system as you describe could ever work. Once you try to encapsulate any financial transaction processing capability with the wrapper of a business, you have to extract operating cost from the financial activity you are facilitating to at least fund a compliance/legal/risk department as your organization has become the lever with which the government enacts accountability for the transactions you're processing.
The only way around that is to drop a fully functional banking suite in every user's hands, which in a fractional reserve based economy comes with it's own problems. (I.e. What do you mean I can't declare myself a billionaire?)
The entire financial system is such a house of cards it simply wouldn't be able to survive a true democratization of the capability to transfer money. It wouldn't be feasible to regulate, and no one would want to be left holding the responsibility bag for the higher risk financial traffic. The level of oversight of every last citizen, if actually attempted would quickly result in excessive chafing as people who aren't even guaranteed to know how to file their taxes now need to figure out how to meet the big boys regulatory burden. No exceptions. Not exercising your capability for monetary transfer either wouldn't necessarily be a guard against regulatory issues, since that would be indistinguishable from someone not reporting.
The level of crash and burn once people realize that the entire system only works because there are such high barriers to entry would be entertaining though.
Then again, maybe I'm just jaded from being in there for so long. Maybe people would realize that the line they've been fed to put all their money in 401k's which serve as investment vehicles to further entrench established players (who were paying that wage in the first place) does nothing but perpetuate the business cycle, and exclude new market entrants due to hyper optimization.
Maybe financial literacy and community spirit would bloom, and entire communities would come together to pool cash to maintain their own infrastructure, and to take care of their own without exploitative behavior becoming the norm.
Maybe starting and growing a local business would become a more attractive venture, deconsolidating the market and turning the dial back on the too big to fail Hobbesian monoliths we're surrounded by today; engines of fundamental income inequality looking to extract the most while minimizing liabilities; ensuring that wages only barely appropriate to keep people coming back to work get paid to ensure that shareholders are getting what they paid for, even if by doing so, it destabilizes life for those who can't afford to buy in and handle the chaos of meeting the challenges of pay-check-to-paycheck life.
Who knows?
I'm not so sure it is "not going to happen" especially as millenials age and realize there is a clear dichotomy between generations owning property/cash vs generations who don't own anything tangible and have basically lived rented lives. Unfairness usually leads people to turn their backs to inflated assets like property, and instead to create their own generation's bubbles.
The "build strong online communities where everyone feels safe and welcome" point seems impossibly idealistic. And indeed, for lack of a better word, boring. I'd rather have a diversity of communities, run however they choose. If someone doesn't feel "safe and welcome", they can just go away.
Also, from https://contractfortheweb.org/:
> 1. By working towards a more inclusive Web:
> a. Adopting best practices on civil discourse online and educating the next generation on these matters.
Why must all discourse be "civil"? I mean, that's a value here at HN. But it's not one for the chans. So shouldn't people have the right to choose?
> b. Committing to amplify the messages of systematically excluded groups, and standing up for them when they are being targeted or abused.
I can't help laughing at this. Because I'm like 99% sure that they aren't including neo-Nazis here. Or even the incels who aren't even vaguely neo-Nazi.
Anyway, in my ideal internet, everyone could post whatever they want, as anonymously as they want, and as resistant to takedown as they want. And everyone else could choose what to access.
A “strong” community necessarily has members and non-members, insiders and outsiders. If it doesn’t it’s not a community in any meaningful sense, it’s just an amorphous crowd. The idea of a community that welcomes everyone literally is a contradiction in terms.
But if the internet is seen for what it is, a network of networks and the web a community of communities then there's no paradox - if one is not comfortable or welcomed in one community, one can move to, or start, another community that more accepting.
But then, that allows for exactly the sort of toxic and abusive communities and users that TBL and many others believe are "destroying" the web.
And they're kind of correct, but not because these communities exist, per se, or because the 'wrong sorts of people' are allowed to use the web, but because visibility and dialogue has been mostly centralized along a few large platforms with disproportionate influence, and as a result of the effect of SEO and social media algorithms, much of the diversity of the web has been filtered out for the sake of extremist and commercial content.
I think we can safely ignore this.
> Establishing policies designed to respect and promote the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those pertaining to education, gender equality, systematically excluded groups, climate, and socio-environmental justice.
Is it dead?
The Gitter channels are apparently most active.
Web: https://solidproject.org/
Forum: https://forum.solidproject.org/
Gitter channels, etc: https://github.com/solid/information/blob/master/gitter-chat...
What we have today is curve fitting of events to a narrative, taking only the sentences which create a permutation to support the bias, not seeking summation.
And/or the curve fits an emotional goal(ie to scare readers into action).
But we can measure zip's efficiency, but it's harder to measure the true accuracy of events when summarizing, because different points are of varying levels of importance to different people.
This has led me to pay attention to the signal and ignore the noise; watching the full speeches, and viewing the sources myself, but most people aren't so inclined, they just shriek & rage, baited by an inaccurate context shrinker.
Thus, we have hyper informed people who watch full context, as well as severely misinformed folks, getting bad recaps. It is like the income disparity gap with information.
Feels like ladila-feel-good article.
I think what we'll also end up with is an "underground" Internet of the type that's always seen in dystopian SciFi.
> That's because they have such strong motivations to keep things as they are, and even make them worse.
And the EU, Britain, US, etc don't?
I know it's hard to believe, the leader of internet censorship isn't in China, Russia or Iran. It's in europe.
"Germany’s Online Crackdowns Inspire the World’s Dictators"
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/06/germany-online-crackdow...
And the leaders of tech censorship isn't in China, it's in the US since major tech companies are in the US.
This is like saying Iran is the biggest polluter because they produce oil.
But, say our current tech is as good as we know how to make it. Data breaches, for example, would be much less s problem if we held relevant people accountable for due care. Who was the last CxO who went to jail, or was even criminally investigated and found innocent, for a data breach into their org? Or a perpetrator, for that matter?
The best option is to code it in the technology. For example, we can make laws and regulation to see to it that governments don't take more debt or print more money than they should in order not to cause inflation and economic crisis, but what we've seen throughout history is that this never works in the long term.
The better solution was the one Satoshi came up with: program the fixed amount of currency into the Bitcoin technology with computational and mathematical checks. Now it's extremely difficult to do anything else unless you can somehow control or convince the majority of the nodes to accept it.
The same kind of solutions should be developed for the web.