Tim Berners-Lee - Radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web

a reply to: LookingAtMars

I will be interested to see where this heads, but I think its going to tricky to see what the point of it is, until it actually starts to work.

You see, the major problems that the internet has at the moment are:

1) Net Neutrality is dead

2) The government has too much (read: any) ability to involve itself in the private concerns of the citizen without a warrant and without having to apply any due process, which for some reason the right wing are both fans of, and not fans of, depending on which demographic is most damaged by the abandonment of that due process. If its potheads, protestors or innocent people, they don't care, but if its people being nominated for high office, they get awful pissy with those violating due process... its a crock, a bunch of two faced baloney of course, but thats what I expect from those grease filled bags of pus, who enjoy the taste of Trump sweat, and the smell of the filling compound that Jeanine Pirro has to lather over her rotting corpse to make it look human in the morning.

3) The internet, that is the cable that runs to every home, under the sea, over the land, the servers which shunt data and requests for it around the world are owned, which means that use of them can be charged for by their owners. This means that there is no way to free the internet, unless we abandon those lines and all the material owned by the ISPs.

Within the Solid ecosystem, you decide where you store your data. Photos you take, comments you write, contacts in your address book, calendar events, how many miles you run each day from your fitness tracker… they’re all stored in your Solid POD. This Solid POD can be in your house or workplace, or with an online Solid POD provider of your choice. Since you own your data, you’re free to move it at any time, without interruption of service.

You give people and your apps permission to read or write to parts of your Solid POD. So whenever you’re opening up a new app, you don’t have to fill out your details ever again: they are read from your POD with your permission. Things saved through one app are available in another: you never have to sync, because your data stays with you.

This approach protects your privacy and is also great for developers: they can build cool apps without harvesting massive amounts of data first. Anyone can create an app that leverages what is already there.

Here are some examples of usages from their docs:

@prefix jane: .
@prefix foaf: .

jane:me foaf:name "Jane Doe"@en;
foaf:givenName "Jane"@en;
foaf:familyName "Doe"@en;
foaf:knows ,
.
foaf:givenName "William"@en.
foaf:givenName "Barbara"@en.

Here's the output of the example:

Jane’s full name is Jane Doe.
Jane’s first name is Jane.
Jane’s last name is Doe.
Jane knows Bill.
Jane knows Barb.
Bill’s first name is William.
Barb’s first name is Barbara.

"Your data".

That's the issue many people seem to have - data aggregation - this doesn't stop that.

This appears to give you a 'choice' as to what apps can access your data, but nothing here explicitly states "your data" is not up for sale.

Anyone that's concerned with privacy isn't lazy and realizes no company is going to willingly give up something that's profitable.

You have pictures that you want to control who sees them?
Buy a NAS, storage is cheap.

You need calendar?
How about just buy a calendar and just stick that # to your wall?

You want to track how many miles you've run?
WTF , why do you need an app for that? Use a goddamned spreadsheet (that you save on your NAS purchased at step one)

No one wants to do these things because they require effort. Well fine, be lazy and pay the price.

originally posted by: LookingAtMars
a reply to: oriondc

People are still going to get paid. In fact if it catches on it will open up lots of new jobs in developing and IT. Read some of the links it explains that.

I just wanna know where I can buy the stock... This might be the next Google for all we know and shares could go through the roof once/if it catches on.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

Wasn't Kim Dotcom planning the same thing? Maybe his idea got picked up by some group with more capital?

a reply to: TrueBrit

I agree we will just have to see where it goes.

For example, one idea Berners-Lee is currently working on is a way to create a decentralized version of Alexa, Amazon’s increasingly ubiquitous digital assistant. He calls it Charlie. Unlike with Alexa, on Charlie people would own all their data. That means they could trust Charlie with, for example, health records, children’s school events, or financial records. That is the kind of machine Berners-Lee hopes will spring up all over Solid to flip the power dynamics of the web from corporation to individuals.

a reply to: AScrubWhoDied

Thanks for the info, not sure I understand it all.

originally posted by: StallionDuck

originally posted by: LookingAtMars
a reply to: oriondc

People are still going to get paid. In fact if it catches on it will open up lots of new jobs in developing and IT. Read some of the links it explains that.

I just wanna know where I can buy the stock... This might be the next Google for all we know and shares could go through the roof once/if it catches on.

Later this fall, Berners-Lee plans to start looking for more venture funding and grow his team.

I think this will be a framework for authentication interacting with storage.

a reply to: LookingAtMars

This from the op link intrupt is what gave me the most insight into the direction he's going here. Pay for what you want, rather than paying for access to a bunch of "free stuff" that has much greater underlying cost - not just in monetary terms.

People want to have a web they can trust. People want apps that help them do what they want and need to do - without spying on them. Apps that don’t have an ulterior motive of  distracting them with propositions to buy this or that. People will pay for this kind of quality and assurance.

People will pay for this kind of quality and assurance.

No, I will not pay for that.

My biggest problem with this is that I am seeing too much "marketing talk" that doesn't match to the "technical talk", so it sounds like this is already more a commercial thing than anything else.