Posted on 01/11/2021 3:19:44 AM PST by Chickensoup
Unless you've been living under a rock, you know Tim Berners-Lee is a pretty important dude in the technology world. He's the father of the Internet, responsible for the birth of the World Wide Web as we know it.
And he hates what it has become. So he's taking some action to fix it.
Tim- Berners-Lee
Reuters
You see, for years now Berners-Lee has expressed his distaste at how major corporations have taken what was supposed to be a free environment and placed restrictions on it. He doesn’t like how groups like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have effectively centralized the Internet, nor how they control people’s data. So he’s instead working on a new platform and startup that’s declaring war on Big Tech.
Also Read: 50 Million Facebook Accounts Got Hacked & Data Stolen, In Social Giant's Worst Security Breach
Inrupt is a startup that Berners-Lee has been working on in stealth for about nine months. He’s even taken a sabbatical from his prestigious position teaching at MIT’s CSAIL labs in order to work full time. And Inrupt will finally launch to the world this week, Berners-Lee told Fast Company in an exclusive interview.
“The intent is world domination,” he says. Inrupt is built on the ‘Solid’ platform, something he and others at MIT have been working on for years. Solid is basically designed to be like the early days of the Internet, wild and free, and Inrupt will be the way to access it, at least to start. In a demonstration for the piece, he pulled up what looked like a very basic browser page, completely barebones. Part of an app built for his personal use, it displays his calendar, address book, chats, his music etc. It’s like if you combined Google Drive with WhatsApp, Spotify, and pretty much every piece of cloud storage and online connectivity you use today, all in one place. The difference here is that all the information is under his control.
Inrupt
Image courtesy: Tim Berners Lee/Inrupt
Taking back the Internet The basic idea is that each user is assigned a Solid ID and Solid pod when they first come online on the platform, that can be hosted wherever you want. Pod here stands for personal data store, which is what it does. Instead of apps like Google Drive, where your data is stored on the company’s server and therefore subject to their data harvesting. On Solid however, all your data exists in your Solid pod. When an app requests access, Solid will authenticate and then you can choose to give it access to your pod.
And he hates what it has become. So he's taking some action to fix it.
Tim- Berners-Lee
Reuters
You see, for years now Berners-Lee has expressed his distaste at how major corporations have taken what was supposed to be a free environment and placed restrictions on it. He doesn’t like how groups like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have effectively centralized the Internet, nor how they control people’s data. So he’s instead working on a new platform and startup that’s declaring war on Big Tech.
Also Read: 50 Million Facebook Accounts Got Hacked & Data Stolen, In Social Giant's Worst Security Breach
Inrupt is a startup that Berners-Lee has been working on in stealth for about nine months. He’s even taken a sabbatical from his prestigious position teaching at MIT’s CSAIL labs in order to work full time. And Inrupt will finally launch to the world this week, Berners-Lee told Fast Company in an exclusive interview.
“The intent is world domination,” he says. Inrupt is built on the ‘Solid’ platform, something he and others at MIT have been working on for years. Solid is basically designed to be like the early days of the Internet, wild and free, and Inrupt will be the way to access it, at least to start. In a demonstration for the piece, he pulled up what looked like a very basic browser page, completely barebones. Part of an app built for his personal use, it displays his calendar, address book, chats, his music etc. It’s like if you combined Google Drive with WhatsApp, Spotify, and pretty much every piece of cloud storage and online connectivity you use today, all in one place. The difference here is that all the information is under his control.
Inrupt
Image courtesy: Tim Berners Lee/Inrupt
Taking back the Internet The basic idea is that each user is assigned a Solid ID and Solid pod when they first come online on the platform, that can be hosted wherever you want. Pod here stands for personal data store, which is what it does. Instead of apps like Google Drive, where your data is stored on the company’s server and therefore subject to their data harvesting. On Solid however, all your data exists in your Solid pod. When an app requests access, Solid will authenticate and then you can choose to give it access to your pod.
So where is this technology now?
NOT “NEWS”. This was an OCTOBER, 2018 ARTICLE.
At the same state the Internet 1 was before being taken over by Big Tech.
I do hope they can roll this out.
Not Al Gore again?
But we all know that Al Gore invented the internet, he said so /s
But we all know that Al Gore invented the internet, he said so /s
But we all know that Al Gore invented the internet, he said so /s
It is news and very relevant to the conditions and situations today.
The conversation is where is this tech being used if anywhere.
If not being used, why not?
Big Tech probably joined together to cancel his work, as it threatened their domination.
And you think Verizon and the other big communication companies are going to let you access it?
“It is news and very relevant to the conditions and situations today.
The conversation is where is this tech being used if anywhere.
If not being used, why not?”
*******************************
You might want to check out the comments on the following linked blog entry.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/11/inrupts-solid-announcement.html
Are you able to characterize or summarize them?
“Big Tech probably joined together to cancel his work, as it threatened their domination.”
You’re more right than you know :-)!
There were a lot of predecessors to very popular websites out there already ... none of them were centralized ... you’d simply connect to one of many servers to access the information ... and the information was distributed to all servers world wide. They weren’t as easy to access as typing “foo.com” into your browser or launching an app, but various means of accessing these tools were evolving into some pretty slick, easy to use programs with some really nice GUIs.
Just some examples ...
Usenet was a very powerful way of hosting discussion groups. There were groups for almost anything you could imagine (that is both good and bad :-) ). Reddit is basically what Usenet was ... though it is much easier to stifle free speech on Reddit given its centralized design. Usenet groups could have moderators if they wanted. However, it was always in the moderator’s best interest to only moderate posts that were completely ridiculous given the forum ... if it got too ridiculous, people would leave. It’s still out there, but it is nothing like what it was in the 1990s ... and it is downright stupid that it isn’t in use today.
IRC is an outstanding, distributed chat network. You could host town-hall like chats, or private chats. These days, instant messaging seems to be held hostage by Facebook (it is pretty much the defacto casual chat app being used today ... and that is sickening). Sure there are alternatives, but a vast majority of people out there simply use Messenger since it is ‘easy’. This is also still out there, but, again, isn’t used as much as it could be used.
Those are just two examples. It seemed like those were the first two of the early internet features that were destroyed. I don’t know if it was intentional, but a lot of sites started popping up in the “Web 2.0” days that lured people away from these older servers. Reddit was probably the largest of the bunch.
A site like Facebook, one where people post crap, follow others, like/dislike things, etc., could be designed to be distributed. The only problems I see are a means for users to host videos or pictures ... however, if something like YouTube were made free and fair, that would solve a lot of problems.
There are certainly issues with everything being distributed (security comes to mind), but I’ll take those risks over the frigging powermongers we see today running these social media companies.
Thank you
“And you think Verizon and the other big communication companies are going to let you access it?”
I don’t think they’ll have much of a choice if these wireless alternatives work well (Starlink for example). Right now, yes, they can be tyrants. However, competition can help alleviate that problem ... it’s pretty clear that these gigantic companies don’t know *how* to complete ... their desire for monopolies kind of proves that point.
Who knows what the truth is about anything. But I have read that Lee was something of an intel front-man cutout, like Zuckerberg or the Google boys. And I forget the details now, but also an analysis about how his solution is yet another tech alternative spin.
The CEO of mewe consulted with Tim Berners-Lee when building out mewe.
This is weird that it is printed in the india times. My thots yesterday as all this was occurring was that we would need to use foreign countries to house our internet services because our country is shutting them down. I thot Parler should reach out to India to house his servers. My web hosting is in Ireland.
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