Solid, a spec that lets people store their data securely in decentralized Pods | Hacker News Reader

Solid, a spec that lets people store their data securely in decentralized Pods

solidproject.org

94 pointsjandeboevrie33 comments

We should also focus on educating folks on self hosting and the value of owning their own data. Kids are taught way too early these days to put everything in the cloud, no clue what local files are, etc.

I'm not sure we should tell them that "own" is something people do with data (data not being scarce and not having a distinct location in space/time like other things that are owned). But I agree that future generations would benefit from being more thoughtful about what they share with whom.

If you choose to own your own data, you certainly, literally, can, at a price. If you choose not to, you can also not own it. You cannot own all data, and you do need to be able to understand the difference.

I don't understand the difference.

We're not talking about trademarks, parents, or copyrights here. I don't think we're talking about read or write access either.

What does it mean to own data? Wouldn't that require that there be a ledger somewhere that kept track of which data had been transferred to whom? Property rights are typically accounted for and enforced by an authority and when I look around I just don't see anything like that for data.

Ah, I have to agree that not all ownership concepts can apply to data, such as transfer like you mention. And if you lose control of your data it would be impossible to put it back into your sole control.

This project is being led by Tim Berners-Lee, for those who weren't aware.

Aka the guy who sold us DRMs in browsers

What a smart summary of TBL's career.

unfortunately you also need to be reminded of their greatest failures when it mattered the most.

Chamberlain is remembered for letting Hitler do what he wanted, not for the rest of his career as a politician.

Speed running godwins law!

There's a scottish proverb about this involving goats and relations.

He sold out his creation to Big Corporate. I'd expect his pivotal role in allowing DRM to be brought up first anywhere he's mentioned.

There's no washing hands of an act like this. He broke the free and open web permanently for everyone. Creating Solid is not an act of absolution because DRM will forever exist now in all browsers forever. Browsers that increasingly act as our total window into computing.

Who's going to put the genie back in the bottle? No one sitting on the W3C will ever go for it now or in the future.

With Self-Sovereign-Identities, you will most likely have a wallet storing your "cards" on your mobile phone. Which implies that you make a presentation of that "card (verifiable credential)" on demand. The requester of the card (the verifier) will know if the card is revoked but will not know if that card has been replaced by another one. In regards with that problem, the Solid pod could help because you would share a container of the pod where that type of card are stored (eg your energy contract), so the third party would know all the time what is your latest energy contract type with the price you pay (for example to optimize your grid injection/consumption).

Can't tell is this is ChatGPT spam or not

Not very friendly reply. First the english sentencrs are not good enough to be an AI. Secondly, forecasting the combination of usage of 2 non mainstream tech is not yet an AI task. Feel free to argue that you think it is not a good idea

Why is a word like "solid" a good choice for a project like this? I'm sick of all these startups and open-source projects using the same SEO-certified names. How about a weird acronym?

Private Atomic Network Storage (PANS)

Atomic Network Unified Storage, that's where I pull my data from and it's where I shove it up.

It could be also a very good way to let user hop from open source project to another by bringing their data with them (only open source project is capable of that kind of kindness :-) )

Solid could be used to allow sharing of data in a more "easy" way. For example, if your pod would contain your energy time series, you could share them from a location that you "own". In that sense the energy company is not responsible if you share it with malicious actors. And then get these data in your Home Assistant or to a optimizer service.

I'm failing to see the point of this. You pick a "pod provider" and then they host your data for you, right? And that provider is just backing it on some cloud host. why would I do this

It is/was supposed to be a centralized store of your data, so that you can have more control over who has it. Instead of uploading a photo to facebook, you upload it to your pod, then allow facebook access to it to post to your timeline. Then you can see who has access to your stuff and revoke if wanted.

What incentive does Facebook have to support something like that? Zero.

Yeah, that's kinda the issue. Even if pods came first, Facebook has the incentive to give pod storage for free. It's a nice idea, just don't see it taking off.

I also don't see how it's possible to revoke access to your information; once they're given access, there's nothing stopping them from backing up all of your information in their own storage.

Another scenario is going to a doctors appointment and having to fill out forms with your info (name, address, preferences, medical history and etc)

with a system like this, you can tap into a sign in station and give them access.

Doctors can also send you any documents they generate and it gets stored in your POD.

oh boy the HIPAA compliance nightmare this will create. Sadly there is a reason why every doctor office you go to give you poorly xeroxed form and a pencil to fill it out. Wish that would change obviously.

Not for the folks north of you. I'd be happy with a form & a pencil but for the past year plus I've been told by the less than helpful dr office assistant to "Go to our website and make your appointment" which then makes me fill in various screening forms.

The trade off - clerk doesn't have to spend less than a minute looking up and giving me a time for my next appointment and I have to setup yet another id & password to use their crappy appointment/medical forms app in a cloud somewhere.

Assuming you have a universal API for all medical forms ever. This would be like the final boss of scope-creep APIs

Centralized platforms have no incentive to implement this

Decoupling the storage from the application provider would be a huge step forward.

Even if you continue to host your data on Dropbox or Google Drive, you have total control over the underlying data--you can audit, modify, or delete it at any time.

From the application side, it also means you no longer have to deal with persistent state, which means you can ship applications with no backend. That's an order of magnitude easier to develop and maintain.

The downsides are real though: the user experience is often jankier, and the lack of a central database makes it really hard to do anything social/realtime. I'm rooting for Solid but am not yet convinced they'll make it.

In reality apps would keep their own cache and indicies of your data for faster and more reliable access.

So there's an immediate consistency problem the user may or may not have the tools to fix because they rely on the application exposing a bespoke cache refresh. Is this solved for in solid?

wasn't this a problem for http? any private network could funnel traffic through a reverse proxy cache and you end up with (potential) issues. Seemed to work ok for HTTP in general?

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