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Now is the "battle for the soul" of the internet according to Tim Berners-Lee. It's not to late to fix the web.
Founder of the world wide web says commercialisation means the net has been 'optimised for nastiness', but collaboration and compassion can prevail
Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by "charlatans".
"It's only a small part of the whole internet ... but the problem is that people spend a lot of time on [social media websites] because they're addictive," he says.
So money is the root of all the evil then ... Or in their case perhaps it's how they make their money. Or did it just turbo charge Greed?
Compounding the problem is monopolisation. Facebook and Google's dominance is bad for innovation and bad for the web,
I would like to see a Cern for AI, where all the top scientists come together and see whether they can make a super intelligence.
Not sure what it pays to work at CERN but I doubt it's Google and FaceMeta money. So unless all the scientist are supposed to be altruists ...
Not sure I share his optimism. It has become quite soulless, commercial/corporate, bigbrother:y and well somewhat "evil". Perhaps it's just time to slay the beast, stake it once and for all and build something new and better on its festering carcass. Too bad to save. Time to put it out of its misery?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday February 03, @11:04PM (2 children)
This reminds me that I really need to take a look at the various distributed search engines.
But beyond that, I think that web rings could be successful again as you just need static IPs and some method of distributing them, as in you can't be taken offline by just seizing the domain name, they also have to take the IP and the servers. And, with public key cryptography, the IP might not even be mandatory.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 13, @06:09PM (1 child)
But beyond that, I think that web rings could be successful again...
Oh, how I miss the Quake days! Webrings came before Google, but used URLs rather than ip addresses. Everything I put on the web when Google came online was highly rated, because I was part of so many webrings and part of Google's algorithm was how many sites were linked to you. Years later I posted How to quit smoking cigarettes [mcgrewbooks.com] on K5 around 2003 and it was #1 on Google's search for any search about smoking cessation for years.
Why do the mainstream media act as if Donald Trump isn't a pathological liar with dozens of felony fraud convictions?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday February 13, @08:16PM
The great thing about webrings is that as long as you have some method of directing people to the computers hosting the sites directly, via things like IP, there's a whole lot less ability of corporations and the government to go about shutting it down. And, you can potentially even make it a sneakernet affair if the content doesn't change too often.