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Tim Berners-Lee Announces Solid, an Open Source Project Which Would Aim To Decentralize the Web (fastcompany.com)
Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, thinks it's broken and he has a plan to fix it. The British computer scientist has announced a new project that he hopes will radically change his creation by giving people full control over their data. Tim Berners-Lee: This is why I have, over recent years, been working with a few people at MIT and elsewhere to develop Solid, an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web. Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we've all discovered, this hasn't been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance -- by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way. Solid is a platform, built using the existing web. It gives every user a choice about where data is stored, which specific people and groups can access select elements, and which apps you use. It allows you, your family and colleagues, to link and share data with anyone. It allows people to look at the same data with different apps at the same time. Solid unleashes incredible opportunities for creativity, problem-solving and commerce. It will empower individuals, developers and businesses with entirely new ways to conceive, build and find innovative, trusted and beneficial applications and services. I see multiple market possibilities, including Solid apps and Solid data storage.
Solid is guided by the principle of "personal empowerment through data" which we believe is fundamental to the success of the next era of the web. We believe data should empower each of us. Imagine if all your current apps talked to each other, collaborating and conceiving ways to enrich and streamline your personal life and business objectives? That's the kind of innovation, intelligence and creativity Solid apps will generate. With Solid, you will have far more personal agency over data -- you decide which apps can access it. In an interview with Fast Company, he shared more on Solid and its creation: "I have been imagining this for a very long time," says Berners-Lee. He opens up his laptop and starts tapping at his keyboard. Watching the inventor of the web work at his computer feels like what it might have been like to watch Beethoven compose a symphony: It's riveting but hard to fully grasp. "We are in the Solid world now," he says, his eyes lit up with excitement. He pushes the laptop toward me so I too can see. On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across the top: Tim's to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this app -- one of the first on Solid -- for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In fact, it's so plain that, at first glance, it's hard to see its significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The app, using Solid's decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly -- his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It's like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsApp. The difference here is that, on Solid, all the information is under his control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within a Solid pod -- which is an acronym for personal online data store. These pods are what give Solid users control over their applications and information on the web. Anyone using the platform will get a Solid identity and Solid pod. This is how people, Berners-Lee says, will take back the power of the web from corporations.
Starting this week, developers around the world will be able to start building their own decentralized apps with tools through the Inrupt site. Berners-Lee will spend this fall crisscrossing the globe, giving tutorials and presentations to developers about Solid and Inrupt. "What's great about having a startup versus a research group is things get done," he says. These days, instead of heading into his lab at MIT, Berners-Lee comes to the Inrupt offices, which are currently based out of Janeiro Digital, a company he has contracted to help work on Inrupt. For now, the company consists of Berners-Lee; his partner John Bruce, who built Resilient, a security platform bought by IBM; a handful of on-staff developers contracted to work on the project; and a community of volunteer coders. Later this fall, Berners-Lee plans to start looking for more venture funding and grow his team. The aim, for now, is not to make billions of dollars. The man who gave the web away for free has never been motivated by money. Still, his plans could impact billion-dollar business models that profit off of control over data. It's not likely that the big powers of the web will give up control without a fight.
Solid is guided by the principle of "personal empowerment through data" which we believe is fundamental to the success of the next era of the web. We believe data should empower each of us. Imagine if all your current apps talked to each other, collaborating and conceiving ways to enrich and streamline your personal life and business objectives? That's the kind of innovation, intelligence and creativity Solid apps will generate. With Solid, you will have far more personal agency over data -- you decide which apps can access it. In an interview with Fast Company, he shared more on Solid and its creation: "I have been imagining this for a very long time," says Berners-Lee. He opens up his laptop and starts tapping at his keyboard. Watching the inventor of the web work at his computer feels like what it might have been like to watch Beethoven compose a symphony: It's riveting but hard to fully grasp. "We are in the Solid world now," he says, his eyes lit up with excitement. He pushes the laptop toward me so I too can see. On his screen, there is a simple-looking web page with tabs across the top: Tim's to-do list, his calendar, chats, address book. He built this app -- one of the first on Solid -- for his personal use. It is simple, spare. In fact, it's so plain that, at first glance, it's hard to see its significance. But to Berners-Lee, this is where the revolution begins. The app, using Solid's decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly -- his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It's like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsApp. The difference here is that, on Solid, all the information is under his control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within a Solid pod -- which is an acronym for personal online data store. These pods are what give Solid users control over their applications and information on the web. Anyone using the platform will get a Solid identity and Solid pod. This is how people, Berners-Lee says, will take back the power of the web from corporations.
Starting this week, developers around the world will be able to start building their own decentralized apps with tools through the Inrupt site. Berners-Lee will spend this fall crisscrossing the globe, giving tutorials and presentations to developers about Solid and Inrupt. "What's great about having a startup versus a research group is things get done," he says. These days, instead of heading into his lab at MIT, Berners-Lee comes to the Inrupt offices, which are currently based out of Janeiro Digital, a company he has contracted to help work on Inrupt. For now, the company consists of Berners-Lee; his partner John Bruce, who built Resilient, a security platform bought by IBM; a handful of on-staff developers contracted to work on the project; and a community of volunteer coders. Later this fall, Berners-Lee plans to start looking for more venture funding and grow his team. The aim, for now, is not to make billions of dollars. The man who gave the web away for free has never been motivated by money. Still, his plans could impact billion-dollar business models that profit off of control over data. It's not likely that the big powers of the web will give up control without a fight.
A false sense of security is in some ways worse than no security.
Honestly not sure if you are right or not... For such a long summary it's remarkably free of actual information and details of what this thing is or how it works.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
These are very nice puff pieces claiming a lot of good intentions, but how does it work?
I can already create a calendar app -- or download one -- and control all my information by running it on my own web server. That is more hassle than I want. How does this new thing let me trust my data to code written by other people, that I probably never see, running on servers I don't control? How will Berners-Lee's new company make enough money to pay employees and satisfy its venture-capital backers?
This. When the WWW was born, the only entrenched interests were networks like AOL and Compuserv, none of which had the political or economic clout to stifle competition. The web, at that point, was pretty useless anyway, and likely not viewed as competition, per se. These days, Facebook and Google are some of the largest companies in the world, and they exist precisely by monetizing the very user data that TBL proposes to lock down. So.. good luck?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The Web isn't broken. It's still there. It's still working the way it always has. Most people have simply chosen to use it badly.
I don't respond to AC's.
I may be misunderstanding this, but there has to be a better front end for those of us who aren't geeks
I don't think you are. I tried it out sans TFM, on the theory that it's going to have to be pretty damn intuitive for much of the world to bother. Just creating a blank document in a private space (and then finding it again) required way too much trial and error (including manually typing in a URL at one point), and the privacy/sharing interface doesn't seem to allow for any customization of groups/roles much less an obvious way to actually assign users to them. It's a long way from showtime.
Listen to your selves...
In the light of the recent blow to net neutrality and the recently passed European copyright law, I find it disheartening reading the comments.
You sit here nay-saying any effort to decentralize the internet and better privacy before it has a chance to mature. You regurgitate political and corporate bias left and right. These tech giants like alphabet/google, amazon and the likes, should be considered the enemy of privacy and a free, decentralized internet, and it is their ideas that should be objected, not the ideas that help promote it.
Shame on you!
I see an increased polarization and hostility towards each other, instead of working together to make something that helps us in the the way we communicate and exchange data. There is nothing constructive about that. I only hope we come to our sense before it is too late, and i chose to believe there is still time to fix the state of things.
Yes, I am posting as an anonymous coward. Deal with it.
EOF
The summary probably wasn't written with a technical audience in mind, and it leaves much to be desired.
The main contribution here is the concept of linked data: that the relationship between media objects should be exposed through a standards-based interface. This is an old idea, but it is seldom practiced. Linked data is a natural extension of Sir Berners-Lee's original hypertext protocol, which provided for hyperlinking between documents.
The linked data protocol encourages the development of distributed applications. For example, one can host a photo on one server, but comments about that photo could be distributed among many others. Linked data is used to describe what refers to what. In this model, contributors are expected to retain more control over their contributions. This will likely scale OK for small groups... but if you attract hundreds of comments, you might be in trouble.
Is this useful? Maybe. It appears to fill much the same space as existing "social networking" websites, which provide both identity and methods for "limited sharing." It does not appear to address the needs of
Worse, where are we going to put these "Solid PODS?" On our home PCs? Most homes are not blessed with high uplink speeds, 99.9%+ SLAs, uninterruptible power, or redundant data centers. The answer for most people is likely going to be "in the cloud." Economies of scale dictate that low-cost cloud computing resources will be concentrated into the hands of relatively few organizations with both the capital and the experience to provide them.
All will be well and good until the cloud service providers realize that they can simply peer into these PODS and extract all the data that they ever wanted.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
StikyPad stated:
When the WWW was born, the only entrenched interests were networks like AOL and Compuserv, none of which had the political or economic clout to stifle competition. The web, at that point, was pretty useless anyway, and likely not viewed as competition, per se.
<lecturemode>
Not true.
TBL announced the WWW - and posted source code for it - in late 1989. It instantly took the high-energy particle physics research community by storm (because he worked for CERN, and developed the first iteration of HTML there). However, the only graphical browser in the world at that time was the one he built as a proof of concept - and it ran only on NeXT cubes. Everyone else had to settle for using Lynx, a character-mode browser.
That was less of an impediment to its spread than you might think, both because NeXT machines were wildly popular among high-energy particle physicists (they were, after all, the most powerful personal computers available at the time), and because, outside of the academic/research particle physics and academic computer science communities, the dominant Internet access paradigm at the time was via dial-up, terminal emulation session, where user applications pretty much only ran on the ISP's host machines. Oh, and you had to buy (and your ISP had to support) a US Robotics proprietary-technology modem to get speeds above 9600 baud.
But it is profoundly incorrect to claim that the Web was simply a curiosity at the time. Folks who had Internet accounts then (mine was via Netcom - one of the first commercial ISPs) were tremendously excited when the existence of this new technology exploded out of the HEPP academic hothouse (via Usenet, of course). And we weren't the only ones, either. Any number of tech companies built websites right away - and many of them were actually useful to us. In particular, since I was working as a freelance LAN administrator and networking consultant at the time, I regularly made use of both Novell's and Compaq's sites to download drivers, patches, and documentation - and was grateful as hell to be able to do so.
That's because my colleagues and compeers who didn't have Internet accounts were forced to download those same resources via CompuServe's balky, and determinedly-user-unfriendly, forum portals. Meanwhile, I had gleefully uninstalled the CompuServe client from my own computers, and permanently kissed the monthly CompuServe tax goodbye.
One of the things that made the Internet so attractive an alternative to CompuServe and the <shudder> odious techno-leech called AOL was that, in those days, it was still subject to the restrictions on commercial traffic imposed by the NSFnet's backbone content policies. (NSFnet was the default Internet backbone for the USA. As a project the sole funding source for which was the National Science Foundation, its use policies naturally prohibited commercial messages from traversing it, because federal agencies were, quite rightly, forbidden by law from endorsing any commercial product or service - and basically every packet sent over the 'net wound up traversing NSFnet, because it was the only backbone provider in the USA.) So, no advertising (outside of Usenet spammers) or pay-for-content services were permitted on the 'net.
The first graphical browser for Windows users (which also swiftly was ported to the Mac and AmigaOS platforms) was cobbled together in early 1993 by two grad students working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (one of whom went on become a billionaire venture capitalist, while the other one didn't). They called it Mosaic, and man was it ever primitive - but it was free, and open-source (even though that was not yet a term of art), and by using a shim (the name of which escapes me at the moment), you could even get it to run on your dial-up, terminal-emulation-mode account. And, as lame as it was, it was the coolest thing in computing, and all the hax0r kids had to have it.
Me includ
Check out my novel.
Just read much of the inrupt.com site and some of the specifications on github. Not everything, but alot. Two critical problems seem obvious though it is possible I missed the provisions.
First, I see no indication that access to the pods is end-to-end encrypted. So, if your pod is stored on a server that is not your own, they definitely have access to your data. No 3rd party server can be trusted with your data (even if it can, you won't get notified when that changes) and few have the skills to stand up their own server. I would think that a requirement for end-to-end encryption of all data is an obvious one. An app given permission to access it must also be given some type of revocable keys.
Second, I don't see provisions to stop apps from taking the data and writing it somewhere else. To control your data, you must control the writing at everywhere it is processed as well. Apps should be forced to run in a sandbox that can only write data to approved places and all memory in the sandbox should be reliably wiped when the app is no longer needed. Trust of the sandbox should be verified before pods can be accessed.
Without at least these provisions, I see no possibility that this system can deliver user's control of the dissemination of their data.