Re: New Scientist - We want our internet back

On 08/02/2016 10:51 PM, Kevin Marks wrote:
> A friend showed me this week's New Scientist on Saturday, and this was
> the cover:
>
>
> "We want our internet back - The grassroots fight to regain control
> and what it means for you"
>
> I assumed this would be based on the Decentralized Web Summit, and
> hoped it might mention indieweb and the Social Web Working Group's
> recent Drafts.
>
>     “Very big and powerful companies own a huge chunk of what happens
>     on the web,” says Andrei Sambra, a developer with the World Wide
>     Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
>     the main standards organisation for the web. But we – the ones
>     producing this valuable data – have lost control.
>
>     The time has come to push back. Sambra is part of a growing
>     movement to wrest back control
>
>
> then:
>
>     In a sense, that would be just getting back to the way the web was
>     always intended. The original World Wide Web, invented by Tim
>     Berners-Lee at the particle physics centre CERN near Geneva in
>     1999, was a “decentralised” affair. There were no central servers;
>     websites ran on individual machines in universities, offices and
>     bedrooms. Hosting a site just meant plugging a computer into your
>     internet connection and having it serve up the HTML code to anyone
>     visiting. No one company ruled the roost.
>
>     Simple open protocols meant that anyone who knew what they were
>     doing could be a part of the burgeoning network. “A lot of the
>     things that made the early web wonderful were these open
>     standards,” says Harry Halpin, also with W3C. “This allowed a
>     level of decentralisation, and lack of monopoly control of the web.”
>
>     It sounds utopian, and in many ways it was – but far too fiddly
>     for most people to faff about with. Those open protocols are still
>     there. But we were lured away by convenience.
>
>
> After more explanation of how silos are taking over, I was expecting a
> mention of the SWWG from the 2 w3c people quoted. But no.
>
>     Sambra is working on a project called Solid, which is led by none
>     other than Berners-Lee himself. The idea behind this prototype
>     software is to separate our data from the apps and servers that
>     process it. With Solid, you get to decide where your data lives –
>     on your phone, a server at work, or with a cloud provider, as it
>     probably does now. You can even nominate friends to look after it.
>     “We want to put the data in a place where the user controls it,”
>     says Sambra.
>
> It talks more about Solid, and about Maidsafe, another interesting
> project, but not a standard. Then, Harry again:
>
>     The answer, says Halpin, is for the developers working on
>     different parts of the distributed web to start talking to each
>     other about their work, something that doesn’t currently happen.
>     “The community has to get together with the adequate expertise and
>     solve these hard problems and push open standards,” he says. Open
>     standards will make it easier for talented developers to build
>     applications without having to go through existing networks.
>
>
> I thought we were talking to each other. We have multiple specs going
> through CR at the moment. How did this story not get told?
>
>
>
I did mention the Social Web WG but the reporter left that out. I'm also
disappointed that it wasn't mentioned. I discussed it at length and was
not aware somehow the W3C would be confused with Solid (a MIT research
project), much less Maidsafe (who do not even participate in the WG).
I'm happy to see the general concept and Solid mentioned of course, as
some media is better than no media!

Note I interviewed the reporter when I was still a staff contact for the
Social Web WG before, I believe, being removed due to my funding going
against my will to Ira at ERCIM -  and then not being supported by MIT
for not being sufficiently willing to push SoLID into what I thought was
premature standardization. Although I still think its premature to
standardize Solid, given that the user base is relatively small and
technology still under development, although I hope any standards
produced can be compatible with RDF - AS2.0 clearly can and I believe AS
2.0 is being used by Solid.

Although its odd to have Solid confused as a W3C standard although it
being Tim Berners-Lee's personal project, it's not surprising there is
confusion given that he is also Director and Solid is funding two staff
contacts for the WG (Andrei was also at least aware of the Social Web
WG, I hope he also mentioned it). I'm much more unhappy with Maidsafe,
as the security community believes that the technology base is basically
a possibly well-intentioned scam. I've personally asked them to submit
their work to peer review as they make a large number of dubious
privacy/security/anonymity claims in their marketing. When I asked them
for peer review, I got a 'whitepaper' posted on reddit :) Anyways, I
also believe the software still doesn't run yet and is patented.

   cheers,
       harry