World Wide Web Foundation closes so Tim Berners-Lee can spend more time with his protocol

After fifteen years of fighting to make the web safer and more accessible, the World Wide Web Foundation is shutting down. In a letter [PDF] shared via the organization's website, co-founders Sir Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of the World Wide Web – and Rosemary Leith explain that the organization's mission has been somewhat …

[amanfromMars 1]

Cometh the hour, cometh the man*

Pods stands for "personal online data stores," which can be hosted by an individual or provider.

Are they going to be a great deal different or very similar to the likes of Google blogspot.com pages or live interactive reader generated content/post a comment threads available for deep see phishing and the free radical phorming of future leading commentary and virtual realities/remotely controlled existential treats?

Either way, whenever the aim is to make the internetworking of things a great deal better everywhere for everyone and everything, I'm in and captured, hook, line and sinker, and all for it.

It is just exactly what is currently needed in these dire present day times of dark and dismal voids which invite the weak and meek and the psychotic and unwary and greedy and lairy into work, rest and play in confused and conflicted spaces rather than destroying them and rendering them unavailable for systems administering corrupted operations/DoDGI SCADA SkunkworX

* ........ https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/28/messages/517.html?utm_content=cmp-true

[Snapper]

He's baaaack!

[Captain Hogwash]

Yes

I must remember to look at the name of the poster before losing valuable time & energy reading the post.

[amanfromMars 1]

Re: Hogwash Stuff and Nonsense

I must remember to look at the name of the poster before losing valuable time & energy reading the post. .... Captain Hogwash

That’s a tad harsh and surely unfair on Thomas [Claburn], Captain, ..... and if you can remember, something valuable to say from yourself in the future would be nice too.

[Captain Hogwash]

Re: Hogwash Stuff and Nonsense

I was referring to amanfromMars 1

[Tubz]

so a pod at home or online, either way, the data will always be at risk of being hacked or misused, so can't see it being any more of an improvement to what we have now?

[Naich]

My understanding is that you have control of your pod and can fine-tune who has access to what. Personal information is not stored anywhere else so access can be revoked and Evilbastardcorporatetakeover can't use your data any more.

[Doctor Syntax]

That's the theory but Tubz may be right. After all a pod will be a well defined target although I don't really have any idea of what a database of social graph data might look like.

[Androgynous Cow Herd]

"what a database of social graph data might look like"

most of them are full of cat videos.

[doublelayer]

That sounds like the theory, but if you put anything in the pod that someone actually wants, I wouldn't be that sure that it's easy to keep people out. Sites that you actually want to use will likely require access to everything in the pod. A lot of users will allow that. That site will then copy everything in the pod for local storage and perpetual access, meaning that you can at most cut them off from further updates, not continued access and abuse of old data. Those sites can coordinate to continue distributing your pod data. For example, it would be pretty easy for an advertising network to say that they'll target ads best if you send them the pod ID, and if they don't already have the pod data, they ask for that from the site on which the adverts are placed.

It also sounds like it will have the risks that any decentralized, sometimes self-hosted service does. All these systems end up having the risk that, if you make it properly secure, the average user has trouble working with it because it requires key management, so they either don't bother having it, get locked out of it, or leave it in an insecure state. Meanwhile, if you simplify things to try to prevent that, then you often make it easier to attack, for example authenticating it with an SMS which is costly and vulnerable to SIM swapping. I haven't looked into this project, so maybe they've actually fixed this problem, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.

[Martin Summers]

To be quite honest, it sounds pointless and it sounds shit. Most web users don't really care about their privacy, those that do already take precautions. I can't see this going anywhere, or being successful. I'm sure Sir Tim could put his exceptional mind to better use with a more worthy project.

[David Newall]

Datum needs to be in a big data centre

Edge computing is a fine idea and I support it wholeheartedly. The problem with it is that bandwidth is thin at the edge, power is unreliable, environment runs hot and dusty, and the hardware lacks error correction. Not always, of course, but, say, 99.99% of it.

Social networks could be engineered to allow the data to keep appearing and disappearing, but, my god that would be hard. What they can't do is analyse and aggregate petabytes of data across thin, highly contested links.

There's a reason Google and Facebook have bigger and better networks than AT&T, CenturyLink and Verizon, and more computer power than IBM and Microsoft. It's because they can't operate any other way.

I lament that it's so.

[fg_swe]

Wrong

Write down your texts in plain HTML and your DSL modem or FTH line will be good enough to serve thousands of visitors a day. No need for overloaded CMS systems.

[doublelayer]

Re: Wrong

How about your pictures. The ones that a lot of social media users like to share? What do you think that will do to your connection, especially considering that users will likely not save them so if they see them multiple times, they'll download them multiple times.

Bandwidth is far from the only problem with this system. Among other things, it doesn't really protect your privacy very much as soon as someone starts to build services around it. Are we using a public model where anyone who wants can follow you? Then everyone who wants can download your data. Fine then, we'll make it private. Some small subset of the data is public and you have to approve anyone who wants access. In that case, it will be slightly harder, but a company could offer a service that will run on the data, then access the data of anyone the user follows. For instance, my company will offer a new program that will scan through your friends' images and run facial recognition on them to show you the ones that you appear in. That needs to run on our servers because the facial recognition models are too big to run on your phone (note to marketing, don't admit that it's really so we can copy all the data). Just give it access to all the pods you connect to, and it will generate those results and send them back to you.

There is also a feasibility problem. So you're going to host this on your computer on your home network. That won't work well for any people who don't have a desktop that's on most or all of the time. I'm guessing you have at least one of those. Now consider the people you know. How many people do you know who have only laptops and mobile devices? The laptops could do it if they were never moved and always kept on, but that's not the most common. I think we can agree that this is probably not being hosted off a smartphone. This will either mean that it's not really feasible to run it for many users or they will outsource it to an online provider. In other words, the way that these social networks started in the first place, because although anyone who wanted could host a website, it took maintenance and infrastructure and having a page on a social media site didn't.

[fg_swe]

It's Already There - Raspberry PI

Connect your RPI to the DSL router, get a DynDNS (e.g ddnss.de) name, install a web server and publish your ideas.

You can also store your files via ssh/scp.

Run a personal email server, encrypted with DeltaChat.

The local Linux User Group are your best friends in this.

All while the sheeple will focus on golden cages such as FB, X, youtube and so on.

[fg_swe]

Linux User Groups

LUGs are the best way for amateurs to learn how to run true internet services as opposed to the gilded, censored mainframe-cages of Google, Facebook, MSFT, Amazon and so on.

Join them, learn something. Grow balls.

[fg_swe]

Freedom Video Sharing

No need for WallStreetVideo ("youtube"), see this:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

[fg_swe]

Our Lefty French Friends

https://framasoft.org/de/roadmap

Looks like these are the *real* lefties, who cannot be bought by corporations and financiers, unlike most.

[fg_swe]

DeGoogling ala Francaise

https://degooglisons-internet.org/de/

[J.G.Harston]

It's rare that an organisation says "job done, let's abolish all our jobs". Well done Tim and co. The usual process is to continously redefine their target to keep Tarquin and Jocaster in their jobs.

Absolute poverty's been conquored, ok let's target relative poverty.

Relative poverty's been solved, ok let's target inequality.

Inequality's been solved, ok let's target inequity.

Inequity's been solved, ok, let's redefine 'inequity' to ensure this gravy train keeps going.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's an inept dolt and the project is a distraction and a money pit.

Much like his prior foundation. T.B.L. helped craft this dumpster fire, or at least the foundations of it. Now, finally having publicly acknowledged the failure of his vision for an open or even non-toxic internet, he offers a project that will waste more attention, time and resources on a "solution" that will never accomplish anything more than him feeling better.

HTML superseded it's rather rickety predecessors by being relatively more robust and feature complete while also attempting to present a user friendly, easy to use facade.

Much like the slog to get people to move to other "second projects" T.B.L. is due to find it hard going, like getting C++ people to move to Rust or Node projects onto Deno. He should know this. But he has been more cheerleader than engineer for decades and has lost the pulse of the internet a long time ago. He's of course free to prove me wrong, but there are too many predatory actors invested in the status quo.

So Tim is likely tilting at windmills in the twilight of his years. Hard to say and a bit sad, but I for one will leave the poor mad bastard to it and focus my time elsewhere, save the occasional glance to make sure he isn't going to hurt anyone but himself in the process.

[fg_swe]

Re: He's an inept dolt and the project is a distraction and a money pit.

So you claim he is responsible for "evil" information/ideas being published on the WWW?

Like Guttenberg being the cause of the 30 years war ?

It would be so much better if the old information monopolies/empires(newspapers, TV, Radio, book publishers) kept their power ?

If there were only the catholic church ?

Let me propose this: on the WWW you can show your best or your worst side. You can parrot nonsense. You can be tricked by hostile actors. But you can also act in good faith to help others. You can find very good advice in a heap of rubbish, just like there are good books amomg a mountain of others.

[fg_swe]

Errata

Must read Gutenberg, of course.

[hertz]

Re: He's an inept dolt and the project is a distraction and a money pit.

Solid and the PODS idea has been something Lee has been working on for like five years. It's not a new idea for him. He clearly wants more time (and money) to dedicate to that as it's something he thinks might make a difference.

Whether it will, etc, etc, remains to be seen. But considering organisations like the European Commission have flirted with decentralisation when it comes to their own social media presence, he might find supporters and advocates outside of the Silicon Valley dominated side of the web.

[Saigua]

Re: He's an inept dolt and the project is a distraction and a money pit.

RFC and Revokable Key sidebar or get the blob out?