Web Foundation launches internet hippie manifesto: 'We've lost control of our data, it is being used against us' The Web Foundation is warning about the death of the web again, and urging people to come together to make the internet all nice and lovely. "The World Wide Web is under threat," a 19-page hippie manifesto [PDF] published by the pro-WWW group warned on Monday. "We've lost control of our personal data and that data is being …
The Internet is full of people posting listicles, many of them need a kick in the listicles.
The web is a bit like a child; you can guide it's education and create guidlines for its activities, but eventually it matures enough that it takes its own direction.
At that stage you have no more control snd can only attempt to guide it.
Two words: self hosting.
The bigger problem is not that the internet is being censored, spied on and sold to spammers, but that users just passively accept this abuse, whine about it, but ultimately do nothing about it, even though there is a solution.
They just don't like the fact that the solution requires them to make an effort, learn something new, and abandon existing commercial infrastructures, because their sheep mentality herds them towards what's "easy" and "popular", two considerations that are apparently more important to them than such trivia as free speech and privacy.
Oh well, apathetic people get what they deserve.
@ veti. Are sure that is what Oh Homer meant? As I read it, he is absolutely spot on. Even if you do the odd job for family and friends, you will know that they will take 3 days to come up with a password (after asking you 10 times whether a password is really necessary). They will go on a drinking spree when Microsoft decided to change their GUI. And buy a new Apple Phone because it comes with new exciting emojis. And that if you've spent some time in biz you know that this is the perfect "target audience" presenting an perfect "opportunity" to "maximise ROI"...
Everything other than the ISP can be moved to self-hosting, and in certain areas of the developing world (and even in NYC, so I've heard) they've even circumvented that requirement via mesh networks, mostly out of sheer necessity due to the utter lack of commercial infrastructure.
But if you're going to leave the last strand of the umbilical chord intact (the ISP) then just pay an extra ten quid a month for a static IP, or use a dynamic DNS hostname service like NOIP.
In either case, you will have far greater control of your data, and thus there will be far less likelihood of it being "weaponised against you".
Again, people need to consider what is more important to them, the "ease and popularity" of prostituting themselves to the likes of Google and Facebook, or the "hard work" of living independently in freedom.
Again, people need to consider what is more important to them, the "ease and popularity" of prostituting themselves to the likes of Google and Facebook, or the "hard work" of living independently in freedom.
Any one want to bet on which will happen? People want "independence" but want someone else to do the hard work or pay for it. They will give away all their data so they can have online friends easily. We, El Reg readers, are not the target audience here. We know too much and are a minority.
Two words: self hosting.
That's only a thin slice of the solution. I have a website and I host it myself (or rather, I pay someone else to host it for me, but I think that's still what you mean by "self hosting"). That doesn't solve the problem.
The first thing it doesn't solve is accessibility. If I want people -- people I don't know -- to be able to look at my hosted material then they have to be able to find it. This they can do by using a search engine ... but as soon as a search engine becomes part of the solution it isn't all "self hosting" any more; you (and your site's users) have to trust the search engine company, and the search engine company is in a position to monetize your data.
The second thing is exclusivity. I may publish the things I want to publish on my own site -- and only on my own site -- but that doesn't stop other people from putting information about me (or other information I'd like to keep under my own control) on their sites ... and they may not be self-hosting, so that information may misused, monetized, and otherwise abused in all the ways you hope to prevent by self-hosting your own site.
So, you're only partly right. Putting the information you wish to share on a website on a server over which you have some degree of control is certainly better than putting it on a bunch of pages on some social media site, but it doesn't give you all of the privacy or the control that one ought to be able to demand for one's online presence. Not nearly.
... but I don't think there is a solution, as such. There's no way that you can stop other people scraping a public website and correlating the data there with data from all the other websites in the world and making connections and drawing conclusions. Big Data analytics is getting to be scarily effective technology, and facial recognition of any photographs you post means that your un-named friends and family will be identified pretty quickly.
The only solution that stands a chance is not to have an online presence at all, and to ask all your family and friends to refrain from posting about you, or posting your photograph, anywhere that they have a presence ... and even that doesn't have much of a chance.
when all we had to worry about was that pesky flaming from the IRC thingy that the damn kids had come up with, mind you, with access being in the 56kbps, we were LUCKY to have flames, I barely raised smoke :oP
just re read this, and am now sitting waiting for the got wood remarks ffs, sometimes I go moist for the days of IRC
Since we are reminiscing of the good old days, I remember when I was reading Usenet News on a terminal with a 9600 bps connection to a Unix-ish server. And it was plenty speedy as there were no ads (except from the September blues) and the killfiles took them out quickly. Just doing the kills and the selects and then pumping the space bar made it possible to drink straight from the fire hose. That is why I still find the link https://www.theregister.co.uk/Week/ so handy.
There needs to be clear plan of attack, recognition of pain points for companies, a broad and well-organized campaign to engage and rally people.
What more than Registering AI Pow Wowing is needed?
So your point is that humans aren't perfect... ? And that everything they create necessarily reflects their nature? So, what - should we just voluntarily refrain from such frivolities like "going online" until we manage to ascend as luminous beings of pure energy and enlightenment...? Or should we just forget even thinking about how the web could be made better because it's all pointless anyway? Is that it...?
Yeah, this "manifesto" isn't exactly a giant leap for mankind towards a better web, for sure; I fully concede that angle. And it's not like anyone ever asked the hare if it has any objections against being the dinner tonight, true. Perhaps the internet does indeed have a snowflake's chance in hell to ever be what it was supposed to be when it was imagined; but that won't make me stop listening for any ideas of what could be done or trying to apply any sensible ones - just because we're all fucked anyway*.
* Duh, of course we are. That doesn't mean we can't go to hell with some panache...
"As a young physicist at CERN, Sir Tim saw that valuable information was being trapped within institutions… Sir Tim gave the technology of the web to the world for free."
Wasn't it CERN paying his salary? So CERN gave it away for free, just like the actual TCP/IP protocol comes from DARPA.
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I’m not sure I’ll say “Shame on you”, but that did seem a rather unreasonably ranty article (no, I am not new here), without really offering much in the way of any alternative solutions instead.
In that context, would mentioning noyb.eu, the Mastodon distributed social network (and various other useful ground-upwards things that I haven’t yet heard of) as possible ways out of the quagmire not perhaps have been helpful, at least?
(And, yes, I do miss usenet (I know it still exists, but it is in long term decline), but while for a time the fact that you needed the smarts to manage a score file meant that those who knew could maintain a good signal:noise ratio, that level of complexity did make it unsuitable for a wider non-techie audience as internet growth increased.)
"especially after Sir Tim stared down a claim on his noblesse oblige when he gave the thumbs-up to including digital rights management as a web standard."
That was the moment when I came to the conclusion that the web was irretrievably lost. TBL's mouth noises now seem far too late at best, and disingenuous at worst.
The reason I considered that a bellwether wasn't because I object to the inclusion of DRM in the standard (although I do). It was because of how it came about -- pushed through by Microsoft, Google, and Netflix -- with the indispensable assistance of TBL -- over the objections of the majority of the other stakeholders. When major corporations get to shove stuff (and especially poorly designed stuff argued for by lying) in the web standard based solely on their power as major corporations, the people have largely already lost.
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