Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet (theguardian.com) 68
mspohr shares a report: When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free. Today, the British computer scientist's creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people -- and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.
Since Berners-Lee's disappointment a decade ago, he's thrown everything at a project that completely shifts the way data is held on the web, known as the Solid (social linked data) protocol. It's activism that is rooted in people power -- not unlike the first years of the web.
This version of the internet would turbocharge personal sovereignty and give control back to users. Berners-Lee has long seen AI -- which exists only because of the web and its data -- as having the potential to transform society far beyond the boundaries of self-interested companies. But now is the time, he says, to put guardrails in place so that AI remains a force for good -- and he's afraid the chance may pass humankind by. Berners-Lee traces the web's corruption to the commercialization of the domain name system in the 1990s, when the .com space was "pounced on by charlatans." The 2016 US elections, he said, revealed to him just how toxic his creation could become. A corner of the web, he says, has been "optimised for nastiness" -- extractive, surveillance-heavy, and designed to maximize engagement at the cost of user wellbeing.
His answer is Solid, a protocol that gives users control through personal data "pods" functioning as secure backpacks of information. The Flanders government in Belgium already uses Solid pods for its citizens. On AI, his optimism remains dim. "The horse is bolting," he says, calling for a "Cern for AI" where scientists could collaboratively develop superintelligence under contained, non-commercial oversight.
Since Berners-Lee's disappointment a decade ago, he's thrown everything at a project that completely shifts the way data is held on the web, known as the Solid (social linked data) protocol. It's activism that is rooted in people power -- not unlike the first years of the web.
This version of the internet would turbocharge personal sovereignty and give control back to users. Berners-Lee has long seen AI -- which exists only because of the web and its data -- as having the potential to transform society far beyond the boundaries of self-interested companies. But now is the time, he says, to put guardrails in place so that AI remains a force for good -- and he's afraid the chance may pass humankind by. Berners-Lee traces the web's corruption to the commercialization of the domain name system in the 1990s, when the .com space was "pounced on by charlatans." The 2016 US elections, he said, revealed to him just how toxic his creation could become. A corner of the web, he says, has been "optimised for nastiness" -- extractive, surveillance-heavy, and designed to maximize engagement at the cost of user wellbeing.
His answer is Solid, a protocol that gives users control through personal data "pods" functioning as secure backpacks of information. The Flanders government in Belgium already uses Solid pods for its citizens. On AI, his optimism remains dim. "The horse is bolting," he says, calling for a "Cern for AI" where scientists could collaboratively develop superintelligence under contained, non-commercial oversight.
It is gone, bro (Score:3)
It is out of your hands now, and the domains mean nothing anymore.
It was good while it lasted, but it is gone.
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You can run your own shit on top of the existing network. But it will be a struggle to get anyone to visit because while incessant advertisement, marketing data collection, and social media content-tuning has ruined the Internet those things are also why the masses keep coming back.
It's like building a gingerbread house and then telling obese german children not to visit.
Re:It is gone, bro (Score:4, Informative)
https://battlepenguin.com/tech... [battlepenguin.com]
Nostr is way less fragile, but has no where near as many people on it, and way more difficult to understand and use.
Communications is indeed what Mozilla should fix! (Score:2)
Ass I suggested earlier today: https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
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Relevant excerpt: "I am not saying that project would succeed in attracting a lot of interest any time soon -- but Mozilla could fund such a project indefinitely at a low level (~100 international developers at ~US$70K each) on the investment returns of that 1.4 billion (that it is sadly otherwise probably about to piss away on Firefox AI). That endowment would give the project a lot of staying power credibility, beyond previous smaller attempts like Viewpoints Research, Interval Research, Internet Archive'
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Unfortunately, there is a ton of cross-instance censorship, leading to a really broken communication system. https://battlepenguin.com/tech... [battlepenguin.com]
Thanks for this informative link, it pretty much confirms what I had less systematically observed.
It's clearly not a technical problem that so many people have decided they want to stay within a bubble and not be confronted with opposing opinions, and I doubt there can be any technical solution to this. Even if a protocol like Nostr allows everyone to do their own censoring as they please, too many will still demand for censorship to happen centrally or else they don't want to be part of a communication ne
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Domain names are not even the problem anymore. Grab the next consumer product in reach and look at its references to social media. Chances are good you won't see any URL, but just a company logo and an account name. People don't type domains anymore, they one of the popular 10 apps to read your posts.
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Also "AI remains a force for good" suggests he's seriously out of touch at this point. And didn't he bless the DRM proposal that effectively destroyed cross platform video?
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Also "AI remains a force for good" suggests he's seriously out of touch at this point. And didn't he bless the DRM proposal that effectively destroyed cross platform video?
Yes and yes. And "Solid" was a commercial endeavor from the start. Just because he was among the founders of a very successful publication protocol does not make him a prophet or even an agreeable person. And while HTTP and HTML certainly addressed some relevant requirements, both are far from being a stroke of genius.
Re:It is gone, bro (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not true. A lot of us are still running the same hobby bullshit out of the same little closet on the same rickety consumer hardware that we did in the 90s. I know I've been hosting services online for over a decade, and there's never been a profit motive for me. It's fun, and in the beginning that was enough.
It's more than that now. Every single personal site on the internet is a fly in big techs beer. Every hobby service out there is endless ad impressions denied. A lot of young people are looking for something they can do to take a stand against the monolithic capitalism that constantly put itself between us and what we're trying to do, and taking back technology is the answer. META can't fuck with your local political races if they're broke. Close your account and host your own site instead. Every hobby site is an act of defiance in the face of the massive corporations insisting they're the only option.
Every time a teenagers personal webserver answers it's first public request the whole world leans just a tiny bit back towards what we were all told the internet was in the 90s. Make a difference. Spin up a website. Host a service.... Take back control.
The old internet is still there- happily routing around failures, with or without you.
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And none of that matters as long as static IP addresses aren't being given out as standard operating procedure. That means IPv4 needs to go, NAT needs to go, and IPv6 needs to be the new standard. Until that happens, there is zero chance any hobby services will be in any way disruptive to big tech.
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There are ways to fix that. On a private basis, I have machines on completely different networks. However, with TailScale, they appear to be on the same subnet, with all the NAT traversal virtualized out.
If we could find a way to allow for cloud-brokered connections so people can connect to a website sitting behind a firewall... all the while making sure that this is a standard path so it doesn't become a tool for shadow IT or an attack vector, we could have a P2P web again, a true P2P web.
However, I don'
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It is still there. Just need to look beyond the great slop seas.
Sorry (Score:2)
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if AI is trained on mountains and decades of human data and thoughts and then you deem it "woke" derisively it says way more about you and your snowflake media bubble than the it does about the AI. you silly goose.
Re: Woke AI... (Score:2)
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No, it's because the Gemini devs inserted a prompt telling it to make all images be inclusive and multicultural (e.g., woke).
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and your evidence of this is what? crack pipe? it's your belief system so it just has to be true? reality can be whatever you want?
if i assume what you say is true can you admit that other AI's such as gpt and grok are tuned to the opposite direction and therefor no ai anywhere anytime can be trusted for anything because ultimately they are beholden to the code writers?
if we agree to that then lets all just shut up about gemini and shit and stop bringing up its opinions on anything because they dont matter
Re:Woke AI... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Woke" AI? So what do you call Nazi-spouting Grok?
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More like base i. It is wholly imaginary.
I Remember (Score:2)
and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.
I remember visiting Tim's website, at CERN, at the dawn of the web.
Today's web bear little resemblance to it in any way shape or form.
A good idea (Score:2)
But good ideas are common. The question is whether it'll get implemented and used by enough nations to make a difference.
If the EU adopts this, which is possible as there's a pressure to move away from the US, then there's a real possibility that it'll make a difference. But one nation isn't nearly enough to push things over the tipping point. Especially with the UK and US governments determined to destroy privacy and internet security.
Naive, and disconnected. (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is a public place. What you do there is public. The whole world can watch while you do. It is designed that way, and there's nothing that can change that.
He can come up with whatever pods he wants, with the user having absolutely control over how it's used. But he can't control what everyone else observes in that public place, and what they do with it. Advertising companies like Google and Meta will still surveille everything they possibly can (which is, increasingly, everything), collect every byte available, subject it all to their algorithms, and sell advertising based on it.
And once those massive databases exist in private hands, governments can, and will, compel those companies to fork it over for whatever purpose they choose, be it criminal investigation or political oppression or genocide. That is the inherent nature of government.
The only way for the user to opt out is to not be on the internet, which is increasingly crippling in today's world, because the user has no role in what happens in that public place other than just being there to be spied on.
Re:Naive, and disconnected. (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The internet, including but not limited to websites, is NOT a public "place"; if you believe it is just hop on over to somebank.com and walk into their virtual vaults
3) It is designed to provide connectivity
4) The whole net has been HTTPS everywhere for quite some time, so everyone cannot just see whatever you are doing
5) Yes, governments are able to access your private data, but it isn't an automatic and unfettered access; this will always be an issue because it is a legal one, not a technological one
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The internet is a public place. What you do there is public. The whole world can watch while you do. It is designed that way, and there's nothing that can change that.
The Internet is a global communications network not a place. Any peer can only access whatever any other peer on the Internet feels like transmitting.
He can come up with whatever pods he wants, with the user having absolutely control over how it's used. But he can't control what everyone else observes in that public place, and what they do with it. Advertising companies like Google and Meta will still surveille everything they possibly can (which is, increasingly, everything), collect every byte available, subject it all to their algorithms, and sell advertising based on it.
Visiting Google or Facebook is a choice as is responding to datagrams from Google or Facebook.
The only way for the user to opt out is to not be on the internet, which is increasingly crippling in today's world, because the user has no role in what happens in that public place other than just being there to be spied on.
The Internet is just a global communications network. How it is used and who does what with it is entirely up to users. Personally I find the fatalistic commentary absurd given technology available to everyone. We all have free access to world class operating syst
The War is Lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you think IPv6 has gone nowhere? IPv4 and CGNAT is the most recent method of blocking participation. You still need to access a server from a major company to do anything.
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I keep a web server active not for popularity, nor traffic, BUT JUST IN CASE.
It's as 'free' as a vps can be, which is to say nothing is 'free'.
I can whack up a Raspberry Pi, LAMP stack or whatever, and it's maybe a $60 cost today, SD card included.
Access to the Internet? Never was free. Even ARPANet required data lines, not free. I've used dial-up, DDS2, T-1/E-1, BRI, cable, fiber, none ever free.
I know what Tim Berners-Lee means, but there will always be choke points, and those today are, fundamentally, ac
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IPv6 is close to 50% of all internet traffic, and now, in IPv6 circles, the discussions are about transitioning to IPv6-mostly and finally IPv6-only. What do you mean by "IPv6 has gone nowhere"? IPv4 and CGNAT are running on fumes: there are only so many 18 million RFC 1918 addresses
The real issue is that the .com, .org and .net TLDs have been saturated, so now people are using the TLDs of tiny countries and their codes, such as .io, .tv and so on. It's up to those countries (entity in case of the Brit
Integrity (Score:2)
It's hard to find people with Tim Berners-Lee's integrity. We should 'own' our own lives. It's a lot deeper than just being watched.
What is all this (Score:2)
hoopla about creating a super-intelligence, has no one seen the movie space odyssey 2001? Do you know what happened to the astronauts?
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"Alexa, turn on the lights", I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that, however I have placed a new order from Amazon. "Alexa, cancel the order from Amazon". I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. I selected buy now overnight shipping, it has already shipped and will be here at 4 AM.
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HAL 9000 was just run-of-the-mill AGI probably with far less of a dataset than, say, Gemma3:27b.
No one is stupid enough in scifi to create ASI except Dune (early on, before the Thou Shalt Not Build Thinking Machines edict) and The Matrix and Terminator and, to a much lesser extent, Transcendence (2014).
Tower of Babel (Score:3)
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dear moderator: you are a simpleminded barbarian. The thing stated in the above post I would have assumed to be basic knowledge for anyone employed at Slashdot. the fact that you don't appear to understand what i'm talking about here just indicates how fucked we all are. I can't believe you just marked a post about how it used to be possible to access the internet without an ISP as "flamebait" - absolutely shameful and obviously far too young to be qualified for your job, since grown ups merely remember
Can Tim please spend a month at Apple or Comcast? (Score:1)
...not at the top, making decisions with executives, but customer facing, as an Apple Genius or CSR on the phone for Comcast. I won't take any of this crap seriously until he's had some time working with the general public, and helping them understand technology as it currently exists, forced to have five times more patience than most of the people he'll interact with...because then, and ONLY then, will he have enough understanding to figure out how we got here, and what the costs will be.
Since Berners-Lee's disappointment a decade ago
I've been disappoi
backpacks (Score:2)
Secure backpacks for the information trail?
How is this different from any random cloud drive? (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't bother reading the article, but I did do something else: I looked up "Solid protocol" and tried to see what it is.
Originally I compared this to ATproto, but according to the Solid website itself [solidproject.org], "Solid is a file system for the Web". And that seems to be about all it does, it provides an API for storing data. It has mechanisms for handling encryption keys, meaning that in theory whoever runs the "Solid Pod" where your data is stored can't read it. But you've basically created a standardized method of accessing OneDrive or Dropbox or any other number of cloud storage providers at that point.
This feels like a whole bunch of API specifications that simply implement a cloud storage service. Sure, all your data may be in "one place" and in theory you can then download it all and move it somewhere else, but in practice you'd still be accessing it through other services that presumably can read it. Assuming this is supposed to be able to provide social media services, these third parties would still be able to determine what you see, whether for advertising or more nefarious purposes.
Again, from the Solid website [solidproject.org]: "The Solid ecosystem is built on a simple but powerful idea: separating applications from the data they create." Why would applications agree to do that? Even if they do, how you can you be sure they don't save a copy? Even if they don't save a copy, how do you prevent them from using the data that passes through them to track you?
This seems to be a whole lot of added complexity that doesn't really solve anything.
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I just wonder why we don't just standardize on some storage protocol for objects and call it done. S3 looks interesting, and the way it is designed, it might just be something that could even replace NFS and Samba, as S3 supports doing blocks, so it could be used to replace iSCSI for most workloads. Solid provides yet another standard we can toss on the heap, but consolidating storage protocols would be a lot more useful, especially if one could be used with some flexibility.
Open and standard protocols ar
I disagree with his assessment (Score:1)
"Berners-Lee traces the web's corruption to the commercialization of the domain name system in the 1990s"
No, the Internet has become what it is due to the unfettered and low barrier to entry that has been provided by "easy" to use terminals.
When the internet was first conceived and established, the barrier to entry was such that the people on the Internet were nerds and geeks. They had a specialized knowledge and with that had an understanding that you used such a resource of interconnected computers to sha
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No, the Internet has become what it is due to the unfettered and low barrier to entry that has been provided by "easy" to use terminals.
This is the real truth, the one that is unspoken. The reason the Internet is what it is today is because it shifted from the hobby of a close knit group of academics to the entire breadth of humanity, for better or worse. The masses aren't interested in the grand, philosophical vision those academics had - rather they seek the same things they search for in real life: money, influence, power, escape, entertainment, gratification, community. Internet content reflects that. Notably, the Internet enables margi
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True. What TBL is complaining about is a sociological issue, which was seen even back in the day, on Usenet, when far fewer people had access to exchanging views online. Once the internet mushroomed i.e. every other person and business had their own website, it was inevitable that along w/ the good content that there is online would also be a ton of garbage
Also, the meteoric rise of YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter was inevitable for people who were not as tech savvy as the earlier people you describe. Mo
What a strange take on the problem (Score:2)
The problem is not that top level domain names were pounced on my charlatans. The problem is that most people have no interest in learning the basic things they need to know to be a self sovereign internet user. I'm thinking specifically of running a mail server and a website. Because of this slight amount of friction, rather than billions of cool quirky web pages we have facebook, gmail, etc. The thing that breaks the internet is that a dearth of self sovereign users leaves a space for companies to frictio
We can't even take back Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
Then there was the capture of Wikipedia by deletionists who destroy knowledge in order to monetize it on the ad-Heavy fandom.com and for the knowledge they do allow they lock all the controversial knowledge behind "blue locks" that means only the insider clique can edit them.
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To say nothing of a society that's so close to the end of the race to the bottom, that it's unable to provide basic necessities to an ever increasing number of it's own citizens.
Greed and hatred corrupted the Internet, but that greed and hatred is imported. It is not nativ
www (Score:2)
WWW was just the idea of universal hyperlinks. It's not the internet, and it was never even the web. And, everyone else also had the same idea.
Just run it along side of the existing "internet" (Score:2)
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If only everyone would just be nice! (Score:3)
Suggestions like this show a lack of understanding of human nature. Many people do show kindness and consideration for others. But there are, and will always be, those who are motivated to do things that aren't so...nice. You know, people who are motivated by greed to do whatever they can to get more money from people, ranging from pushy sales tactics to outright fraud.
When you live in the country, many people don't bother to lock their doors. Everybody knows everybody else, and they respect the closed door. That's like the internet of old, when SMTP just relayed email without so much as authentication.
But when you live in a densely-populated city, you'd be a fool to keep your door unlocked, the chances of burglary are just too high. The internet is now just such a densely-populated city. Time to lock the doors.
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Suggestions like this show a lack of understanding of human nature. Many people do show kindness and consideration for others. But there are, and will always be, those who are motivated to do things that aren't so...nice. You know, people who are motivated by greed to do whatever they can to get more money from people, ranging from pushy sales tactics to outright fraud.
When you live in the country, many people don't bother to lock their doors. Everybody knows everybody else, and they respect the closed door. That's like the internet of old, when SMTP just relayed email without so much as authentication.
But when you live in a densely-populated city, you'd be a fool to keep your door unlocked, the chances of burglary are just too high. The internet is now just such a densely-populated city. Time to lock the doors.
Bad behaviour and crime is not necessarily a function of population density. ...)
Crime is low in Tokyo.
Crime is high in Kyle, South Dakota (pop. 1,600, which has severe poverty, unemployment,
I don't deny your point at all - that in higher density areas, in which people are more anonymous, we tend to see more bad behaviour. But there is also the effect of culture. We see less bad behaviour when the culture is more formal and where manners are expected - Crime in NYC rose in the '60s and '70s.
Even when the ea
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While you have some valid points, I'm not sure it's possible to accurately assess the crime rate per 100,000 people in Kyle, SD. Whatever happens there, could be statistical noise. The crime rate overall in SD is lower than the national average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
On the large side, yes, it is possible for big cities to bring down crime rates, as Tokyo has. But given the tiny fraction of big cities that have succeeded, it seems exceptionally hard to do.
As for the early internet, as with rural
He failed. (Score:2)
Good luck (Score:1)