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Tim Berners-Lee Warns About the Web's Three Biggest Threats (webfoundation.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the next-28-years dept.

Sunday was the 28th anniversary of the day that 33-year-old Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for the World Wide Web -- and the father of the web published a new letter today about "how the web has evolved, and what we must do to ensure it fulfills his vision of an equalizing platform that benefits all of humanity."

It's been an ongoing battle to maintain the web's openness, but in addition, Berners-Lee lists the following issues: 1) We've lost control of our personal data. 2) It's too easy for misinformation to spread on the web. 3) Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding. Tim Berners-Lee writes:
We must work together with web companies to strike a balance that puts a fair level of data control back in the hands of people, including the development of new technology like personal "data pods" if needed and exploring alternative revenue models like subscriptions and micropayments. We must fight against government over-reach in surveillance laws, including through the courts if necessary. We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem, while avoiding the creation of any central bodies to decide what is "true" or not. We need more algorithmic transparency to understand how important decisions that affect our lives are being made, and perhaps a set of common principles to be followed. We urgently need to close the "internet blind spot" in the regulation of political campaigning.
Berners-Lee says his team at the Web Foundation "will be working on many of these issues as part of our new five year strategy," researching policy solutions and building progress-driving coalitions, as well as maintaining their massive list of digital rights organizations. "I may have invented the web, but all of you have helped to create what it is today... and now it is up to all of us to build the web we want -- for everyone." Inspired by the letter, very-long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. asks, does the web need improvements? And if so, "I'm wondering what Slashdotters would consider to be a solution?"

49 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. You can't have it both ways. by Larsen+E+Whipsnade · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Free exchange or censorship. Pick one. And besides, censorship never fixed the problem of fake news. The only solution to fake news is for readers not to be gullible.

    Want a second opinion? Here's one: HTTP and HTML are getting long in the tooth, and Javascript is bloat. Maybe it's time to come up with a new stack? Something with better controls for deep linking and embedding, and better support for distributed/cached store-and-forward, and mechanisms so Web 2.0 doesn't have to be such a bolt-on kluge. Maybe a decentralized reputation system so we can choose our own echo chambers more readily.

    I'm disappointed that after all these years Tim speaks mainly in slogans and generalities, and still can't avoid contradicting himself. Let's show him how it's done by talking brass tacks.

    1. Re:You can't have it both ways. by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I don't mind HTTP and HTML, they work reasonably well. The problem is all the ads injected/embedded from other sites than the source site.

      What really worries me is that today some media outlets instead develops their own apps for reading their content where they claim that it will be a faster and better experience. I don't trust them and I see a risk with installation of apps because then the app has more ability to do suspect stuff on my device than what's normally possible with HTML and some JavaScript.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    2. Re:You can't have it both ways. by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Especially that he, himself, allowed EME into the standard, when he could stop it.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    3. Re:You can't have it both ways. by grumbel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The big issue I have with HTML is that it's useless for publishing larger content, like books or even just multi-page articles. Thanks to hyper links it is of course possible to add some Next/Prev buttons to a webpage to represent such content, but those links are just hacks, not markup. eReader have developed their own formats (.ePub, .mobi, iBook, etc.) for accomplishing this task, but while they often are little more than a .zip with .html files, none of them are proper part of the Web and your regular web browser won't read them.

      HTML had <link rel="next/prev"...> markup going back to HTML2.0, but it was never properly supported by any browser or developed into something that would be powerful enough to replace .ePub and Co. This to me is one of the big failures of the Web that nobody really talks about. The Web should be the place where you publish content, it should be the replacement of paper, but instead people are forced to use .ePub or .PDF for that task, as plain old HTML isn't doing the job.

      The other elephant in the room are of course the hyper links. The Web still lacks any kind of content-addressability, it's all location based, thus when server go down or it's URL layout changes, all your hyperlinks break. Basic tasks like linking to a specific paragraph from another article are also not possible with HTML. Project Xanadu never got much traction, but it's really time for the Web to learn a thing or two from what they tried to accomplish back then.

    4. Re:You can't have it both ways. by nukenerd · · Score: 1

      The only solution to fake news is for readers not to be gullible.

      I agree but it means that there is really no solution. Some individual readers may not be gullible, but not the majority.

      A philospher said, long time ago, that if you had a billion monkeys bashing at typewriters, one of them would eventually perchance reproduce the works of Shakespeare. However, the internet has shown that this does not happen.

      OTOH, if some monkeys did produce some gems of literature, another monkey could perchance produce an index pointing where to find them among the dross. However there would be billions of times as many false indexes too. It's hopeless.

    5. Re:You can't have it both ways. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      The big issue I have with HTML is that it's useless for publishing larger content, like books or even just multi-page articles.

      Inability to publish multi-page articles sounds like a good thing.

      Fair point about books, but it seems like a few simple new tags is all that would be required, or even just a "book mode" in the browser that formats content into pages. I know, publishers want to control the layout, but screw those guys. The browser is supposed to display content the way I want it to be displayed.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    6. Re:You can't have it both ways. by Cajun+Hell · · Score: 1

      However, the internet has shown that this does not happen.

      Only because we're not doing it right. The problem with using billions of monkeys, is that you're required to keep the monkeys isolated from one another, in order to have their typing remain random. If the monkeys are able to read one another's typing, they will form patterns together. They'll learn, invent culture (i.e. spread memes), trade typing duties for sexual favors, cheat by photocopying previously-typed pages, etc. All these things remove much of the entropy needed to eventually recreate Shakespeare. They start working on problems of their own, seperate from the Recreate Shakespeare project. Or even if they remain loyal to the project's goals, the learning will guide them into local optima, when what we need them to do is continue to type randomly, all in parallel.

      This is why I propose using simulated virtual monkeys, each in their own sandbox. The monkeys need to remain isolated and free of anything which might incentivize non-random typing. With simulated monkeys, we can do this!

      (BTW, it would only be fair to point out that a competing research team claims they have found a faster and more efficient means of recreating the works of Shakespeare, using a key-reference system where using the title of the work, it is looked up in a memory bank and read out. This all sounds too complated to me, though, so I'm sticking with the simulated monkeys.)

      --
      "Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
    7. Re:You can't have it both ways. by munch117 · · Score: 1

      The markup you are looking for is H1/H2/H3/...

      HTML has had those since the very start. The current crop of web browsers stink at how they display it: They could so very easily display a TOC based on the headings, and provide controls for navigating sections. They don't, but that's not the markup language's fault.

    8. Re:You can't have it both ways. by twistedcubic · · Score: 1


      The big issue I have with HTML is that it's useless for publishing larger content, like books or even just multi-page articles.

      TeXinfo

      I know, I know, it's just too hard for regular people to use.

  2. Conspicuously absent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Missing from his list:

    • DRM
  3. I used to think he seemed reasonable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    #1 threat to the web: Tim Berners-Lee endorsing DRM into web standards
    It's also pretty funny that he thinks misinformation is some new problem because Trump was elected or whatever - Information on the web has always been wildly untrustworthy, it's just that the dumb shit public have been gradually brainwashed by massive corporations to accept it as some authoritative source to sell more advertising.

    1. Re:I used to think he seemed reasonable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I think everyone would be up in arms if he endorsed Flash!
      If all alternatives are shit, you should at least not endorse it! Or if you need to publish some kind of spec, start it with "this is utter shit, its use should be discouraged and browsers should warn about pages using it". But if you are an organization that has "open" as kind of it's slogan, then to be take seriously the only real option is to say "take this elsewhere, it has no place in an organization promoting openness".
      Even if we were all to agree that it's better that Flash and thus should exist (and in many, many, possibly all significant ways it is not, and will be much harder to get rid of once that realization sets in), that does in no way mean it is reasonable for the W3C to support it.

    2. Re:I used to think he seemed reasonable by Cajun+Hell · · Score: 2

      The alternative to providing a DRM option in the web standard is Flash/Silverlight, or something similar, can you explain how what he endorsed is any worse?

      That is one of the alternatives.

      Another alternative, which is even better, is in HTML5 right now: the audio and video tags. No DRM, pure functionality. 100% win. Don't use DRM, and your content gets to comply with standards, so you have the largest customer base possible. That maximizes revenue. Every deviation from this approach, should be viewed in terms of how much revenue you trade away, exchange for .. uh .. whatever-the-fuck it is, that media producers get by reducing the number of customers who can buy their product.

      Yet another alternative approach would be to have an actual DRM standard, such as rot13. Since everyone would be able to implement it and it wouldn't require any weird hardware or proprietary trade secrets, you'd get maximum compatibility across all platforms and devices; it'd be just as good as not having DRM at all. Everyone wins. Had he endorsed this compromise, people wouldn't be flaming him.

      --
      "Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
  4. That's a bit more like it. by Larsen+E+Whipsnade · · Score: 2

    Much more worth talking about.

    https://solid.mit.edu/

  5. This is a pattern. It happens to everything. by Larsen+E+Whipsnade · · Score: 1

    Projects go all bloat plus legacy, until it seems a project only exists for its own sake. I see only one solution: move on. Maybe split the difference by forking the code and then innovating and jettisoning cruft, or maybe start from scratch. But one way or the other, move on.

    I can foresee a day when Unix style operating systems will be obsolete, when that whole paradigm will be replaced by something better. It won't happen without wailing and gnashing of teeth.

    I'm not a systemd fan, Bad implementation from an arrogant culture. But let's try again, huh? And let's start from a basis of user needs and best practices this time.

    1. Re:This is a pattern. It happens to everything. by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      I can foresee a day when Unix style operating systems will be obsolete, when that whole paradigm will be replaced by something better.

      Better.......like what?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:This is a pattern. It happens to everything. by grumbel · · Score: 1

      Unix is build with a one-system:many-users mindset. That was a great idea 30 years ago. Today's reality however is the other way around many-systems:single-user, everybody has a tablet, a smartphone and a PC, sometimes multiple of each. Unix provides nothing to deal with that. You can try to export your home directory via NFS, but that falls apart the moment you have the same app running on two different computer and both want to access the same file. Some programs solve the problem at the application level, i.e. bookmark syncing in Chrome, but that doesn't scale to the rest of the system.

      Once upon a time X11's network transparency was its claim to fame and it did provide a bit of a solution to the many-systems:single-user problem. But today it's close to useless. Ever tried to stream a video over X11's network connection? Doesn't work. The protocol just can't deal with today's workloads. Proprietary alternatives exist that can handle this much better.

      In terms of security the whole idea of giving every app that a user runs access to everything that the user can access is also foolish. But at least there is a bit of hope in fixing that. Android solves that by running each app under a different user. Ubuntu tries to solve that by sandboxing. It's all still far away from being the default way you run apps on a desktop Linux, but at least people have recognized the problem.

    3. Re:This is a pattern. It happens to everything. by justthinkit · · Score: 1

      Eudora didn't go this route. It went out on a high note, has been freely downloadable forever after, and seems to be more well preserved than bloated.

      --
      I come here for the love
    4. Re:This is a pattern. It happens to everything. by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Unix is build with a one-system:many-users mindset......today's reality however is the other way around many-systems:single-user,

      ok, that's actually a really interesting thought.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  6. Not Three Biggest Threats by mentil · · Score: 1

    I think the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse are much bigger threats.
    Think of all the bogus DMCA takedowns justified by 'combating illegal copyright infringement', or Bitcoin being shut down due to money laundering concerns, or laws requiring people to decrypt their devices for officials who ask them to (to ensure nothing illegal/incriminating/sexy is there).

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
  7. HTTP and HTML by Larsen+E+Whipsnade · · Score: 2

    One objection I have is they're not well suited to binary data. This content-encoding stuff seems klugey and inefficient. But that's not a deal breaker.

    Deep linking and embedding is what makes all sorts of problems possible. Cross site scripting, linked images that bog down page loads, tracker pixels and dead links.

    Suppose cross site embedding and scripting were disallowed? Just don't support them in the browser - or at least not without a click to bring up an image. The infrastructure for ads would have to be overhauled, yes. A price worth paying.

    Suppose there were restrictions on deep linking, so that a site could explicitly state what is or isn't exported? That way a Web developer could overhaul his logic any time without fear of breaking other sites' links into his site. I can't endorse making Referer mandatory, so a custom browser can bypass this easily, but... that's the user's responsibility.

    Yes, I'm talking about limiting options. Options to do things that we've all established were bad ideas. That's why we have laws. Some laws, anyway. And RFCs. And call gates and page protection and user permissions. Make it harder to shoot yourself or someone else in the foot, and we can have (reasonable) freedom without (needless) fear. Seek the best balance by considering things on a case-by-case basis,

    Maximum sustainable freedom by means of rules that make sense.

  8. Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Kunedog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm disappointed that after all these years Tim speaks mainly in slogans and generalities, and still can't avoid contradicting himself. Let's show him how it's done by talking brass tacks.

    This.

    From the summary:

    We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem, while avoiding the creation of any central bodies to decide what is "true" or not.

    That is literally what "gatekeeper" means, Tim.

    1. Re:Contraditions in the Same Sentence by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      He is saying that the free market should handle it. Google and Facebook will improve their products by flagging up fake news, rather than having a regulator force them to.

      I don't think that is a very good solution. I don't claim to have the answer either. In the past TV and newspapers were the primary sources of news, and they were regulated. Many countries had requirements for impartiality and fairness, and some mechanism for settling disputes with the press. The internet is ungovernable in that sense, so technical means are likely to be the only effective ones.

      Problem is the only technical means we have available are either companies like Google creating some opaque algorithm/mechanical Turk, or some sort of distributed system that will be open the same kind of abuse we see in similar systems like Slashdot moderation and Reddit voting.

      I don't think hoping people get smarter is a realistic option. The best plan right now seems to be using the same tactics as the fake news peddlers - spin alternative narratives based on the truth, create a bunch of shitty memes and flood Facebook with them, and generate some ranty blogs disguised as news sites to create credibility in the minds of fools.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Xest · · Score: 1

      No, I think you're assuming this process requires some person to make arbitrary decisions. That's not the case.

      What he's talking about is creating smarter algorithms that weight content based on it's veracity such that stories with little to no veracity aren't given the same or higher prominence as stories with high veracity.

      That is, given that stories have to be ranked (we can't place them at the same place on a page or you'd not be able to decipher it as they'd all be on top of it) then they should be ranked based on their veracity - how verifiable the content within those stories is.

      So effectively algorithms have now reached a point where they're able to interpret content to categorise it and so forth, they now need to take the next step and begin to try to verify content by cross referencing it with other sources and so on and so forth.

      As such there's no contradiction, just a request that the companies that act as the front end to most people's people's internet experience do a better job of separating fact from fiction so that when someone searches for something they get something that's objectively true before they get something that's fiction. That's not censorship, that's better ranking of data based on relevance so that irrelevant fiction can no longer get away with pretending to be relevant truth when it's simply not.

      This, for what it's worth, would greatly improve journalism, as it would force news sites to make damn sure that they're telling the truth and can back that up before publishing a story that otherwise may or may not be true.

    3. Re:Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      He is saying that the free market should handle it.

      Google: "Hmm, we'll get more users on Chrome, if we drop ads for it on our frontpage (and all of our sites.)"

      Facebook: "This contradicts our viewpoints. Out it goes."

      Many countries had requirements for impartiality and fairness, and some mechanism for settling disputes with the press.

      Many countries also had laws that required compliance with police investigations without a warrant, or mandated that the state approve of your articles / story / opinion before you could publish them. Some countries still have these laws....

      The internet is ungovernable in that sense, so technical means are likely to be the only effective ones. Problem is the only technical means we have available

      This is a social issue not a technical one. Start fixing it by targeting the correct issue first. "Gatekeepers"? They have the same issues as governments in the fact that they are self-serving. Hard AI? You do realize that a Hard AI would need to correctly deal with the social issue you keep avoiding for it to be effective, correct?

      I don't think hoping people get smarter is a realistic option.

      Hoping people get smarter is not a realistic option. Requiring them to get smarter or shut the hell up, is a realistic option. No, I don't care if you want to be spoon fed what to think. In that case EVERYTHING you read is "fake news", because you don't verify it. Your opinion does not matter, because it's not your own opinion. It's someone else's opinion that you've been spoon fed on daily basis. You have no right to complain about "fake news", because you'll believe whatever talking points your favorite figurehead regurgitates (repeats).

      That is the problem. We have a bunch of people who think that thinking is hard, so someone else should do it for them. Then they complain about what those other people think for them. You can't have it both ways people. Either do the thinking yourself, or quit complaining.

    4. Re: Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Xest · · Score: 1

      I think that was Berners Lee's point - that we need to figure out how to do it. Your view is that it's impossible because we've not managed to do it yet, but that's no the point - it's not about what we can already do, it's about what we want to be able to do. Just because we haven't done something doesn't mean we can't do something.

      There is a lot of scope to improve on this sort of project using machine learning, if for example you produce an objective data set of stories that have high veracity vs. some that as you suggest have high collusion but low veracity then you could use ML techniques to judge going forward.

      You'd probably end up with some kind of trust rating that grows or erodes over time, coupled with topic competence. So say for example Gamergate - you'd typically see that gaming websites have zero trust rating when it comes to politics because they have no background in that field, this would push other news organisations above them that do have competence in the field of politics but they wouldn't have much advantage because they wouldn't have much experience in gaming. This would in turn push sites like Slashdot up the rankings for subjects like this because it has a good history of both gaming and politics forcing the user comments disputing the press view into much more public view.

      This is just a stab in the dark of course, but the point is that I wouldn't say it's impossible, just because it hasn't yet been done.

    5. Re: Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Gussington · · Score: 1
      I'm replying to this because Slashdot archived the last thread and prevented any right of reply.

      Your whole argument is based on the misguided assumption that if you want an equivalent quality of life then you're not wanting to do something different. That's patently false, it's possible to still want the same size house, the same salary, and same commute to work whilst indulging in a completely different culture and lifestyle outside of that.

      No it isn't. I've traveled extensively, lived in four separate countries (for longer than a year), and each time there were compromises. Some things were worse, some were better, but overall each was more interesting than staying put.

      You're fundamentally wrong - people don't move to do something different, they move to make their lives better.

      I'm a person, I moved for more interest. I threw away a regular income, and everything I own to try something different and I know a *lot* of others that did the same. Maybe you just hang out with boring people or maybe just old, but I assure you there are millions of people out there who live for adventure, even if it means they have to get their hair wet.

      People only move to change absolutely everything, when absolutely everything in their life is shit.

      Or not interesting enough. And you don't have to change everything only some things. You've made it clear you'll only move if pretty much everything is the same. That's fine, but a lot of people think differently to you.

      You're ironically making judgements about my travelling experiences, my acceptance of change and so forth without having any idea about me,

      Based on what you've told us about yourself. "Must haves: Same sized house, same income, same commute", your words friend...

      a suggestion that a move to NZ will always leave you with a bigger house,

      No we've been over this already. Repeating lies won't make them any more true.

    6. Re: Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Xest · · Score: 1

      "No it isn't. I've traveled extensively, lived in four separate countries (for longer than a year), and each time there were compromises. Some things were worse, some were better, but overall each was more interesting than staying put."

      Yes, because your situation was bad enough for that to be the case in the first place, mine isn't, many people's isn't. Fine, you're right, if your life if fucked then absolutely any move is going to be good on balance, but not all of us are in such a negative situation.

      "I'm a person, I moved for more interest. I threw away a regular income, and everything I own to try something different and I know a *lot* of others that did the same. Maybe you just hang out with boring people or maybe just old, but I assure you there are millions of people out there who live for adventure, even if it means they have to get their hair wet."

      Nope, more assumptions, all wrong. What you're really saying is that your life was terrible enough that it didn't matter what you did, again, I'm not in that situation. I'm happy with my life, I'd still like it to be better, everyone wants their life to be better, but I don't want it to be worse - you obviously were at such a low point that it couldn't get any worse so it didn't matter. We're not all fuckups though.

      "Or not interesting enough. And you don't have to change everything only some things. You've made it clear you'll only move if pretty much everything is the same. That's fine, but a lot of people think differently to you."

      No, I made it clear I'd move if it was a net improvement, that's not the same thing - for you it is, and I understand that, if your life was terrible that nothing could be worse which is the entire implication of your argument then fine, but again, we're not all in that situation.

      "Based on what you've told us about yourself. "Must haves: Same sized house, same income, same commute", your words friend..."

      Different climate, different way of life, different activities, different culture, different people, different job. What bit of that argument threw you? Oh the selective reading bit, I see.

      "No we've been over this already. Repeating lies won't make them any more true."

      Selective reading. Go back to the start of the thread and try again. You've dug yourself so far down the rabbit hole of false assumptions and invalid arguments that you can't even remember what the thread was about.

      Now do fuck off, I really don't care how much you want to tell me about how terrible things are for you that you'll take anything over your existing pathetic life even if it means meandering into a completely irrelevant thread - I'll give you a hint, Slashdot shuts down conversations after a while precisely because sometimes it's just time to shut the fuck up and stop being wrong about something indefintely, now take the hint.

    7. Re: Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Gussington · · Score: 1

      it's just time to shut the fuck up and stop being wrong about something indefintely, now take the hint.

      You are the gift that keeps on giving. Keep repeating yourself, this is worth the price of admission...

    8. Re: Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Xest · · Score: 1

      Okay, look I get it, your understanding of adventure is being so utterly desperate that any change to your life is good.

      My understanding of adventure is hiking across Svalbard, where polar bears roam, diving with things bigger than me like sperm whales in the Azores, basking sharks in Scotland, and whale sharks in Indonesia, going on a field trip in Eastern Brazil and discovering previously unknown species of cacti to science. Next year is diving with marine Iguanas in the Galapagos, the year after I'll be diving under the North Pole.

      I get that you can't comprehend what real adventure is, that you're probably jealous, which feeds your necessity to stalk me into completely separate threads to continue telling me how you believe that being adventurous is the same as suffering a desperate need for change because you're one of life's failures.

      That's all fine, but the fact remains that you're still ultimately the problem here - it's not my fault your life is shit, it's not my fault you're jealous, it's not my fault that you don't know what real actual adventure looks like because you've never experienced it. Keep telling yourself otherwise all you want, but that won't change the fact that it's all still entirely your problem, and that you'll still remain completely wrong whilst you keep up your victim mentality of it being everyone elses fault.

      If you ever do manage to achieve something with your life, and do actually manage to travel properly, meet different people, in different cultures, you'll eventually understand why it's important to understand that you might not always be right, until then you'll continue to be a bitter pretender that spends his life being wrong on the internet. Good luck whichever path you choose.

    9. Re: Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Gussington · · Score: 1

      Do you also dance like no-one is watching? This is gold.

    10. Re: Contraditions in the Same Sentence by Xest · · Score: 1

      Says the guy who so can't shut up to the point he followed me across discussion. You've done an excellent job of proving my point about you being an insecure failure. Go on, keep at it, it's brilliant, I don't even have to make the point anymore, you keep doing it for me.

  9. Eternal September goes on and on by Martin+S. · · Score: 2

    Fake News is the new name for the same old problem, we used to call it yellow journalism, we saw over Eternal September and the same moral panic.

    Eternal September highlighted the tension between two contrasting trends. The Internet was built on the free exchange of ideas and information. While the natural consequence of this, increasing availability, actually lowered the overall quality of the content. Panic ensued.

    Some of us came to recognised that what was needed was to strike a balance, not choose between two stark choices. We saw was the average quality trending toward the mean, not simply going down.

    Should we panic because the average number of balls in the working population is trending toward one? No we should be looking behind the headline to identify the reality and raise the mean.

  10. personal data pods by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    I used to think personal data pods would be a good idea. Then I realized, almost everything on facebook is worthless. This definitely includes my stuff that I've put there. It's things that mattered for a moment, and that's it. You can tell because people rarely go back and look through their old posts (unless Facebook prompts them).

    Twitter is even worse.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  11. Re:What if Firefox were still viable? by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    I often ask myself, would the web be like it is today if Firefox had remained a viable, popular web browser?

    Firefox has surpassed IE.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  12. Bow your head by hidflect · · Score: 1

    There are very few Gods in the Pantheon of IT. TBL is one of them and we should not only listen but remember.

    1. Re:Bow your head by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      TBL has lost his godhood status. Endorsing DRM on the web was his fall from Olympus.

  13. DRM, Tim... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    fair level of data control

    Unfortunately, Tim Burners-Lee has come out in favor of DRM in the HTML standard recently. As such, any "fair level of control" strikes me to essentially be "the corporation gets everything except for what they deign fit for us peons." Ultimately, that's what DRM is in practice.

    At this point, I can't help but wonder if he's being paid off somehow. Very, very few people who advocate a "free and open web" would put DRM anywhere near it, because they're aware that it's pretty much a contradiction. This only furthers the perpetuation of the copyright laws that are already grossly biased in favor of large corporations at the great expense of just about everyone else. One of those expenses is the "free and open web" itself, if they get their way.

    1. Re:DRM, Tim... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The DRM was happening anyway, the alternative was to ignore the use of Flash/Sliverlight, bury your head in the sand and pretend the web was completely DRM free.

  14. More object oriented API, for starters. by Larsen+E+Whipsnade · · Score: 1

    And get rid of zero-delimited strings in all APIs. Horribly dangerous.

    bash is not all that great a scripting language. We have many better options to choose from. Demote it from its position at the heart of everything put.. oh, maybe Python 3 in its place.

    VFS... it's useful to have the notion of a volume root for backups and mirroring and mounting and such. I'll give Windows this, except I'd prefer volume names to drive letters. Like old school DEC stuff.

    Trash/recycle implemented at system level. Automatic deleting of the oldest trashed files when disk space is needed.

    I'd also like to see all configuration done via sqlite. Use a sqlite editor instead of a text editor. It'll be easier to search and to figure things out. XML would be my second choice.

    Better handling of thrash conditions and working sets, so the system will be more responsive. It's irritating when you get no prompt feedback to acknowledge your user action and you're wondering if the key stuck or if you mis-typed, or you forget what you typed because it isn't on the screen yet. Things that take a while should be low priority background threads. But acknowledging user keypresses and clicks should be more like a software interrupt, and the required code only swapped out in extreme situations. (Sorry, but mlock is too simplistic.)

    Acknowledge to the user that an app is being loaded.... before the window comes up. Plus an option to cancel the load if you change your mind.

    A /tmp file system that is never written to disk at all unless necessary. Kind of a cache in reverse.

    Set user and group on folders instead of files, so you can more easily be assured of what has access to what based on path spec?

    Just examples of what I think might work. Maybe a thread to brainstorm this?

    1. Re:More object oriented API, for starters. by goose-incarnated · · Score: 1

      And get rid of zero-delimited strings in all APIs. Horribly dangerous. bash is not all that great a scripting language. We have many better options to choose from. Demote it from its position at the heart of everything put.. oh, maybe Python 3 in its place.

      You can already use python as your scripting language. Why force the rest of the world to use it? Let people choose it based on its own merits.

      VFS... it's useful to have the notion of a volume root for backups and mirroring and mounting and such. I'll give Windows this, except I'd prefer volume names to drive letters. Like old school DEC stuff. Trash/recycle implemented at system level. Automatic deleting of the oldest trashed files when disk space is needed.

      So go ahead and do both of those things. A system of soft-linking and mount points coupled to a cron job would give you this. You can even do the scripting in python if you want.

      I'd also like to see all configuration done via sqlite. Use a sqlite editor instead of a text editor. It'll be easier to search and to figure things out. XML would be my second choice.

      Storing configs in a binary file? Don't you already have that with systemd? What would another binary registry file buy you?

      A /tmp file system that is never written to disk at all unless necessary. Kind of a cache in reverse.

      Why would I want to use up expensive RAM for temporary files? If you want to you can go ahead and set up a RAMDisk and mount /tmp on that.

      Set user and group on folders instead of files, so you can more easily be assured of what has access to what based on path spec?

      I thought you could already set user/groups on folders.

      --
      I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
    2. Re:More object oriented API, for starters. by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      What os is this? Doesn't look like a linux problem, unless you have way too little memory?

      Yes it's a problem, although I see it on desktop when running out of swap (a credible user scenario when your browser fills up all remaining ram + swap). Sometimes there's not enough memory left to log in on a text console (after ctrl-alt-F1) to kill the biggest process. Sometimes, if you have a graphical task manager running you can use it (but if it's not running you won't have enough memory left to launch it, and the start menu might have been swapped out). If all fails you have to hit the reset button (if you're lucky to have a reset button) or ctrl-alt-backspace which kills all your stuff anyway so on a desktop it's about as bad as a reboot.

  15. Small details. by DrYak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem,

    Notice the plural (emphasis mine)

    while avoiding the creation of any central bodies to decide what is "true" or not.

    That is literally what "gatekeeper" means, Tim.

    There's a subtle difference :
    - Tim wants the companies (plural) spreading informations/news to do a little bit of work to help assess the reliability of facts in the links that people pass around.
    - Tim does not want a single central entity becoming the official authority on all truth (he doesn't want a central "Ministry of Truth").

    They aren't contradictory.
    But without paying attention, there's a risk that one devolves into the other.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:Small details. by nukenerd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem,

      Notice the plural (emphasis mine)

      - Tim wants the companies (plural) spreading informations/news to do a little bit of work to help assess the reliability of facts in the links that people pass around.
      - Tim does not want a single central entity becoming the official authority on all truth (he doesn't want a central "Ministry of Truth").

      Having plural gatekeepers does not solve the problem. "Plural" in practice means jerks like Zuckerberg, Gates, Cook, Nadella and Pichai being in control of gatekeeping. These are people who, as senior company officers, only their boards or shareholdes could remove : such actions in companies are very rare and even more rare over anything ethical, or their influence is not removable at all if they hold a massive share of the company (as in Gates' case). How is that any better than an independent single body that could be more easily changed?

    2. Re:Small details. by moeinvt · · Score: 2

      "How is that any better than an independent single body that could be more easily changed?"

      What makes you think that a single, centralized gatekeeper could be "more easily changed"? How would that system work and who would get to make the changes?

      I'm open to ideas, but trusting any single body with the mission of defining "misinformation" seems really dangerous. That's a huge amount of power and I think it would be extremely vulnerable to corruption and abuse. Imagine what it would be worth to big corporations to get their representatives in place as the single arbiters of truth/reality? They would be looking at every possible way to influence whatever system you created to establish and change that "independent" single body.

      Creating that single body as a government agency would be totally insane for obvious reasons. I think that's what he was warning about when he said we can't put the control under a "central authority". Just picture the idea of a Donald Trump or a Hillary Clinton appointing the person who will run the federal "Ministry of Truth"? Scratch the idea of making the single body changeable via the electoral process.

      At least with the plural "gatekeepers" model with individual corporations controlling their own services, we have some degree of choice.

    3. Re:Small details. by nukenerd · · Score: 1

      "How is that any better than an independent single body that could be more easily changed?"

      What makes you think that a single, centralized gatekeeper could be "more easily changed"?

      Anything would be more easily changed than the CEO or board membership of a company like Google or Facebook - at least for reasons related to anything ethical. Such people can only be changed by a boardroom "palace" rebellion or shareholders' vote, and neither of those would ever happen over an issue (trivial to them) like fake news. Such rebellions only ever happen if not enough money is being made, and are rare even then.

      How would that system work and who would get to make the changes?

      Something like a body appointed by the W3C. Complaints could be made to it, they'd look into the incident, and at the very least they could name and shame. They could also initiate court proceedings against offenders if actual damage was considered to have been done.

  16. The internet and commerce... by blahplusplus · · Score: 1

    ... are not comptabile when the public is stupid, irrational and tech illiterate. The vast majority of hte people don't know what DRM is or how tech works which is why software and entertainment companies are getting away with re-engineering Windows and software generally to live in the "cloud" (aka walled garden).

    Apple, Google, Valve, and other corporations saw phone and videogame companies getting away with basically stealing the peoples right to own their own software and never have it entirely run the users machine, that ended because 1) the average videogame playing person/kid is a grade A moron. 2) Adults who use windows speak a good game about rights but are ultimately also as illiterate as the average videogame playing kid.

    Basically human beings minds did not evolve to make rational decisions in a high technology capitalist society so they act like they normally would - like irrational dumb animals.

    Fundamentally corporations desire for profits and power means taking away users rights to software on their machines. Phones and videogames have shown corporations the way, so much so that even big physical machine making companies like John Deere are trying to prevent farmers from repairing their tractors due to "software licensing" nonsense, aka claiming farmers never own their own tractors. You can google it.

    Software licensing in the context things we should own like human culture and apps that aren't taken hostage inside the "cloud" are what we need but the average person simply is too irrational, too impulsive and too illiterate. You'd pretty much have to challenge the very architecture of capitalist society to get your rights and freedoms back - aka paying citizens a way to buy them the time to clean up corporations and government, good luck getting the average citizen to come to that point of view though.

  17. He also forgot one by Chas · · Score: 1

    DRM, in any way, shape or form is a direct threat to the open, and archival nature of the web.

    Seriously. Go back to any of these services that used any sort of DRM and later closed.

    Now go ahead and access their content....

    Oh wait!

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
  18. Re:Yes, it works fine. by grumbel · · Score: 1

    Yes it does.

    Well, yeah, without sound and with one 1fps or less. Meanwhile Steam can pump a game at 1080p@60 over the network without much problem, sound included.

    Even ignoring the slowness when it comes to fast moving content. It's missing a lot of fundamental features, such as the ability to move apps between devices or screen sharing. You have to stop an app and restart it to move to another device. That you have to pipe the protocol through SSH if you want a bit of security also makes it more complicated to use than it's needs to be.