Tim Berners-Lee Skeptical of Web3, Touts Decentralized Internet Without Blockchain (thenextweb.com) 62
Sir Tim Berners-Lee "is skeptical about a blockchain-based internet," reports the Next Web. Instead, they describe his new vision as "a decentralized architecture that gives users control of their data" — on a Platform called Solid:
Berners-Lee shares Web3's purported mission of transferring data from Big Tech to the people. But he's taking a different route to the target. While Web3 is based on blockchain, Solid is built with standard web tools and open specifications. Private information is stored in decentralized data stores called "pods," which can be hosted wherever the user wants. They can then choose which apps can access their data. This approach aims to provide interoperability, speed, scalability, and privacy.
"When you try to build that stuff on the blockchain, it just doesn't work," said Berners-Lee.
Berners-Lee says Solid serves two separate purposes. One is preventing companies f rom misusing our data for unsolicited purposes, from manipulating voters to generating clickbait.The other is providing opportunities to benefit from our information. Healthcare data, for instance, could be shared across trusted services to improve our treatment and support medical research. Our photos, meanwhile, could be supplied to Facebook friends, LinkedIn colleagues, and Flickr followers without having to upload the pictures to each platform.
This evokes Berners-Lee's original aim to make the web a collaborative tool. "I wanted to be able to solve problems when part of the solution is in my head and part of the solution is in your head, and you're on the other side of the planet — connected by the internet," he said.
"That was the sort of thing I wanted the web for. It took off more as a publishing medium — but all is not lost."
"When you try to build that stuff on the blockchain, it just doesn't work," said Berners-Lee.
Berners-Lee says Solid serves two separate purposes. One is preventing companies f rom misusing our data for unsolicited purposes, from manipulating voters to generating clickbait.The other is providing opportunities to benefit from our information. Healthcare data, for instance, could be shared across trusted services to improve our treatment and support medical research. Our photos, meanwhile, could be supplied to Facebook friends, LinkedIn colleagues, and Flickr followers without having to upload the pictures to each platform.
This evokes Berners-Lee's original aim to make the web a collaborative tool. "I wanted to be able to solve problems when part of the solution is in my head and part of the solution is in your head, and you're on the other side of the planet — connected by the internet," he said.
"That was the sort of thing I wanted the web for. It took off more as a publishing medium — but all is not lost."
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I'm extremely confused by this post..
You make a list of things that are 100% political, but start off with something technical?
And I'd argue that crypto currency isn't based on 'conservative and outdated economic models' so much as it's based on 'no model but make quick money'.
Their purported purpose certainly isn't what they actually are.
So... Confused! lol
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At first I thought this was a send-up of hyperbole-laden but vacuous sales pitches. Then I found this [p2pfoundation.net] and now I'm as confused as you are:
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Look at his wallet, though the hint in his Subject is so glaring that I'm going to let the vacuous Subject stand. It's possible that he's a simple fool, but I think he's a motivated fool, but even the smart fools tend to believe what they want to believe. And I believe that he's got money riding on the issue.
Me? I'm a true skeptic. I don't believe in nuttin'. Well, I'm not that good at it, but I have doubts about pretty much everything and at least I think I'm always trying to find and question my own assum
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Sounds like gibberish trying to sound like technobabble. Perhaps a travesty generator?
What is your problem?
What's that smell? (Score:5, Insightful)
Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. It doesn't actually address any real and pressing needs, and so right now all we have that uses it is hype and fraud.
Like it or not, commercial interests drive innovation. There will be no future internet where decentralization reigns supreme, because there simply isn't enough money behind it, and hence no economic power to push it forward. A tiny community of idealistic geeks just can't overcome these facts! You won't get mass buy-in from the lower classes either, because (as we have already seen) the very instant anything goes wrong they start screaming for an organizer to step in and fix it by force (which, of course, requires centralization).
We aren't going to see a future internet based on end-user control of their data either. Its more idealistic BS. We will see a few bits of regulation roll down from on high in any case where those in power are also harmed by a lack of privacy, and such regulation will not put power in the end-users hands so much as put responsibility in the hands of the corporate caretakers of such data. Its a golden rule now: if you use their products, they will spy on you. There is no escape. Your options are to use other products (like...you know....Linux and Firefox and what-not), or to hand over your data and trust that they will obey the law and keep it safe.
Its a bleak future if your privacy is all you care about. It is a workable future if you care about convenient access to news, shopping, and gaming online.
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Yeah, mod parent up. Even though Fu said it better than I did.
Re: What's that smell? (Score:2)
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Problem: I have no money. What I do have is a shit picture of a monkey. How do I get idiots to give me lots of the former in exchange for a link to the latter?
It's a solution to that.
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It's far worse than even that. When you buy an NFT, you don't even get the picture.
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Weaver's Iron law of blockchain:
"When somebody says you can solve X with blockchain, they don't understand X, and you can ignore them." [fudzilla.com]
Re: What's that smell? (Score:2)
* Its a golden rule now: if you use their products, they will spy on you.*
Not if people physically own their data, like IP. Itâ(TM)s DRM space, but it puts all the privacy stuff above board, and makes it illegal to proliferate and sell copies everywhere. Thats more like blockchain.
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To really have communism or socialism you'd also need to have direct citizen involvement. To actually implement it you would need something that is more democratic than governments we currently call democracies. Everybody claims that they will give The People a voice, but only direct democracy actually does that, and the more direct the better.
Re: Breadchain (Score:5, Informative)
but only direct democracy actually does that
Right. We're having a town meeting on whether to repair the snow plows or buy new tires for the police cars. And 240 other things on the agenda up for a vote. Screw it. I've got better things to do. Too bad we can't hire some bureaucrats to take care of the details for us. The kind who say trust me, dude. And vote for me this fall. But now we have an indirect democracy. And the money was spent on the mayor's yacht and another presidential palace (thanks, Vladimir). And of course a healthy allocation for the secret police, just so you and I don't get it into our heads that we're actually going to vote these bastards out.
Direct democracies work well when society is restricted to Dunbar's number [wikipedia.org]. When you, I and the rest of our tribe can sit around the campfire and make decisions about tomorrow's work allocations.
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The level of directness should be directly proportional to how rapidly the decisions have to be made, and how important the decisions are to society.
Supreme court justices should be voted for, not appointed. Presidents should be elected directly, not be representatives.
The fact that our votes count for much less than they should is a big reason why people don't vote.
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Presidents should be elected directly, not by representatives. Sigh. Preview is there, I know what it's for.
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Anyone who advocates direct democracy after 2016 needs their head examined.
The clues were there in 415 B sodding C, if anybody cared to look.
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Anyone who advocates direct democracy after 2016 needs their head examined.
The clues were there in 415 B sodding C, if anybody cared to look.
Trump would have lost in 2016 if the US Presidential elections were a democracy.
So what is your point?
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I don't see what Trump has to do with the issue at hand anyway. The electoral college is shot, but it's nothing to do with the issue at hand.
There are other countries in the world, you fat cunt.
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History has made it crystal clear that direct democracies lead straight to disaster. Crowdsourced governance is completely unworkable.
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So, if I get some meatchain, can I make a sandwichchain?
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If I need to secure my doors, do I need a chainchain?
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This [youtube.com] will answer all your questions.
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Blockchain doesn't actually do anything to avoid centralized control. The web itself was built for this very same purpose. in its architecture, it is highly decentralized. Anybody can stand up a web server just about anywhere, more easily than they could open a coffee shop. The centralized control comes from the need to promote and connect to your server. You have to register a domain name with a centralized DNS registrar. There are only a handful of internet backbone providers in the world. There are only
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That's ultimately what makes the 'zOMG, web3 will be
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Touchdown.
On paper?
Unbreaded!
Re: Breadchain (Score:1)
One more time... (Score:5, Funny)
Dissociated Press (DP) — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Physicists identify new fundamental particle
May herald a new particle family and restructuring of the Standard Model
Geneva, Switzerland — August 2018
Keywords: hypino, shinyon, blockchain
High energy particle physicists at the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nullité) facility have confirmed the existence of the long-conjectured hypino (hy-PEE-no). It is thought to be the first member of a new class of particles known as shinyons (SHY-nee-ons), distinct from bosons and fermions.
Unlike other subatomic particles, hypinos carry no charge, and have neither rest nor relativistic mass. Their only defining quantum property is spin. Hypinos are thought to be the fundamental unit of marketing hyperbole. To date, hypinos are the only known members of the proposed class of shinyons, which are of especial interest to tech investors and holders of the MBA degree. Dr. Martin Waugh, of the Institute for Advanced Squander, further posits that the hypino may be the carrier of the so-called “weak-minded force”, a mutual repulsion between fools and their money. It is theorized that, upon sufficiently accelerated spin, hypinos transform into super-excited hyperinos, detectable only by Chief Information Officers.
The discovery of the hypino is recounted by Drs. Robert Crawford and Robert Jensen as follows:
“It was a Friday afternoon, and we and our colleagues were returning from a long lunch. Maintenance on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was scheduled to start Saturday morning, and the apparatus would be unavailable for two months. We were in a ‘what the hell’ kind of mood, so we thought we'd take a fantasy shot, just for grins and giggles.
“We had a few leftover Higgs Bosons from 2012 on the shelf, so our lowly lab technician, Garth Dennis, breech-loaded them into the beast , set up a blockchain for the target, positioned the extremely sensitive Swindleometer at the intended point of collision, energized the superconducting electromagnets, and let it rip. Upon collision, the blockchain shattered into a shower of the elusive hypinos. Examination of the debris field revealed that the blockchain and all of our cash were gone! Apparently the hypinos were entangled with our funding.”
There may be natural sources of hypinos. The strongest natural emitters appear to be located in Redmond, Washington, and Armonk, New York.
Web3 is a lie. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's take a look at things. Web1 - 1990s Internet, you want something, just fire up your own server for it. Complete democracy!
Web2 - Firing up your own server sucks balls! Pay for our S/P/I/L/G/B/T/QaaS and host your shit in the cloud! Web1 is so dead!
Web3 - Fuck big corporations! We need blockchain so we can once again democratize the Internet! Blockchain is the solution to making everyone equal!
Okay. Now that we have a insanely gross simplification to catch everyone up, Web3 is a false promise. Unless your cell phone has the power to hold some significant portion of the ledger that is the blockchain, YOU ARE BEHOLDEN TO SOMEONE. The end, that's it. Because at any point, it's still fair game for those holding the ledger to remove the transactions that relate to you.
Think about all the current dApps (decentralized applications) that are out there right now. They are using one of two systems. Alchemy [linkedin.com] or Infura [linkedin.com] and we've hit a point that if you want to start your own dApp API, you've got as good a chance as starting up your own Twitter [mastodon.social]. All this is is instead of trusting Meta or Google, you are trading over who your master is to Alchemy or Infura, but it literally the same game.
Some people just look at the end product like Bitcoin or Eth, but the exchanging of those end products incredibly good chance that anything you do with them is handled at some point by Binance [linkedin.com]. This is literally no different than a less regulated ACH [treasury.gov] where you have no legal recourse.
And everyday, this industry that props up Web3 is shrinking. They are shrinking because these big players are buying up the competition. [coindesk.com] WEB3 IS A LIE and people who are telling you otherwise have had the wool firmly pulled over their eyes.
Web1 was the more correct take, albeit not the most effective one. If we want a truly decentralized web, we need to make the Internet (not just the web) a place that is open and easy to use [gemini.circumlunar.space] (not this stupid godforsaken HTML5 [whatwg.org] bullshit that is so over engineered that it puts Lennart Poettering's wettest dreams to shame). It needs to invite all to interact with it with protocols that aren't closed behind server room doors with pay-to-play gatekeeping for the services. Web3 is just changing one master for yet another master.
Re:Web3 is a lie. (Score:4, Interesting)
Web1 was the more correct take, albeit not the most effective one. If we want a truly decentralized web, we need to make the Internet (not just the web) a place that is open and easy to use (not this stupid godforsaken HTML5 bullshit that is so over engineered
What we need if we want a truly decentralized web is a truly decentralized network, and that means getting a meshing mode into the major 802.11 standards so that we aren't arguing over which mesh we should use, and when, and why. Long haul traffic is "always" going to be a sticking point (foreseeably) but we could conceivably be replacing all the local traffic with something truly democratic.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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You are correct in that web 2 was heralded as the site operators start facilitating user contributed content (comments on articles, pretty much the entirety of wikipedia, etc).
The logistics of hosting are a separate matter. You left out Angelfire/Geocities and web page options ;)
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That's exactly it. The web didn't become centralized from a lack of decentralized technologies. It happened because big companies chose to centralize it. Centralization gave them power. It let them lock people into their services.
Tim Berners-Lee is pushing a technological solution to a problem that isn't technological in nature. It won't work. At least his technology is more rational and better designed than the one the blockchain crowd is pushing. But technology was never the problem. As long as co
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Web2 - Firing up your own server sucks balls! Pay for our S/P/I/L/G/B/T/QaaS and host your shit in the cloud! Web1 is so dead!
I'm probably showing my age, but I remember "Web 2" being used to describe the proliferation of openly accessible RESTful APIs when AJAX was first becoming commonplace in all major browsers. This was around the mid 00's if I remember correctly. It was the very beginning of the single page web application / client-side rendering and the promise was that websites would expose data and content via these APIs and other websites, and possible desktop applications (this was just before smart phones) would consume
Cryptocurrency was meant to solve money (Score:4, Insightful)
I feel like all these buzzwords like smart contracts, unstoppable domains and web3 are to lure people into buying some altcoins that overpromise and under-deliver.
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Cryptocurrencies qualify as speculative investments. That means that investing in them us much MORE like gambling than investing in blue chip stocks or high grade bonds.
The forces that keep poor people poor are not addressed in any way by cryptocurrencies. In first world countries, the PRIMARY force that keeps poor people trapped in poverty is their own ignorance (both in the form of a lack of education in skills that get jobs that pay, AND in a lack of understanding of the stock market and how to invest
Re: Cryptocurrency was meant to solve money (Score:2)
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This supposed "intention of cryptocurrencies" doesn't matter. They are speculative investments, whether somebody intended them to be or not. For ones like bitcoin, using them as an actual currency is impractical due to the very high transfer fees. That's just one reason out of many, though.
And are you bringing up gold because you believe that limited-supply currency somehow solves the key problems that we have with fiat currencies today? If so, you need to study your history. Fiat currency was introduc
Re: Cryptocurrency was meant to solve money (Score:2)
Web 3.0 block chain just makes me think "hey, you think thr internet doesn't forget what you do now, just wait!"
The problem is users don't want that (Score:5, Interesting)
When the Internet started just about anyone could make a web page. But users wanted more features and with that come complixity. That lead to templates and then services like My Space and eventually to modern social media like Facebook.
And yeah, I know a lot of the old farts here prefer Web 1.0. Sorry, but that's not what most people want. They want pictures and movies and filters and fonts and text and reposts and all sorts of stuff you can't do with Web 1.
Eventually it got to the point where no one but the most dedicated hobbyist and/or programmers could maintain their own sites.
This inevitably lead to centralization since you needed increasingly large companies to make the software for all these features, and because anti-trust laws aren't enforced so they just buy out or bury any competitor.
Basically, Web 3 is a technical solution to a social problem, e.g. the tendency for things to centralize.
Re:The problem is users don't want that (Score:4, Insightful)
I found that in the Web 1.0 world, maintaining my web site was not a problem. *Protecting* it was the real challenge. Image leaches were what I noticed most. You could use referrers and other things to mitigate that, but that added a layer of complexity but it's all part of a general problem: Popularity is actually kind of a curse for independent sites.
The bad kind of popularity is DoS or DDoS because somebody doesn't like you. Even the good kind of popularity can be bad though. There's an excellent chance that you won't be able to monetize it, and your site will just have to shut down, or your hobby will become something that gets you unwanted attention for insufficient compensation. ie, fame and money is workable; but fame without money is the pits. Seriously, money without fame is the best; but that's not found in content creation online.
Layer on the ever-present chore of making sure that you're patched, and running your own server simply isn't worth it for almost everybody. The next level is to be hosted somewhere where they do the patching, hosting, and even DoS protection for you but that costs money. There we go. It's money most people don't want to spend just for the privilege of doinking around with the internals of their web sites.
I know how to do all that stuff if I put my mind to it, and I have still not even had a parked domain for at least 10 years now. There's just no compelling reason, and way too much hassle.
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I don't think anyone is saying that user content is bad, just that the current centralization is bad.
In theory, similar capabilities and similar ease of use could be had in a more decentralized fashion. The practical problem is that such a high minded goal offers no room for profit and competes with a ton of profit motive for technical attention. It's worth it for the companies to catch a whiff of potentially successful efforts and hire the people that could make them possible, even if they just pay them
Somebody still has to write the code (Score:2)
Again if you're going to have market forces at work you're going to have the tendency for markets to consoli
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That's what I stated as a practical problem it requires technical attention but without profit motive to drive it.
I don't want unlimited immutable data (Score:3)
Also, I mentioned this elsewhere, but users don't really want to manage their data. It's too much work. I don't want to worry about whether I gave access to my medical record to a bad actor by mistake. That's why we have HIPPA. Again, this seems like yet another technical solution to a social problem, and those rarely if ever work (with the obvious exception of tech that produces tangible goods).
Web3 is basically a lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Those pyramid-scheme-loving cryptobros came up with "web3" in hopes that people might come to believe blockchain could serve a purpose other than to waste prodigious amounts of electricity.
Like Apple but as a public utility (Score:1)
So Tim is proposing what Apple is doing for their user data but run as a public utility. You own your data and you decide who gets to see, and add to, parts of your data.
The exact technology to do this is not so important. What is important is:
You own the data and it is portable for you to move.
The data is unhackable.
The data is not available to government prying eyes.
No one can monetize the data without your explicit permission.
Large amounts and small amounts of data are managed efficiently.
Now that we've blockchain being hacked.... (Score:2)
Roe V Wade (Score:2)
How does one ensure that corporation A can access fields 1-10 only and corporation B can access fields 5-15 only? This is block-chain technology looking a problem it can fix and I'm not seeing a solution.
It's important to remember that overturning Roe v. Wade wasn't about restoring State's rights, it was about removing privacy, a goal the USA has been advancing for some 20 years and thus, overturning this landmark case was only a matter of time. While some US states have promised to protect every woman'
"they can choose" (Score:1)
which can be hosted wherever the user wants. They can then choose which apps can access their data.
The private information about the user is needed only for commercial usage - for self-promotion. For millions of people who just want to communicate - zero private information is needed to be accessed by anything.
Nobody in the world needs to need anything private about "mapkinase" - only collection of my posts and my comments. If am the idiot who tells the world the name of my favorite pet and my birth year,
Skeptical of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Score:2)
"Solid" [inrupt.com] is based on a company owned centralized server. How is that de-centralized?