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Submitted via IRC for FatPhil
The man who invented the web says it's now dysfunctional with 'perverse' incentives
Thirty years ago, the World Wide Web was born.
But over the next 30 years, it needs to be "changed for the better," according to its inventor.
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee laid out his vision for an information management system, which would become the World Wide Web, in March 1989. The blueprint would radically transform society as half the world's population went online in just three decades. But in a letter published Monday marking the web's 30th anniversary, Berners-Lee said he understands concerns that the internet is no longer a "force for good."
"The fight for the web is one of the most important causes of our time," Berners-Lee said.
[...]An open web has been a sticking point for Berners-Lee. From the outset, he chose to make the underlying code of the World Wide Web available to anyone without a fee.
Berners-Lee said the system has since been designed with "perverse" incentives, which he sees as the second source of dysfunction in the web today. He singled out ad-based revenue models, used by many tech giants like Google and Facebook, that reward "clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation."
[...]"Companies must do more to ensure their pursuit of short-term profit is not at the expense of human rights, democracy, scientific fact or public safety," he said in the letter Monday.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:11PM (2 children)
For example, it seems like almost every bank in existence (or at least in the US) has come up with their own crappy, barely functional website with their own broken security. When something breaks, I can't help but wonder, why don't they care? The people using such things might not be the bank's bread and butter, but it's pretty high end profit. This is not an abstract problem either. Living in the internet backwater of Yellowstone National Park and working in accounting, I occasionally see the results of this, such as paychecks that were deposited by cell phone, but the bank website/app either reported them as not deposited or just died without reporting anything (at least one of each). And I've heard of people fussing with a slow loading website for an hour just to pay a few bills from their bank accounts.
As to the security of these banking sites, what happens when someone messes up their hard-to-remember password that it needs to be reset by the bank's staff? There's a huge social engineering hole that virtually everyone has.
Meanwhile, SoylentNews just works. I've never had trouble connecting (at least when internet access is available no matter how bad it got).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:36PM
I would separate into JavaScript, and then "weird widgets" aka browser extensions. The four 'popular' browser extensions were: Java Applets, Flash, ActiveX, and Silverlight.
If these browser extensions did nothing more than 'play content' in a confined rectangle on a web page, then we would be okay. But Nooooo! They had to have an ability to interact with JavaScript in the browser. And then also have capabilities to, say, access local files, save files, trigger downloads, etc.
Yes, Banks are the worst. They are trying. But once they implement something, they think the world is a static place and they don't need to continuously keep up and upgrade.
IMO, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the web is mostly moving (moved) to a JavaScript only without any of Applets / Flash / ActiveX / Silverlight. But some people stick to stuck in the past.
Now if only JavaScript capabilities could have a permission model, like oh, maybe Android. The first time a JavaScript code tries to open a popup window, the user is asked permission. The first time it tries to start a file download, the user is asked permission. And even better, when you first visit the site, it would declare a manifest of wanted permissions, and the user could agree:
This sites wants to:
[x] Start file downloads (to provide printed accounting reports as PDF or Excel documents)
[x] Open popup windows or tabs (to open report viewers in a new context)
[_] play obnoxious sounds
[_] play even more obnoxious videos
[_] store cookies that survive beyond this login session
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:47PM
How many people build and run SoylentNews? A handful. A small number of people.
How many people build and run each bank website? Hundreds. More if you count related job functions. In some cases Thousands of people are involved.
And, yet the small team runs a well functioning, secure, and security responsible website. While the enormous team can't keep up with security patching and getting the site to work with various browsers. Why is this? Focus and priority. Nothing more. If it really mattered, the big group would do a much better job than the Soylent crew. It really doesn't matter to them, so they do a worse job than the Soylent crew.