Posted on 09/29/2018 7:01:04 PM PDT by Paladin2
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, its 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.
We have to do it now, he says, displaying an intensity and urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. Its a historical moment. Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed peoples data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building.
Yep. This sounds like the latest Pied Piper scheme.
Solid is a platform, built using the existing web. It gives every user a choice about where data is stored, which specific people and groups can access select elements, and which apps you use.
It allows you, your family and colleagues, to link and share data with anyone. It allows people to look at the same data with different apps at the same time.
Imagine if all your current apps talked to each other, collaborating and conceiving ways to enrich and streamline your personal life and business objectives? Thats the kind of innovation, intelligence and creativity Solid apps will generate.
With Solid, you will have far more personal agency over data - you decide which apps can access it.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet and is disgusted by what it has turned into.
It can be a server at home or a server you get via web hosting or a bonafide Solid POD server.
The problem with running a server at home is upload speeds tend to be very slow and your upload speed is the download speed for everyone surfing your stuff.
The problem with using web hosting for your server is that this Solid software runs on javascript so you need something like NODE.js running on the server and you also need root access, neither of which is available on your $5/month web hosting. Think more like $50/month and you need to know the commands and some programming.
That leaves you with existing Solid POD servers which will be free but far and few between and unreliable.
There are already distributed social networks out there. Diaspora is one. They haven’t been very successful due to the reasons mentioned above. High dollar hosting or really good upload speeds. I can’t even get the upload speeds required to host my own website as I live in the boonies. I would have to move to the city and then get business ISP service. Couple hundred $$ a month ought to cover it.
Maybe this upcoming 5G stuff will help. Not that I can even get a cell signal where I live. It’s DSL or nothing here.
Just now did a speed test. We’re running at about 8Mbps download speed and 0.70Mbps upload. 8Mbps allows me to surf pretty quickly. If 0.70 was my download speed, it would take a full minute for some sites to load. That means if I hosted a website on my computer, it would take every visitor(if one at a time) a full minute before my site would load for them. If 10 people tried to get on my site all at the same time, it simply wouldn’t work. One lucky person might be able to get to the site.
I imagine Tim Lerner-Lee has thought of all this and maybe has a plan but all that server space and bandwidth has to be paid for somehow. Will I have to watch an ad before I can access my data? Will someone else have to view an ad before they can see my stuff?
He’s thought of it, I’ve thought of it, you’ve thought of it, we’ve all thought of it. Until everybody has a firehose ISP none of it is going to be feasible. Putting stuff “up in the cloud” doesn’t solve anything. You don’t control it.
It’s got to be simple, and it’s got to be local. Something like Napster with Apache that you download and browse through it instead of your ISP or VPN.
I’m just throwing out ideas here. I am not criticizing anyone.
“It was at Winter 1992 (January) UseNIX conference when we attempted to create a library of pictures of attendees”
We are not worthy. Proud to know you. I fiddled with Unix for a couple of years when running my conspiracy BBS “Baby Brain” via Mustang, a BBS app, off a 1200 baud modem in Oakland in the early 90’s. One of my BBS visitors got in touch and baked me cookies. She’s still an email friend 25 years later.
“Im a bit [permanently] behind on my current Popular media cultural references. So, you have me at a disadvantage.”
“Silicon Valley” is an HBO comedy series ... i think it’s had 4-5 seasons ... by FAR the funniest thing on TV right now, PARTICULARLY for those in technology ... I only subscribe to HBO streaming seasonally (like for a season of Game of Thrones), and then binge on whatever I haven’t seen during the last years ... for anyone who cares, the quality of the “HBO GO” streaming channel itself is horrifically awful, but for the same monthly fee, the exact same HBO streaming content can be obtained from amazon.com, with all of the exact same features and quality of Amazon Prime streaming ...
Has the true inventor of the net Al Gore looked into this?
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Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms
allowing the Web to scale......and he fought to make it free to all.
If he had patented his "link" idea, he could have become a multi-billionaire....even if we paid just one mill everytime we linked.
The idea of the hyperlink goes back a long way. Vannevar Bush alluded to it in his essay “As We May Think” in 1945. The word was coined by Ted Nelson who founded “Project Xanadu” in 1960, an early effort in this area. I knew some of the guys who were involved with that. Last I heard, they are still kind of working on it!!
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