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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
In a surprising announcement, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the web, and Rosemary Leith, co-founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, revealed that the organization is ceasing operations. The decision comes after 16 years of advocating for a safe, trusted, open web.
However, Berners-Lee is not giving up on the Foundation's goals; instead, he's just redirected his efforts to the Solid Protocol. That said, some of the Foundation's original objectives have been achieved. These include:
- Expanding internet access: When the Foundation started in 2009, only 20% of the world had internet access. Now, nearly 70% of the global population is online.
- Advocating for affordable internet: The foundation set a benchmark called "1 for 2", which stated that 1GB of mobile data shouldn't cost over 2% of a person's average monthly income. Not only was this successful, but now the Alliance for Affordable Internet is advocating for "1 for 5", where the goal is for the cost of 5GB of broadband, both mobile and fixed, to be no more than 2% of someone's average monthly income by 2026.
- Promoting net neutrality: The foundation helped win victories for net neutrality in the EU, India, and the US.
Berners-Lee and Leith cited the dramatically changed landscape of internet access as a key factor in their decision. The Foundation's original mission has evolved with most of the world now online, at affordable prices, and numerous organizations now defending web users' rights.
From where they sit, the top threat to users' rights is dominant, centralized social media platforms, such as Facebook, X, and Reddit. This dominance has led to the commoditization of user data and a concentration of power that's contrary to Berners-Lee's original vision of the web.
[...] This shift aims to restore power and control of data to individuals and build powerful collaborative systems. So, what is the Solid Protocol?
It's a set of specifications and technologies designed to decentralize the web and give users more control over their personal data. It's built on top of existing web standards, such as HTTP, REST, WebID-TLS, and Web Access Control.
End users will keep their data in pods. These are secure personal web servers for storing your information, rather than Google, Meta, or X. This data will be kept in Linked Data formats, such as Resource Description Framework. Users will use WebID, a decentralized authentication and identification system to access data. You will enable other people to access or use your data via a variety of access control systems. In short, you will control your data and no one else.
Will enough people and groups support Berners-Lee's vision to make it viable? Or has the pendulum swung so much towards the corporate web that his vision will remain an unfulfilled dream? Stay tuned.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Wednesday October 09, @11:39AM (1 child)
I agree as long as the "Web ID" is not tied to your physical ID and you can have multiple Web ID's. There are so many crazies on the internet that having things linked to my physical ID is a no-go, and that is before I even get onto the whole big-brother type government surveillance aspect.
However I know that governments have been pushing for exactly such a physical-virtual ID to be put in place, so I approach this development with suspicion.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday October 09, @07:40PM
I've dug into the project enough to see its not.
What OpenID was supposed to do was decentralize your identity and in theory everyone's identity provider would trust everyone else to an equal level and you could log into Yahoo using your Google OpenID etc. None of that ever happened for various technical and trust issues. SOLID seems to be an implementation of that ideal that actually works, plus built in file hosting (well, database hosting, well, object hosting, whatever)
My understanding of how the SOLID works, is anyone can run an identity provider and extending that notion anyone can run a little live online database of sharable data. Then whomever owns the pod (presumably who pays for it) gives permission to a list of webids. Someone has to host the POD, again, that's either big corporate, small corporate, maybe a govt, maybe yourself in your basement, if its a resolvable URL I think it'll work.
You could run your own identity provider if you want and create as many IDs as you want and in theory (unless actively blocked, which it probably will be) you could use any of those identities at any online service. In fact SN could run an IDP and you'd be able to use your ID 5779 at SN as an identity anywhere on the internet (in theory...) after logging in here, just like logging into Google or logging into your own OpenID. Now will "real world" applications permit you to use SN as an IDP, I think they'll actively block people from using anything but their own IDP for customer support reasons. But, in theory, yeah it would work.
The POD concept is sort of a little database instance owned by precisely one webID (although there can be many pods) and that's how you broker and permit who gets to read. Like, technically, I think we could host our SN comments in our own pods and give SN@SN permission to read them and render them on the web page, making us literally own our own posts because we host them. So SN would host an ID provider (if we need one) and we host our pods of comments, and SN gets read perms on our pods of comments and renders stories. It could, theoretically, work.
In practice I see problems:
Bad actors at the corporate level can short circuit the entire interop process (to "streamline" customer support, perhaps) and simply demand you use their identity provider and their pod provider ONLY. I don't see any way at the protocol level to stop them from absolute subversion. So you'd end up doing code golf to emulate what we currently have, you need to log into Google to use Google Drive. Although in theory anyone who trusts Google could not block their identity provider.
This product will work great with populations having an IQ higher than 110 or so. I don't think this will scale to tictok or Instagram users. "I can't log in its all your fault what do you mean 'my' identity provider is down its your site" or similar for pod providers. Maybe this is good, set up a separate infra for "smart people doing smart things" and let the masses continue to log into facebook for everything.
I don't know how DDOS type behavior would be handled. Lets say I become an Onlyfans superstar (as if I'm not already) and upload my latest 'special' video to my POD, they will freak out when tens of millions of subscribers I've given permission to, download my video prior to purchasing my bathwater. A guy's gotta make a buck, you know. Anyway, this bandwidth is all going to cost money; if XYZ corporation is moronic and their poor implementation of a blog costs me $5/month because they're too stupid to cache, I'll be mad, but I seem to have no recourse other than being out the money. Sure I have control of my data, but now I have morons accessing "for free" what I have to pay for to host; not feeling happy about this.