22 ms·

I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

385 points by perseusprime11 10y ago

Andrenid 10y ago
I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free. I think the existing one is fine to continue for the general public, online shopping, social networks, etc.. but a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data with some standard stylesheet that concentrates in readability, and the "good" bits of the modern web, without the fluff. It would be great for technical blogs and news, project sites, wiki type data stores, discussion forums, etc. Maybe everything in this "new" web is static, no stylesheets except browser-side for users to customise themselves. I'm not sure what the actual answer is but I know the existing web is broken beyond repair.
- Esau 10y ago
  So, basically, Gopher with user style-sheets?
  - sverige 10y ago
    And better search engines to find obscure documents on the servers of small, obscure colleges.
- myowncrapulence 10y ago
  This type of "web" would run perfectly over encrypted networks as well since it would carry much less data. It would solve the problem of cluttered/fluffy web and insecure/easily-surveilled communications. Being realistic though, this would only serve highly functional computer users seeking simplicity and privacy. A lot of internet users view "beautiful" webpages as a display of trustworthiness and importance. And that's a very important trait if you are a business.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    The nicer the package, the worse the contents.
  - username223 10y ago
    > A lot of internet users view "beautiful" webpages as a display of trustworthiness and importance. Not so much. A lot of web users like simple, predictable pages. Flyout menus spazzing all over the page, giant headers breaking the space bar, and obscure hamburgers hiding useful features just confuse and annoy people who don't know about CSS element blocking.
    - marcus_holmes 10y ago
      Those aren't beautiful pages. We geeks, who can understand the code, decry the complexity of a beautiful page and prefer not to go there. But we're 1% of the audience. The other 99% are used to equating beauty and style with quality. More style == more quality. Less style == less quality. The pages we love because of their simplicity don't do well in the mass market because of their simplicity. I have taken to calling this the "Kardashian Problem" - I don't understand why the Kardashians exist. I am forced to accept that they do exist. Therefore I do not share a worldview with the people who pay money for the Kardashians to exist. The Kardashians are very wealthy, so there are a lot of those people. I am a taste minority, so building things that I like won't make money. I have to build things that the Kardashians would like. I don't understand what they would like, so I must test everything!
      - holografix 10y ago
        I know what you mean. Frankly I think the Kardashians are a force for evil. Promoting selfishness, superficiality and female independence through hyper sexual objectification. Why are they so popular? Total mystery to me.
        sweeneyrod 10y ago
        "selfishness, superficiality and female independence" One of these things is not like the others.
- pfraze 10y ago
  I work on Beaker Browser. Version 0.7 will have markdown sites. Here's what that looks like: https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/840228255529590784 https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/840228255529590784 If you ask a layman to differentiate between "the browser" and Facebook, they might not know the difference. In a lot of ways, Facebook is a browser for a set of content types like posts, videos, business pages, etc. Same logic applies to say YouTube: it's a specialized "subbrowser" for videos. If pressed I think I'd say the only reason YouTube or Facebook aren't browsers is because they're not decentralized. They browse a fixed set of end points. AMP project, kind of similar, it's a specialized sub browser for mobile articles. And it's like what you describe, actually: constrained, but not decentralized. I don't think we need a new browser or web to accomplish your ask Browsers could specialize by running "sub browser" overlay applications. If you want to a constrained subweb with markdown-only sites, then sure, why not? It's not that different than a markdown-only publishing service-- the YouTube of markdown-- except the app logic is on the client side, and it's browsing a decentralized web our markdown website feature is built in, but it could be moved to userland as an overlay, as an app that's triggered when the user turns it on, or goes to a certain type of site. It may sound like a stretch, but out bigger picture is to invert the relationship with services to create thick client side apps, in which case an overlay app is just a particular class of app with a particular class of permissions
  - themodelplumber 10y ago
    Thanks for the reminder to try out Beaker! It looks like a really cool project and I hope you find success with it.
  - tuukkah 10y ago
    Could Beaker be distributed as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome?
    - JohnDotAwesome 10y ago
      I think this would constrain the vision of Beaker. I can't point to any concrete examples (like, where the extension API doesn't support something beaker does), but I can imagine wanting a less sandboxed environment when developing the platform for distributed web apps.
- yissir 10y ago
  The uncomfortable truth is that even if style-free information-dense content would be better for you, it wouldn't be better for the advertisers that currently fund this content. And nobody is going to pay for this content out of pocket when they can pay for it though the tax of terrible UX and being reduced to a data product bought by businesses. If the web is broken, it's not because of the technology, but the shaky economic foundation upon which it's built.
  - white-flame 10y ago
    The web wasn't built on an economic foundation of ad revenue. The web was built on the economic foundation of both university-provided and personally/privately funded servers. What ad revenue did was wildly expand the number of people trying to exploit the web for revenue, by generating sheer quantity regardless of content. I agree that that's a shaky foundation to base the web on.
    - matt4077 10y ago
      I don't think you can just throw out everything produced by professional newspapers as useless content.
      - sly010 10y ago
        Just 90% of it.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - laumars 10y ago
    You can still have adverts on style free sites: <a href="adverts.com?ad-id=12345><img src="adverts.com/ads/12345.jpg></a> Then there's paid for promotional content, which is one of the current trends on the web at the moment anyway. As long as information can be rendered then adverts can be included.
    - 10y ago
- Touche 10y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
- paulddraper 10y ago
  That what we already had/have. How is that different from anything you can already do?
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    The difference is that the author doesn't realize nobody else wants this, or people would be styling their sites like that.
    - mixmastamyk 10y ago
      The rise of "readability" features appears to differ with your assessment.
      - paulddraper 10y ago
        Readability is driven by (a minority of) consumers. The fact of the matter is that if the producers want to deliver crap by default, they will deliver crap by default. Creating a new thing for producers to use when they could just do that with their existing medium changes nothing. It's like devising new receptacles for discarding unused apple cores so people don't throw them on the ground. It's not going to help. People don't litter apples because they have to.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- westmeal 10y ago
  Vannevar Bush had this kind of idea back in the 40s. I'd love it.
- actuallyalys 10y ago
  There's already a proliferation of minimally styled sites and blogs like this one. There's also a proliferation of tools—particularly static site generators—that are meant for creating that kind of site. Finally, there's a proliferation of browsers that "work on every device and platform." (Admittedly, they're not lightweight, but they're not that bad if the sites are lightweight.) Can you elaborate on what creating a parallel, information-dense system would achieve? I mean, I agree the web could be more efficient and lighter weight, but there's nothing stopping us from doing that on the web.
  - shakna 10y ago
    Static site generators are an interesting case, which can go either way. Because the site is static, but the creator still wants to be interactive, you tend to get a lot of JavaScript dependencies that fire off a bunch of 3rd party requests instead. Form handling, comments, user profiles and the like, along with the usual analytics and ads. The resulting mess can be much heavier.
    - actuallyalys 10y ago
      That's a good point, although there are many static site generator and theme combinations that don't have that problem, either by not being interactive or by limiting the interactivity to when the creator is editing locally.
      - shakna 10y ago
        Indeed. They can let you save on bytes, or let you drag megabytes. I'm seeing both cultures, and hoping that the lighter wins. But the dichotomy is a interesting statement on how the wider public thinks.
- jraedisch 10y ago
  If you look at pages today and compare them to pages some years ago, it seems to me that because of usability best practices, they have become a lot more alike. The step to a default style doesn't seem such a large one. When enough people use Twitter Bootstrap, we could just support that natively in the browser.
- navs 10y ago
  You can experience a better web. It's not easy though. You'll need to give up a lot. I turn off javascript in Firefox (must it really be done through about:config?). A lot of websites work and I appreciate those sites even more. Gmail still offering a HTML version for example. Then there are those that don't like Youtube. I've had to effectively give it up or find a workaround like youtube-dl and mpv. What does suck the most is I can't use my banking site! If you must have some JS in your life, Sunday is my cheat day. All the JS and all the calories you can handle, one day of the week!
  - amelius 10y ago
    Can't your browser turn off JS on a per-domain basis? Just wondering.
    - Qantourisc 10y ago
      uMatrix does this well (if you are on Firefox)
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Chrome can do the opposite, white list per-domain.
    - navs 10y ago
      Firefox doesn't seem to afford this beyond installing an extension. Somewhat annoyed that Firefox, with the reputation that it has for privacy and choice, doesn't offer a simple toggle in their settings panel.
  - crystalPalace 10y ago
    I recommend NoScript(Firefox plugin) for blanket or selective JS removal from web pages.
    - unicornporn 10y ago
      Browsing with NoScript is fine if you just visit the same websites over and over. If you actually like to _surf_ the web, the experience is reduced to a never ending configuration nightmare. At least that's my experience. Nice in theory, but a terrible UX.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  I think I get what you're saying, but after thinking a little about it I can only see the big problem of standardization. How can a discussion forum signal that one message was sent in reply to other message? Or how can a wiki say that one word links to another article? If you don't have a standard for all this (which means a standard for everything anyone could invent to run on top of this style-free web) then people will come up with their own way of doing it, and the browser should support different ways of doing it, thus people will start inventing new ways of signalizing that a message is a message, a user profile is a user profile, a link is a link etc. Thus we end up with styles and the web as it is today.
- garrettspringer 10y ago
  I agree completely with the need of a new web. The bad information all across the web is gimmicky and flashy click bait is everywhere. Many people are becoming weary and desensitized to everything out there. We need to create a clean and simple, no bs web where information is clear and reliable. Wikipedia I think is a small picture of what it could look like. Especially if better monitors are enforced.
  - krapp 10y ago
    > The bad information all across the web is gimmicky and flashy click bait is everywhere. That's the price you pay for a web that isn't controlled entirely by governments or the media. The alternative is some service like Facebook determining what the truth is on your behalf, and you becoming nothing more than a pig feeding at their trough. People cite disinformation, bad information and "fake news" as evidence that the web is broken, but it's not. That's evidence the web is working as intended - the problem is with the humanity it's reflecting.
    - sly010 10y ago
      > People cite disinformation, bad information and "fake news" as evidence that the web is broken, but it's not. That's evidence the web is working as intended - the problem is with the humanity it's reflecting. This should be on top.
    - eeZah7Ux 10y ago
      >> The bad information all across the web is gimmicky and flashy click bait is everywhere. > That's the price you pay for a web that isn't controlled entirely by governments or the media. My N=1 anectada seem to show the opposite: More trustable correlates with no gimmicks and ads - Wikipedia, academic articles, expert's and organization's blogs, sometimes even HN. Less trustable correlates with flashy - average online news, facebook & co. (as I said, N=1, bare with me)
- themihai 10y ago
  We already have it. It's called HTML. Disable CSS and JS and you've got it! Standard UI only.
- Joeboy 10y ago
  > I'm not sure what the actual answer is I wouldn't say this is the actual answer, but it would go some way if browsers supported nicer default styling. Businesses are always going to want their sites to look conspicuously "designed", because it signals to the user that it's a successful business that can afford to piss away money. But for the rest of us it would be nice if you could publish an unstyled website that looked a bit prettier / more modern than current unstyled HTML. Maybe with a modified doctype or meta tag or something to say "it's OK to render this with nice styling".
- Silhouette 10y ago
  I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free ... a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data That sounds a lot like the Semantic Web, another thing that Berners-Lee has promoted over the years but that has gained limited traction so far.
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
> Imagine that Big Brother scenario extended to the millions of smart devices such as digital thermostats and fire alarms feeding the Internet of Things ecosystem, and you have a problem that could eviscerate the privacy of billions of people, say security experts. Is this anything but opportunistic scare-mongering? "Spy agency own spy tools. Wouldn't it be scary if they used them on you?!?!?"
- wernercd 10y ago
  "Wouldn't it be scary if..." is different than being provably known to do/use/abuse.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    I mean, is there any evidence the recent batch of WikiLeaks leaked CIA tools are being misused? As in, any at all? As far as I'm aware, the only documented case of inappropriate tool use is overly broad selection criteria on legitimate pipelines of information (and related abuse of access to that data) -- the Snowden leaks. That was a doozy with serious constitutional implications. But that's substantially different than "they're hackin muh TV!" just because the CIA developed the ability to as part of their mission to spy, which I dont believe we've seen evidence of indiscriminate use.
inetknght 10y ago
Irony: can't view the page with an adblocker.
- wernercd 10y ago
  No issue with uMatrix/uBlock.
- holri 10y ago
  works with lynx
hackuser 10y ago
The marketplace won't sort out the security issues, any more than it sorted out unstable banks. Consumers lack the ability to obtain information, understand the issues, and make good decisions. Computer systems should be regulated for safety, which includes confidentiality and integrity, like everything else.
- jMyles 10y ago
  I think you have expressed here a worldview that is completely different than mine, especially the bit about "consumers." What does "regulated" mean to you?
  - hackuser 10y ago
    I'm not sure it's a matter of view; it's a matter of fact. Consumers do not have the ability (much less the time!) to understand everything. They can't reliable figure out which bank is stable, which drug will kill them and which will heal their particular illness, they can't figure out which electrical appliance is safe to use and which will electrocute their family, the fire risks of the various buildings they use, and I don't believe they can understand IT security much less evaluate the security of products. No matter what our worldviews, consumers won't obtain more capability and time. I'm a technical professional and educated person, and I certainly don't have the time or resources to answer those questions, even the very last one. > What does "regulated" mean to you? I don't understand the question. In the case of IT security, I can think of many ways to do it: Liability for bad security, rules requiring good security , etc. I don't know enough about regulation to know what works and in what situations, but some minimal rules and liability sound good.
- ebcode 10y ago
  Just as a counterpoint to your argument about unstable banks: It appears that the marketplace was sorting out the unstable banks, which is why they needed to be "bailed out" by the government. If the government had not intervened, those banks would have been bankrupted, and rightfully so, because they essentially made a giant bet on the housing market and lost. The government intervention in the case of the banks prevented a valuable feedback mechanism from taking place, whereby the "bad players" (as in, bad at the game --- at gambling) would have learned from their mistakes. So instead of the negative feedback of bankruptcy, they got the positive feedback of bailouts, and we should expect to see another financial crisis in the not-too-distant future. What remains to be seen is whether the government itself has a working feedback mechanism for this situation. Will they bail out the banks again? in other words.
kyledrake 10y ago
I've been getting increasingly concerned about the future of the web as well https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/future-of-the-www-timbl-drm/ https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/fut...
Oxitendwe 10y ago
If Tim Berners-Lee really wanted to save the web, he wouldn't support DRM in our web standards.[1] It's absolutely disgusting as well that they would argue that "fake news" is somehow a threat to the internet, provide no evidence whatsoever to explain why, and then link to a panel run by a media company considered untrustworthy by about half of American voters.[2] [1] https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/ [2] http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/january_2017/voters_say_media_still_anti_trump http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gene...
- shmerl 10y ago
  Agreed. He should have clearly opposed this EME garbage, instead of endorsing it.
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  Yes, and he wouldn't endorse WebAssembly either (which is just a different, and even worse avenue towards DRM).
  - shakna 10y ago
    Isn't WA rather easy to reverse engineer? The VM it runs in isn't overly complicated, and is open to the public. Whereas EME is more, trust this native code please, and give it all the access it asks for?
    - tannhaeuser 10y ago
      WA makes it possible to replace entire browser runtimes with proprietary stuff. For example, you can compile WebKit to WA, with typography rendering and flow layout on a Web Canvas, and "Save as HTML" and other basic functionality disabled. I find it very irritating that TBL/W3C is promoting this and EME. I think W3C should be seen as what it is - a self-proclaimed standardization company acting in the interest of whoever pays the hefty membership bills struggling to keep relevant.
simplehuman 10y ago
For a start we need to get rid of this ad driven model. But this is not going to happen because people are addicted to free. Its like a drug.
- erlehmann_ 10y ago
  Wikipedia, university pages, a lot of blogs and imageboards all work without advertising. It is not so much that people are “addicted to free”, it is that the showing of ads is so very easy and profitable. Site operators are to blame here.
- gkya 10y ago
  Nope, just that quality content that's worthy of my $$ is mostly produced by bloggers that don't really ask for money. How many sites are there that are as good as LWN? Ad network business is a big balloon soon to explode as the amount of actual customers you get is so little. Guess most advertisers know this but still publish ads because they're not too expensive to not do. When is the last time you willingly clicked an ad? I believe in the past ten years I only willingly clicked less than five ads.
  - diesal11 10y ago
    Advertising isn't just about clicks/conversions. It's also about brand/product exposure.
    - gkya 10y ago
      If the exposure is an ad in a space provided by sth like the deck network, certainly. But otherwise it's not a positive exposure.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    Do you really want a world without professional journalism? I know it's en vogue to hate the "mainstream" press, but a world without institutions that can be somewhat trusted will be open season for demagogues.
mborch 10y ago
The new web needs to be distributed in a privacy-preserving sense. Today, you can't realistically browse the web without getting identified and – generally speaking – geolocated. What we need is a model where you pull information you request from distributed and diverse pools of public domain content.
- amelius 10y ago
  Yes we need more federated services. Email is a great example. Facebook is a telecommunication medium, which means it should conform to the telecommunications act, which says that there should be a level playing field, and an open network. I guess TBL should best start thinking about the protocols in such open systems.
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    What about matrix.org?
- icebraining 10y ago
  There's Freenet. It's just that nobody uses it.
  - Qantourisc 10y ago
    Took a quick read, there is no way to publicly publish something without using other means to communicate the key and content ?
    - icebraining 10y ago
      You can communicate the link over one of the multiple networks that work over Freenet, like FMS (Freenet Message System).
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  > distributed and diverse pools of public domain content Like what Keybase is doing?
mpweiher 10y ago
The letter: http://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter/ http://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter/ Referenced by the W3C, but surprisingly without a direct hyperlink, only by title. A bit strange considering the organization: https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/03/28th-birthday-of-the-web/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/03/28th-birthday-of-the-web/
ajdlinux 10y ago
As commerce has become more mechanised, we've lost the ability to bargain and haggle in consumer business relationships. Forget about sacrosanct privacy rights, I can't even choose to pay to opt out of a lot of data collection. We need better options than all-or-nothing.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  You are right, but this has nothing to do with bargain. I run a business that's totally outside the web. I don't bargain. If any customer is bargaining I just say no.
chvid 10y ago
Political manipulation, control, misinformation and so on has been around long before the invention of the web and will be around long after we stop using the web. Just as it did not start with Donald Trump and certainly not will end with him.
fiatjaf 10y ago
> "It’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web" It's too easy for misinformation to spread everywhere.
fiatjaf 10y ago
> "Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding" As if that wasn't a problem outside the web. Defenders of democracies like to dream about "transparency and understanding".
- bostik 10y ago
  It's not a new thing either, web or not. Chomsky has been warning about the dangers of mass media turned propaganda machine since 1980's. Hell, George Orwell bitterly quipped that history ended in 1936 and everything since then has been propaganda. [0] 0: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/engl-246-fall2011/2011/10/24/looking-back-on-the-spanish-civil-war/ https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/engl-246-fall2011/2011/...
- _yosefk 10y ago
  "Defenders of democracies" live in democracies. Defenders of dictatorships and monarchies, from Jeremy Corbyn (who had kind words for Castro) to neoreactionaries, also live in democracies, presumably because they're not actually stupid enough to believe what they say. Democracy is a lesser evil, which many people born into it fail to appreciate because their imagination does not render the greater evils realistically.
  - zigzigzag 10y ago
    Excellent comment, especially the last part.
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    Is there anyway to prove you wrong? Or is what you just said the absolute immutable truth forever? Because I have the impression that there's nothing I can say that will make you consider my arguments -- as I live in a democracy --, or to even think about them -- as you also live in a democracy, and as you seem to have accepted as a principle that "democracy is a lesser evil".
    - _yosefk 10y ago
      Of course you can prove me wrong or more precisely convince me I'm wrong (proofs are hard with these things.) Just show me enough monarchies or dictatorships fending off immigrants from established democracies instead of shooting would-be emigrants in their backs. It also so happens that I'm dumb enough to have wasted time listening to arguments from neoreactionaries living in democracies and thinking about them. But mainly I think the test should be empirical.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Does anyone else see as problem that web browsers are getting so feature-rich? That means that if anyone wants to write a new web browser he won't be able to.
- keypress 10y ago
  I don't think that's a browser issue. More an authoring issue. You could serve up pages as text files, with as little html as a link.
  - Sir_Substance 10y ago
    There is a special circle of hell for people who write documentation on pages so javascript heavy that a lynx browser on a computer with broken graphics drivers can't load it.
    - jacobush 10y ago
      At least writers of documentation for graphics drivers.
    - mboto 10y ago
      ugh, we're still using ExtJS 4.1 from 2011. I don't know what circle I'm in but it's definitely not pleasant. Backwards compatibility for IE6!!
- Teckla 10y ago
  Does anyone else see as problem that web browsers are getting so feature-rich? That means that if anyone wants to write a new web browser he won't be able to. Those who control the web browsers control the Internet. And web browsers have gotten so huge and hyper-complex that only wealthy corporations can afford to enter the market as new players.
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    Apart from the political rant that's exactly what I said, isn't it? Or do you meant to say Google, Apple and Mozilla are working to increase the features of their browser in the last years with the objective of controlling the Internet in their minds?
perseusprime11 10y ago
Isn't Facebook the biggest culprit of web? Their walled garden approach and lack of social network portability is what I feel is killing web more than anything.
- keypress 10y ago
  Facebook got a foothold, because authoring tools sucked so bad. That's ignoring the magic of some of their social tooling. But sharing digital content with your own intended audience could be achieved in a distributed manner. I know the W3C are trying to tackle that problem. We still need intuitive and easy publishing and aggregation tools that beat the Facebooks.
  - username223 10y ago
    > But sharing digital content with your own intended audience could be achieved in a distributed manner. We almost have the tools now: * cheap or free blog hosting with easy markup and non-public posts * self-hosted commenting with a URL field for commenters, enabling discoverability * friendly RSS readers (I use NetNewsWire) * password management built into most systems and/or browsers, to keep track of individual logins There's work to be done to make it more user-friendly, but all the tools are there.
    - keypress 10y ago
      It's the user friendly bit that matters.
tomohawk 10y ago
It's interesting that one of the great things about the web is the promise of it distributed nature, and yet his prescribed 'fix' for misinformation sounds like the establishment of some sort of central authority to regulate content.
- keypress 10y ago
  I'd have thought the best fix for misinfo, is having a good audit trail of links. References. And these must end at a source/s.
- ballenf 10y ago
  The real test of whether one supports free speech is whether they still support it when voices they don't like get heard. Kind of like the way to judge a person is how they treat those who are less fortunate, not how they treat their peers.
  - Silhouette 10y ago
    The interesting thing here is that there is no inherent right answer when it comes to balancing freedom of expression with a right to privacy. Both are desirable goals, yet it is inevitable that they will sometimes be in conflict, particularly with the capabilities that modern technologies offer for promoting or impairing either side. Moreover, in the world today, even cultures with broadly similar values such as the US and much of Europe often take very different views on this particular issue, which makes finding a reasonable consensus for a system that spans these different places... challenging.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  I thought he was saying exactly the opposite: "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."
  - tomohawk 10y ago
ThePhysicist 10y ago
Surprised that no one mentioned the new EU data protection directive, which goes a long way to fix the first issue mentioned in the article, the loss of control over our personal data (only for users in Europe though). I studied it in detail as I work in data analysis and consult companies on this, and I honestly think it is one of the best laws produced by the EU so far: It gives users a multitude of rights such as being informed about exactly which kind of data a company has about them (and even get a digital copy of that data), how the company uses that data and for which purposes it is used. And if you're subjected to algorithmic decision making (e.g. an algorithm decides if the bank should award you a credit) you have the right to know which kind of algorithms were used in the process and to contest the decision. You also have the right to demand the deletion of your personal data and to revoke the right of a company to process it, as well as to demand correction of inaccurate data. The legislation also allows for severe fines and punishments for companies not respecting the regulation (up to 4 % of yearly turnover of the whole company group), so even companies the size of Google or Facebook should have strong incentives to follow the regulation.
- halflings 10y ago
  Woah, didn't know it went this far. If anything, this would be great for facebook (which has been anything but transparent when it comes to what they do with your data when your account is deleted). Google already has some relatively transparent controls on what data they have on you, and allow you to wipe all or parts of it.
  - k__ 10y ago
    But the law only works with companies. The Internet as whole never forgets
    - ethbro 10y ago
      The Internet also has to make money at some point, which means there's usually a corporate entity in the chain, one whose money (for better or worse) eventually touches Western banks. So yes, the Internet never forgets (things it can make a buck off of).
K0nserv 10y ago
> Today marks 28 years since I submitted my original proposal for the worldwide web. I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries. Seems to me that the above and the points raised in point 2 sit on opposite sides of the spectrum. Either you get a free and open internet where everyone can publish content as they like or you police who and want can be published. The spread of misinformation seems to be a direct result of the democratic nature of the internet.
- Razengan 10y ago
  The spread of misinformation is better countered by educating people about the potential and existence of misinformation, rather than policing the web. Just like children learning and growing wiser about everyday social deception etc., as opposed to policing everything people do and say offline.
  - elbigbad 10y ago
    Is this just an opinion, or do you have any data on this?
    - Razengan 10y ago
      Opinion. I mean we tell kids to be wary of strangers, but we can't assign a policeman to every stranger. Easier to teach people that they can be deceived or that bad things can happen, than to prevent any deception or bad thing from ever occurring.
      - phy6 10y ago
        Thank you for the common sense analogy. I have a 'hunch' that one could whip up a proof based on countably vs uncountably infinite mappings where the number of ways to deceive/offend outweigh the number of authorities which could police them, even assuming such ideals as perfect enforcement and willingness to submit to being policed (i.e. international uniformity of laws). But that's just a first-coffee-of-the-morning hunch.
nsxwolf 10y ago
It sounds like he's just trying to put the genie back in the bottle now. First he creates a system that gives everyone total freedom and now he's like, whoah, that's way too much freedom.
pdimitar 10y ago
As much as I'd love to help projects like IPFS (for example), truth is that most people simply don't care and are entirely clueless on the impact of the continued centralization and surveillance of the Internet on their lives. Sitting with random people on a table, they giggle and smirk saying "I've got nothing to hide, you're too paranoid, bro, cheer up!" and I quickly give up. They have zero idea about how much info is collected about them. If tomorrow somebody pulled out that info in a fabricated trial against them, they'll sing another tune but it will be way too late. Nobody ever listens until it impacts them directly. Sad reality about Homo Sapiens. Another one is the echo chamber effect -- people absolutely LOVE their social echo chambers and they can legitimately punch in you the face if you point them at a source that disagrees with them. As a second and last point to the above, I can't afford donating all my free time to help progress the decentralized internet anymore. I am 37 and I have a very happy personal life but need to work on my health a lot, I am very tired and burned out and I am finding myself unable (even if I want) to work for free without any reward in sight (not even talking about money; I am sure I wouldn't even be thanked). I imagine many others are in a similar position -- in terms of finances, in the health department, or in their general mental stance. I very much like the idea of creating a "home internet box" which is a self-contained fanless machine connected to an UPS -- and it contains router, firewall, own website, own mailserver, own private Dropbox, a universal P2P node (BitTorrent / IPFS) etc., but as others have pointed out, our current stack of network technologies is way too bloated and full of incomplete standards -- which in turn are likely full of exploits and dark corners -- that right now the only seemingly appropriate course of action is to get rid of it all -- except the physical layer protocols -- and start over. Try making an API app that works with anything else than HTTP and HTML/JSON. Tell me how that went for you. Try using ASN.1 as a data format, or a compressed secured IP layer protocol. Yes it's possible but it's much slower than it should be. Seems us humans always want to have one "universal truth". It's extremely sad and I am afraid we'll live to see very oppresive times pretty soon.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  truth is that most people simply don't care and are entirely clueless on the impact of the continued centralization and surveillance of the Internet on their lives That's a common assumption, but I wonder how true it really is. I've certainly talked with friends in their 20s and maybe early 30s -- people who have grown up with the Internet and ubiquitous mobile devices -- and had them express a sentiment that was more frustration than ambivalence. Sometimes they did find it creepy that they'd be tracked around with ads, or that their phone was doing things based on where they were or what they had planned to do later. However, they've never known technology to work any other way and assume there's nothing they can do about it, and they value the social aspects of sharing stuff online so they keep using these services. I very much like the idea of creating a "home internet box" which is a self-contained fanless machine connected to an UPS -- and it contains router, firewall, own website, own mailserver, own private Dropbox, a universal P2P node (BitTorrent / IPFS) etc., but as others have pointed out, our current stack of network technologies is way too bloated and full of incomplete standards It used to be common that your ISP would provide you with an email address, web hosting, and so on as part of your package. Everyone could set up a basic web site by just FTPing an HTML file up to their ISP's server, and then yourname.yourisp.com would show it to everyone, or you could get your own domain name and use that instead. Likewise for sending and receiving mail. Many countries set up their legal/regulatory frameworks to foster competition between ISPs, and so in practice we had a relatively decentralised Internet. You obviously still had the equivalent of today's lock-in problem if you relied on the email or web address your ISP gave you rather than your own domain, but you didn't have to. It doesn't really take having some magic box in everyone's home to provide this sort of flexibility, though such a box would be no bad thing IMHO. We just have to stop doing so much through a tiny number of centralised service providers and social networks, and develop standards for interoperability and federation. The whole Internet was built on those principles, so I'm pretty sure we could do it for sharing data like mail and photos, and there are many interesting possibilities in terms of searching for data as well. One of the other provisions in the new EU rules that come into effect in 2018 is effectively a right to export data from one controller so it can be processed by another, so people could potentially migrate all the data they've given to sites like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or GitHub to some other competing service (assuming such a service exists). It will be interesting to see how that one plays out and whether it is effective in breaking the lock-in effects that have allowed so few companies to become so dominant in recent years.
return0 10y ago
The web needs more anarchy, not less. Less spoon-feeding people with the truth, let them bear the brunt of their failures. All the problems he mentions are political, stemming from too much power in governments which makes political candidates ruthless.
- qudat 10y ago
  Agreed. This idea that we have an issue with misinformation is ridiculous. The problem isn't the signal to noise ratio, it's learning how to find the signal in the noise.
chengiz 10y ago
Berners-Lee seems to want to stay relevant, I mean he invented the web but does that give credibility to his announcments and concerns and predictions now? I mean we all know how the semantic web turned out.
liopleurodon 10y ago
Tim Berners-Lee. Thank God, I was worried they had interviewed Al Gore
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
toadkicker 10y ago
I just wanted to add some positive comments here complaining the state of the web as we know it today vs. the people who are working on the solutions to the problems. There are well defined paradigms for building distributed systems. While much of the web was built in the belief these distributed systems would take root, lots of engineering went into client-server configurations. There are a ton of psychological reasons why these decisions were made. They don't have to keep being made though. We can all embrace distributed applications (some call them serverless applications) and free the web once again. Here's a lot of great projects that are trying to do just that: http://github.com/toadkicker/awesome-ethereum http://github.com/toadkicker/awesome-ethereum
kahrkunne 10y ago
Publishing this in The Guardian, what beautiful irony
chippy 10y ago
The current narrative of misinformation as a news item is a new thing, which arrived in our world during the recent US election process. The issue gets my suspicion-radar bleeping. The whole narrative smells funny to me. It's not really a global issue, it's a current affairs issue and one particular to a specific geography. And its not really an internet issue I think but a human one. What I find interesting is that Trump is adopting the narrative that emerged to criticise him, to criticise media bias in general. That's interesting because political bias and misinformation can be separated - actual wrong reporting of facts vs bias of interpretation, but they can be argued to produce the same effect.
- xienze 10y ago
  My thoughts exactly. The issue of "fake news" being this global menace appeared seemingly out of nowhere despite the fact "fake news" has been a part of internet culture for pretty much its entire existence.
- menacingly 10y ago
  It seems a little disappointing because I have this fantasy that the goals and problems of the web are above the little hype tempests that happen to have dominated the news cycle for a few months. I'd like the face of the web to have a steadier vision, but I'm not sure how realistic that is
joshuaNathaniel 10y ago
We never had control of our personal data. The WWW wasn't designed with personal data in mind. If it was then https would be the standard. I'm hearing a lot of Chicken Littles. Either adapt to the new age or die. For us this should go without saying.
curiousgeorgio 10y ago
It's refreshing to read Berners-Lee's proposed solutions as they point toward more technical and market-based approaches rather than the typical "we need more legislation to fix these issues" incantation. I often hear many of the same people fighting "against government overreach in surveillance laws" (as Berners-Lee mentions) while at the same time advocating more legislation to govern information use/misuse on the web. I don't think it's realistic to expect government overreach to magically work where we want it and stop right where we don't. Many of these problems aren't on the forefront of most people's minds (yet), but as the issues become more publicized and people begin to understand their importance, then we (as in "the people", not the government) will have a greater voice - and more importantly, power through informed choices - to make a difference.
bnolsen 10y ago
Except for the private data part, I found this not very constructive. Too political. IMHO biggest problem with the web itself is snooping, tracking all driving an insane amount of bloat which clogs the internet. Any extra bandwidth or horsepower is immediately sucked and then some up by advertisers and tracking. There's nothing lean and mean about it anymore. The internet exists as an information resource that people need to be able to sift through themselves, not something that governments or other self selected groups decide to arbitrarily censor for whatever selfish reasons they have.
Tylerosaurus 10y ago
I thought Al Gore invented the internet
sauronlord 10y ago
He is advocating for censorship. Misinformation spreads everywhere not just the web. Who decides what is "misinformation"? All speech and information is political, because man is a political creature. Who decides what is "political"? His first point about losing control of our personal data is right on though. Even so called "heroes of the web/freedom" are on the "fake news bandwagon". What the hell have we come to when this is considered enlightening discourse. We're all in deep shit and this is a taste of things to come this century.
- tim333 10y ago
  He doesn't actually say censorship. He says "by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem." Just putting fake stories at 50th place in the search results say rather than #1 is not censorship.
  - sauronlord 10y ago
    Who decides what is fake?
elwilson1100 10y ago
I recently found a post about JB Funding giving loans at an affordable rate of 2% and i decided to give it a try after my bank denied me of a loan to improve my business and pay some other debts, luckily for me i was able to obtain a loan from JB Funding and i want to use this media to advise/say, if you are out there in need of any type of loan then you are to contact JB Funding via ( jbf_info@zoho.com ) for more info on how you can get funded fast with easy processing. I wish you all the best. Ellen Wilson.
elwilson1100 10y ago
I recently found a post about JB Funding giving loans at an affordable rate of 2% and i decided to give it a try after my bank denied me of a loan to improve my business and pay some other debts, luckily for me i was able to obtain a loan from JB Funding and i want to use this media to advise/say, if you are out there in need of any type of loan then you are to contact JB Funding via ( jbf_info@zoho.com ) for more info on how you can get funded fast with easy processing. I wish you all the best. Ellen Wilson.

385 points by perseusprime11 10y ago

I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free. I think the existing one is fine to continue for the general public, online shopping, social networks, etc.. but a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data with some standard stylesheet that concentrates in readability, and the "good" bits of the modern web, without the fluff. It would be great for technical blogs and news, project sites, wiki type data stores, discussion forums, etc. Maybe everything in this "new" web is static, no stylesheets except browser-side for users to customise themselves. I'm not sure what the actual answer is but I know the existing web is broken beyond repair.

Esau 10y ago
So, basically, Gopher with user style-sheets?
- sverige 10y ago
  And better search engines to find obscure documents on the servers of small, obscure colleges.
myowncrapulence 10y ago
This type of "web" would run perfectly over encrypted networks as well since it would carry much less data. It would solve the problem of cluttered/fluffy web and insecure/easily-surveilled communications. Being realistic though, this would only serve highly functional computer users seeking simplicity and privacy. A lot of internet users view "beautiful" webpages as a display of trustworthiness and importance. And that's a very important trait if you are a business.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  The nicer the package, the worse the contents.
- username223 10y ago
  > A lot of internet users view "beautiful" webpages as a display of trustworthiness and importance. Not so much. A lot of web users like simple, predictable pages. Flyout menus spazzing all over the page, giant headers breaking the space bar, and obscure hamburgers hiding useful features just confuse and annoy people who don't know about CSS element blocking.
  - marcus_holmes 10y ago
    Those aren't beautiful pages. We geeks, who can understand the code, decry the complexity of a beautiful page and prefer not to go there. But we're 1% of the audience. The other 99% are used to equating beauty and style with quality. More style == more quality. Less style == less quality. The pages we love because of their simplicity don't do well in the mass market because of their simplicity. I have taken to calling this the "Kardashian Problem" - I don't understand why the Kardashians exist. I am forced to accept that they do exist. Therefore I do not share a worldview with the people who pay money for the Kardashians to exist. The Kardashians are very wealthy, so there are a lot of those people. I am a taste minority, so building things that I like won't make money. I have to build things that the Kardashians would like. I don't understand what they would like, so I must test everything!
    - holografix 10y ago
      I know what you mean. Frankly I think the Kardashians are a force for evil. Promoting selfishness, superficiality and female independence through hyper sexual objectification. Why are they so popular? Total mystery to me.
      - sweeneyrod 10y ago
        "selfishness, superficiality and female independence" One of these things is not like the others.
pfraze 10y ago
I work on Beaker Browser. Version 0.7 will have markdown sites. Here's what that looks like: https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/840228255529590784 https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/840228255529590784 If you ask a layman to differentiate between "the browser" and Facebook, they might not know the difference. In a lot of ways, Facebook is a browser for a set of content types like posts, videos, business pages, etc. Same logic applies to say YouTube: it's a specialized "subbrowser" for videos. If pressed I think I'd say the only reason YouTube or Facebook aren't browsers is because they're not decentralized. They browse a fixed set of end points. AMP project, kind of similar, it's a specialized sub browser for mobile articles. And it's like what you describe, actually: constrained, but not decentralized. I don't think we need a new browser or web to accomplish your ask Browsers could specialize by running "sub browser" overlay applications. If you want to a constrained subweb with markdown-only sites, then sure, why not? It's not that different than a markdown-only publishing service-- the YouTube of markdown-- except the app logic is on the client side, and it's browsing a decentralized web our markdown website feature is built in, but it could be moved to userland as an overlay, as an app that's triggered when the user turns it on, or goes to a certain type of site. It may sound like a stretch, but out bigger picture is to invert the relationship with services to create thick client side apps, in which case an overlay app is just a particular class of app with a particular class of permissions
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  Thanks for the reminder to try out Beaker! It looks like a really cool project and I hope you find success with it.
- tuukkah 10y ago
  Could Beaker be distributed as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome?
  - JohnDotAwesome 10y ago
    I think this would constrain the vision of Beaker. I can't point to any concrete examples (like, where the extension API doesn't support something beaker does), but I can imagine wanting a less sandboxed environment when developing the platform for distributed web apps.
yissir 10y ago
The uncomfortable truth is that even if style-free information-dense content would be better for you, it wouldn't be better for the advertisers that currently fund this content. And nobody is going to pay for this content out of pocket when they can pay for it though the tax of terrible UX and being reduced to a data product bought by businesses. If the web is broken, it's not because of the technology, but the shaky economic foundation upon which it's built.
- white-flame 10y ago
  The web wasn't built on an economic foundation of ad revenue. The web was built on the economic foundation of both university-provided and personally/privately funded servers. What ad revenue did was wildly expand the number of people trying to exploit the web for revenue, by generating sheer quantity regardless of content. I agree that that's a shaky foundation to base the web on.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    I don't think you can just throw out everything produced by professional newspapers as useless content.
    - sly010 10y ago
      Just 90% of it.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- laumars 10y ago
  You can still have adverts on style free sites: <a href="adverts.com?ad-id=12345><img src="adverts.com/ads/12345.jpg></a> Then there's paid for promotional content, which is one of the current trends on the web at the moment anyway. As long as information can be rendered then adverts can be included.
  - 10y ago
Touche 10y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
paulddraper 10y ago
That what we already had/have. How is that different from anything you can already do?
- StavrosK 10y ago
  The difference is that the author doesn't realize nobody else wants this, or people would be styling their sites like that.
  - mixmastamyk 10y ago
    The rise of "readability" features appears to differ with your assessment.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      Readability is driven by (a minority of) consumers. The fact of the matter is that if the producers want to deliver crap by default, they will deliver crap by default. Creating a new thing for producers to use when they could just do that with their existing medium changes nothing. It's like devising new receptacles for discarding unused apple cores so people don't throw them on the ground. It's not going to help. People don't litter apples because they have to.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
westmeal 10y ago
Vannevar Bush had this kind of idea back in the 40s. I'd love it.
actuallyalys 10y ago
There's already a proliferation of minimally styled sites and blogs like this one. There's also a proliferation of tools—particularly static site generators—that are meant for creating that kind of site. Finally, there's a proliferation of browsers that "work on every device and platform." (Admittedly, they're not lightweight, but they're not that bad if the sites are lightweight.) Can you elaborate on what creating a parallel, information-dense system would achieve? I mean, I agree the web could be more efficient and lighter weight, but there's nothing stopping us from doing that on the web.
- shakna 10y ago
  Static site generators are an interesting case, which can go either way. Because the site is static, but the creator still wants to be interactive, you tend to get a lot of JavaScript dependencies that fire off a bunch of 3rd party requests instead. Form handling, comments, user profiles and the like, along with the usual analytics and ads. The resulting mess can be much heavier.
  - actuallyalys 10y ago
    That's a good point, although there are many static site generator and theme combinations that don't have that problem, either by not being interactive or by limiting the interactivity to when the creator is editing locally.
    - shakna 10y ago
      Indeed. They can let you save on bytes, or let you drag megabytes. I'm seeing both cultures, and hoping that the lighter wins. But the dichotomy is a interesting statement on how the wider public thinks.
jraedisch 10y ago
If you look at pages today and compare them to pages some years ago, it seems to me that because of usability best practices, they have become a lot more alike. The step to a default style doesn't seem such a large one. When enough people use Twitter Bootstrap, we could just support that natively in the browser.
navs 10y ago
You can experience a better web. It's not easy though. You'll need to give up a lot. I turn off javascript in Firefox (must it really be done through about:config?). A lot of websites work and I appreciate those sites even more. Gmail still offering a HTML version for example. Then there are those that don't like Youtube. I've had to effectively give it up or find a workaround like youtube-dl and mpv. What does suck the most is I can't use my banking site! If you must have some JS in your life, Sunday is my cheat day. All the JS and all the calories you can handle, one day of the week!
- amelius 10y ago
  Can't your browser turn off JS on a per-domain basis? Just wondering.
  - Qantourisc 10y ago
    uMatrix does this well (if you are on Firefox)
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Chrome can do the opposite, white list per-domain.
  - navs 10y ago
    Firefox doesn't seem to afford this beyond installing an extension. Somewhat annoyed that Firefox, with the reputation that it has for privacy and choice, doesn't offer a simple toggle in their settings panel.
- crystalPalace 10y ago
  I recommend NoScript(Firefox plugin) for blanket or selective JS removal from web pages.
  - unicornporn 10y ago
    Browsing with NoScript is fine if you just visit the same websites over and over. If you actually like to _surf_ the web, the experience is reduced to a never ending configuration nightmare. At least that's my experience. Nice in theory, but a terrible UX.
fiatjaf 10y ago
I think I get what you're saying, but after thinking a little about it I can only see the big problem of standardization. How can a discussion forum signal that one message was sent in reply to other message? Or how can a wiki say that one word links to another article? If you don't have a standard for all this (which means a standard for everything anyone could invent to run on top of this style-free web) then people will come up with their own way of doing it, and the browser should support different ways of doing it, thus people will start inventing new ways of signalizing that a message is a message, a user profile is a user profile, a link is a link etc. Thus we end up with styles and the web as it is today.
garrettspringer 10y ago
I agree completely with the need of a new web. The bad information all across the web is gimmicky and flashy click bait is everywhere. Many people are becoming weary and desensitized to everything out there. We need to create a clean and simple, no bs web where information is clear and reliable. Wikipedia I think is a small picture of what it could look like. Especially if better monitors are enforced.
- krapp 10y ago
  > The bad information all across the web is gimmicky and flashy click bait is everywhere. That's the price you pay for a web that isn't controlled entirely by governments or the media. The alternative is some service like Facebook determining what the truth is on your behalf, and you becoming nothing more than a pig feeding at their trough. People cite disinformation, bad information and "fake news" as evidence that the web is broken, but it's not. That's evidence the web is working as intended - the problem is with the humanity it's reflecting.
  - sly010 10y ago
    > People cite disinformation, bad information and "fake news" as evidence that the web is broken, but it's not. That's evidence the web is working as intended - the problem is with the humanity it's reflecting. This should be on top.
  - eeZah7Ux 10y ago
    >> The bad information all across the web is gimmicky and flashy click bait is everywhere. > That's the price you pay for a web that isn't controlled entirely by governments or the media. My N=1 anectada seem to show the opposite: More trustable correlates with no gimmicks and ads - Wikipedia, academic articles, expert's and organization's blogs, sometimes even HN. Less trustable correlates with flashy - average online news, facebook & co. (as I said, N=1, bare with me)
themihai 10y ago
We already have it. It's called HTML. Disable CSS and JS and you've got it! Standard UI only.
Joeboy 10y ago
> I'm not sure what the actual answer is I wouldn't say this is the actual answer, but it would go some way if browsers supported nicer default styling. Businesses are always going to want their sites to look conspicuously "designed", because it signals to the user that it's a successful business that can afford to piss away money. But for the rest of us it would be nice if you could publish an unstyled website that looked a bit prettier / more modern than current unstyled HTML. Maybe with a modified doctype or meta tag or something to say "it's OK to render this with nice styling".
Silhouette 10y ago
I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free ... a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data That sounds a lot like the Semantic Web, another thing that Berners-Lee has promoted over the years but that has gained limited traction so far.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

> Imagine that Big Brother scenario extended to the millions of smart devices such as digital thermostats and fire alarms feeding the Internet of Things ecosystem, and you have a problem that could eviscerate the privacy of billions of people, say security experts. Is this anything but opportunistic scare-mongering? "Spy agency own spy tools. Wouldn't it be scary if they used them on you?!?!?"

wernercd 10y ago
"Wouldn't it be scary if..." is different than being provably known to do/use/abuse.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  I mean, is there any evidence the recent batch of WikiLeaks leaked CIA tools are being misused? As in, any at all? As far as I'm aware, the only documented case of inappropriate tool use is overly broad selection criteria on legitimate pipelines of information (and related abuse of access to that data) -- the Snowden leaks. That was a doozy with serious constitutional implications. But that's substantially different than "they're hackin muh TV!" just because the CIA developed the ability to as part of their mission to spy, which I dont believe we've seen evidence of indiscriminate use.

inetknght 10y ago

Irony: can't view the page with an adblocker.

wernercd 10y ago
No issue with uMatrix/uBlock.
holri 10y ago
works with lynx

hackuser 10y ago

The marketplace won't sort out the security issues, any more than it sorted out unstable banks. Consumers lack the ability to obtain information, understand the issues, and make good decisions. Computer systems should be regulated for safety, which includes confidentiality and integrity, like everything else.

jMyles 10y ago
I think you have expressed here a worldview that is completely different than mine, especially the bit about "consumers." What does "regulated" mean to you?
- hackuser 10y ago
  I'm not sure it's a matter of view; it's a matter of fact. Consumers do not have the ability (much less the time!) to understand everything. They can't reliable figure out which bank is stable, which drug will kill them and which will heal their particular illness, they can't figure out which electrical appliance is safe to use and which will electrocute their family, the fire risks of the various buildings they use, and I don't believe they can understand IT security much less evaluate the security of products. No matter what our worldviews, consumers won't obtain more capability and time. I'm a technical professional and educated person, and I certainly don't have the time or resources to answer those questions, even the very last one. > What does "regulated" mean to you? I don't understand the question. In the case of IT security, I can think of many ways to do it: Liability for bad security, rules requiring good security , etc. I don't know enough about regulation to know what works and in what situations, but some minimal rules and liability sound good.
ebcode 10y ago
Just as a counterpoint to your argument about unstable banks: It appears that the marketplace was sorting out the unstable banks, which is why they needed to be "bailed out" by the government. If the government had not intervened, those banks would have been bankrupted, and rightfully so, because they essentially made a giant bet on the housing market and lost. The government intervention in the case of the banks prevented a valuable feedback mechanism from taking place, whereby the "bad players" (as in, bad at the game --- at gambling) would have learned from their mistakes. So instead of the negative feedback of bankruptcy, they got the positive feedback of bailouts, and we should expect to see another financial crisis in the not-too-distant future. What remains to be seen is whether the government itself has a working feedback mechanism for this situation. Will they bail out the banks again? in other words.

kyledrake 10y ago

I've been getting increasingly concerned about the future of the web as well https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/future-of-the-www-timbl-drm/ https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/02/fut...

Oxitendwe 10y ago

If Tim Berners-Lee really wanted to save the web, he wouldn't support DRM in our web standards.[1] It's absolutely disgusting as well that they would argue that "fake news" is somehow a threat to the internet, provide no evidence whatsoever to explain why, and then link to a panel run by a media company considered untrustworthy by about half of American voters.[2] [1] https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/02/on-eme-in-html5/ [2] http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/january_2017/voters_say_media_still_anti_trump http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gene...

shmerl 10y ago
Agreed. He should have clearly opposed this EME garbage, instead of endorsing it.
tannhaeuser 10y ago
Yes, and he wouldn't endorse WebAssembly either (which is just a different, and even worse avenue towards DRM).
- shakna 10y ago
  Isn't WA rather easy to reverse engineer? The VM it runs in isn't overly complicated, and is open to the public. Whereas EME is more, trust this native code please, and give it all the access it asks for?
  - tannhaeuser 10y ago
    WA makes it possible to replace entire browser runtimes with proprietary stuff. For example, you can compile WebKit to WA, with typography rendering and flow layout on a Web Canvas, and "Save as HTML" and other basic functionality disabled. I find it very irritating that TBL/W3C is promoting this and EME. I think W3C should be seen as what it is - a self-proclaimed standardization company acting in the interest of whoever pays the hefty membership bills struggling to keep relevant.

simplehuman 10y ago

For a start we need to get rid of this ad driven model. But this is not going to happen because people are addicted to free. Its like a drug.

erlehmann_ 10y ago
Wikipedia, university pages, a lot of blogs and imageboards all work without advertising. It is not so much that people are “addicted to free”, it is that the showing of ads is so very easy and profitable. Site operators are to blame here.
gkya 10y ago
Nope, just that quality content that's worthy of my $$ is mostly produced by bloggers that don't really ask for money. How many sites are there that are as good as LWN? Ad network business is a big balloon soon to explode as the amount of actual customers you get is so little. Guess most advertisers know this but still publish ads because they're not too expensive to not do. When is the last time you willingly clicked an ad? I believe in the past ten years I only willingly clicked less than five ads.
- diesal11 10y ago
  Advertising isn't just about clicks/conversions. It's also about brand/product exposure.
  - gkya 10y ago
    If the exposure is an ad in a space provided by sth like the deck network, certainly. But otherwise it's not a positive exposure.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Do you really want a world without professional journalism? I know it's en vogue to hate the "mainstream" press, but a world without institutions that can be somewhat trusted will be open season for demagogues.

mborch 10y ago

The new web needs to be distributed in a privacy-preserving sense. Today, you can't realistically browse the web without getting identified and – generally speaking – geolocated. What we need is a model where you pull information you request from distributed and diverse pools of public domain content.

amelius 10y ago
Yes we need more federated services. Email is a great example. Facebook is a telecommunication medium, which means it should conform to the telecommunications act, which says that there should be a level playing field, and an open network. I guess TBL should best start thinking about the protocols in such open systems.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  What about matrix.org?
icebraining 10y ago
There's Freenet. It's just that nobody uses it.
- Qantourisc 10y ago
  Took a quick read, there is no way to publicly publish something without using other means to communicate the key and content ?
  - icebraining 10y ago
    You can communicate the link over one of the multiple networks that work over Freenet, like FMS (Freenet Message System).
fiatjaf 10y ago
> distributed and diverse pools of public domain content Like what Keybase is doing?

mpweiher 10y ago

The letter: http://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter/ http://webfoundation.org/2017/03/web-turns-28-letter/ Referenced by the W3C, but surprisingly without a direct hyperlink, only by title. A bit strange considering the organization: https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/03/28th-birthday-of-the-web/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/03/28th-birthday-of-the-web/

ajdlinux 10y ago

As commerce has become more mechanised, we've lost the ability to bargain and haggle in consumer business relationships. Forget about sacrosanct privacy rights, I can't even choose to pay to opt out of a lot of data collection. We need better options than all-or-nothing.

fiatjaf 10y ago
You are right, but this has nothing to do with bargain. I run a business that's totally outside the web. I don't bargain. If any customer is bargaining I just say no.

chvid 10y ago

Political manipulation, control, misinformation and so on has been around long before the invention of the web and will be around long after we stop using the web. Just as it did not start with Donald Trump and certainly not will end with him.

fiatjaf 10y ago

> "It’s too easy for misinformation to spread on the web" It's too easy for misinformation to spread everywhere.

fiatjaf 10y ago

> "Political advertising online needs transparency and understanding" As if that wasn't a problem outside the web. Defenders of democracies like to dream about "transparency and understanding".

bostik 10y ago
It's not a new thing either, web or not. Chomsky has been warning about the dangers of mass media turned propaganda machine since 1980's. Hell, George Orwell bitterly quipped that history ended in 1936 and everything since then has been propaganda. [0] 0: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/engl-246-fall2011/2011/10/24/looking-back-on-the-spanish-civil-war/ https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/engl-246-fall2011/2011/...
_yosefk 10y ago
"Defenders of democracies" live in democracies. Defenders of dictatorships and monarchies, from Jeremy Corbyn (who had kind words for Castro) to neoreactionaries, also live in democracies, presumably because they're not actually stupid enough to believe what they say. Democracy is a lesser evil, which many people born into it fail to appreciate because their imagination does not render the greater evils realistically.
- zigzigzag 10y ago
  Excellent comment, especially the last part.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Is there anyway to prove you wrong? Or is what you just said the absolute immutable truth forever? Because I have the impression that there's nothing I can say that will make you consider my arguments -- as I live in a democracy --, or to even think about them -- as you also live in a democracy, and as you seem to have accepted as a principle that "democracy is a lesser evil".
  - _yosefk 10y ago
    Of course you can prove me wrong or more precisely convince me I'm wrong (proofs are hard with these things.) Just show me enough monarchies or dictatorships fending off immigrants from established democracies instead of shooting would-be emigrants in their backs. It also so happens that I'm dumb enough to have wasted time listening to arguments from neoreactionaries living in democracies and thinking about them. But mainly I think the test should be empirical.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Does anyone else see as problem that web browsers are getting so feature-rich? That means that if anyone wants to write a new web browser he won't be able to.

keypress 10y ago
I don't think that's a browser issue. More an authoring issue. You could serve up pages as text files, with as little html as a link.
- Sir_Substance 10y ago
  There is a special circle of hell for people who write documentation on pages so javascript heavy that a lynx browser on a computer with broken graphics drivers can't load it.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    At least writers of documentation for graphics drivers.
  - mboto 10y ago
    ugh, we're still using ExtJS 4.1 from 2011. I don't know what circle I'm in but it's definitely not pleasant. Backwards compatibility for IE6!!
Teckla 10y ago
Does anyone else see as problem that web browsers are getting so feature-rich? That means that if anyone wants to write a new web browser he won't be able to. Those who control the web browsers control the Internet. And web browsers have gotten so huge and hyper-complex that only wealthy corporations can afford to enter the market as new players.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Apart from the political rant that's exactly what I said, isn't it? Or do you meant to say Google, Apple and Mozilla are working to increase the features of their browser in the last years with the objective of controlling the Internet in their minds?

perseusprime11 10y ago

Isn't Facebook the biggest culprit of web? Their walled garden approach and lack of social network portability is what I feel is killing web more than anything.

keypress 10y ago
Facebook got a foothold, because authoring tools sucked so bad. That's ignoring the magic of some of their social tooling. But sharing digital content with your own intended audience could be achieved in a distributed manner. I know the W3C are trying to tackle that problem. We still need intuitive and easy publishing and aggregation tools that beat the Facebooks.
- username223 10y ago
  > But sharing digital content with your own intended audience could be achieved in a distributed manner. We almost have the tools now: * cheap or free blog hosting with easy markup and non-public posts * self-hosted commenting with a URL field for commenters, enabling discoverability * friendly RSS readers (I use NetNewsWire) * password management built into most systems and/or browsers, to keep track of individual logins There's work to be done to make it more user-friendly, but all the tools are there.
  - keypress 10y ago
    It's the user friendly bit that matters.

tomohawk 10y ago

It's interesting that one of the great things about the web is the promise of it distributed nature, and yet his prescribed 'fix' for misinformation sounds like the establishment of some sort of central authority to regulate content.

keypress 10y ago
I'd have thought the best fix for misinfo, is having a good audit trail of links. References. And these must end at a source/s.
ballenf 10y ago
The real test of whether one supports free speech is whether they still support it when voices they don't like get heard. Kind of like the way to judge a person is how they treat those who are less fortunate, not how they treat their peers.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  The interesting thing here is that there is no inherent right answer when it comes to balancing freedom of expression with a right to privacy. Both are desirable goals, yet it is inevitable that they will sometimes be in conflict, particularly with the capabilities that modern technologies offer for promoting or impairing either side. Moreover, in the world today, even cultures with broadly similar values such as the US and much of Europe often take very different views on this particular issue, which makes finding a reasonable consensus for a system that spans these different places... challenging.
Silhouette 10y ago
I thought he was saying exactly the opposite: "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."
- tomohawk 10y ago

ThePhysicist 10y ago

Surprised that no one mentioned the new EU data protection directive, which goes a long way to fix the first issue mentioned in the article, the loss of control over our personal data (only for users in Europe though). I studied it in detail as I work in data analysis and consult companies on this, and I honestly think it is one of the best laws produced by the EU so far: It gives users a multitude of rights such as being informed about exactly which kind of data a company has about them (and even get a digital copy of that data), how the company uses that data and for which purposes it is used. And if you're subjected to algorithmic decision making (e.g. an algorithm decides if the bank should award you a credit) you have the right to know which kind of algorithms were used in the process and to contest the decision. You also have the right to demand the deletion of your personal data and to revoke the right of a company to process it, as well as to demand correction of inaccurate data. The legislation also allows for severe fines and punishments for companies not respecting the regulation (up to 4 % of yearly turnover of the whole company group), so even companies the size of Google or Facebook should have strong incentives to follow the regulation.

halflings 10y ago
Woah, didn't know it went this far. If anything, this would be great for facebook (which has been anything but transparent when it comes to what they do with your data when your account is deleted). Google already has some relatively transparent controls on what data they have on you, and allow you to wipe all or parts of it.
- k__ 10y ago
  But the law only works with companies. The Internet as whole never forgets
  - ethbro 10y ago
    The Internet also has to make money at some point, which means there's usually a corporate entity in the chain, one whose money (for better or worse) eventually touches Western banks. So yes, the Internet never forgets (things it can make a buck off of).

K0nserv 10y ago

> Today marks 28 years since I submitted my original proposal for the worldwide web. I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries. Seems to me that the above and the points raised in point 2 sit on opposite sides of the spectrum. Either you get a free and open internet where everyone can publish content as they like or you police who and want can be published. The spread of misinformation seems to be a direct result of the democratic nature of the internet.

Razengan 10y ago
The spread of misinformation is better countered by educating people about the potential and existence of misinformation, rather than policing the web. Just like children learning and growing wiser about everyday social deception etc., as opposed to policing everything people do and say offline.
- elbigbad 10y ago
  Is this just an opinion, or do you have any data on this?
  - Razengan 10y ago
    Opinion. I mean we tell kids to be wary of strangers, but we can't assign a policeman to every stranger. Easier to teach people that they can be deceived or that bad things can happen, than to prevent any deception or bad thing from ever occurring.
    - phy6 10y ago
      Thank you for the common sense analogy. I have a 'hunch' that one could whip up a proof based on countably vs uncountably infinite mappings where the number of ways to deceive/offend outweigh the number of authorities which could police them, even assuming such ideals as perfect enforcement and willingness to submit to being policed (i.e. international uniformity of laws). But that's just a first-coffee-of-the-morning hunch.

nsxwolf 10y ago

It sounds like he's just trying to put the genie back in the bottle now. First he creates a system that gives everyone total freedom and now he's like, whoah, that's way too much freedom.

pdimitar 10y ago

As much as I'd love to help projects like IPFS (for example), truth is that most people simply don't care and are entirely clueless on the impact of the continued centralization and surveillance of the Internet on their lives. Sitting with random people on a table, they giggle and smirk saying "I've got nothing to hide, you're too paranoid, bro, cheer up!" and I quickly give up. They have zero idea about how much info is collected about them. If tomorrow somebody pulled out that info in a fabricated trial against them, they'll sing another tune but it will be way too late. Nobody ever listens until it impacts them directly. Sad reality about Homo Sapiens. Another one is the echo chamber effect -- people absolutely LOVE their social echo chambers and they can legitimately punch in you the face if you point them at a source that disagrees with them. As a second and last point to the above, I can't afford donating all my free time to help progress the decentralized internet anymore. I am 37 and I have a very happy personal life but need to work on my health a lot, I am very tired and burned out and I am finding myself unable (even if I want) to work for free without any reward in sight (not even talking about money; I am sure I wouldn't even be thanked). I imagine many others are in a similar position -- in terms of finances, in the health department, or in their general mental stance. I very much like the idea of creating a "home internet box" which is a self-contained fanless machine connected to an UPS -- and it contains router, firewall, own website, own mailserver, own private Dropbox, a universal P2P node (BitTorrent / IPFS) etc., but as others have pointed out, our current stack of network technologies is way too bloated and full of incomplete standards -- which in turn are likely full of exploits and dark corners -- that right now the only seemingly appropriate course of action is to get rid of it all -- except the physical layer protocols -- and start over. Try making an API app that works with anything else than HTTP and HTML/JSON. Tell me how that went for you. Try using ASN.1 as a data format, or a compressed secured IP layer protocol. Yes it's possible but it's much slower than it should be. Seems us humans always want to have one "universal truth". It's extremely sad and I am afraid we'll live to see very oppresive times pretty soon.

Silhouette 10y ago
truth is that most people simply don't care and are entirely clueless on the impact of the continued centralization and surveillance of the Internet on their lives That's a common assumption, but I wonder how true it really is. I've certainly talked with friends in their 20s and maybe early 30s -- people who have grown up with the Internet and ubiquitous mobile devices -- and had them express a sentiment that was more frustration than ambivalence. Sometimes they did find it creepy that they'd be tracked around with ads, or that their phone was doing things based on where they were or what they had planned to do later. However, they've never known technology to work any other way and assume there's nothing they can do about it, and they value the social aspects of sharing stuff online so they keep using these services. I very much like the idea of creating a "home internet box" which is a self-contained fanless machine connected to an UPS -- and it contains router, firewall, own website, own mailserver, own private Dropbox, a universal P2P node (BitTorrent / IPFS) etc., but as others have pointed out, our current stack of network technologies is way too bloated and full of incomplete standards It used to be common that your ISP would provide you with an email address, web hosting, and so on as part of your package. Everyone could set up a basic web site by just FTPing an HTML file up to their ISP's server, and then yourname.yourisp.com would show it to everyone, or you could get your own domain name and use that instead. Likewise for sending and receiving mail. Many countries set up their legal/regulatory frameworks to foster competition between ISPs, and so in practice we had a relatively decentralised Internet. You obviously still had the equivalent of today's lock-in problem if you relied on the email or web address your ISP gave you rather than your own domain, but you didn't have to. It doesn't really take having some magic box in everyone's home to provide this sort of flexibility, though such a box would be no bad thing IMHO. We just have to stop doing so much through a tiny number of centralised service providers and social networks, and develop standards for interoperability and federation. The whole Internet was built on those principles, so I'm pretty sure we could do it for sharing data like mail and photos, and there are many interesting possibilities in terms of searching for data as well. One of the other provisions in the new EU rules that come into effect in 2018 is effectively a right to export data from one controller so it can be processed by another, so people could potentially migrate all the data they've given to sites like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or GitHub to some other competing service (assuming such a service exists). It will be interesting to see how that one plays out and whether it is effective in breaking the lock-in effects that have allowed so few companies to become so dominant in recent years.

return0 10y ago

The web needs more anarchy, not less. Less spoon-feeding people with the truth, let them bear the brunt of their failures. All the problems he mentions are political, stemming from too much power in governments which makes political candidates ruthless.

qudat 10y ago
Agreed. This idea that we have an issue with misinformation is ridiculous. The problem isn't the signal to noise ratio, it's learning how to find the signal in the noise.

chengiz 10y ago

Berners-Lee seems to want to stay relevant, I mean he invented the web but does that give credibility to his announcments and concerns and predictions now? I mean we all know how the semantic web turned out.

liopleurodon 10y ago

Tim Berners-Lee. Thank God, I was worried they had interviewed Al Gore

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

toadkicker 10y ago

I just wanted to add some positive comments here complaining the state of the web as we know it today vs. the people who are working on the solutions to the problems. There are well defined paradigms for building distributed systems. While much of the web was built in the belief these distributed systems would take root, lots of engineering went into client-server configurations. There are a ton of psychological reasons why these decisions were made. They don't have to keep being made though. We can all embrace distributed applications (some call them serverless applications) and free the web once again. Here's a lot of great projects that are trying to do just that: http://github.com/toadkicker/awesome-ethereum http://github.com/toadkicker/awesome-ethereum

kahrkunne 10y ago

Publishing this in The Guardian, what beautiful irony

chippy 10y ago

The current narrative of misinformation as a news item is a new thing, which arrived in our world during the recent US election process. The issue gets my suspicion-radar bleeping. The whole narrative smells funny to me. It's not really a global issue, it's a current affairs issue and one particular to a specific geography. And its not really an internet issue I think but a human one. What I find interesting is that Trump is adopting the narrative that emerged to criticise him, to criticise media bias in general. That's interesting because political bias and misinformation can be separated - actual wrong reporting of facts vs bias of interpretation, but they can be argued to produce the same effect.

xienze 10y ago
My thoughts exactly. The issue of "fake news" being this global menace appeared seemingly out of nowhere despite the fact "fake news" has been a part of internet culture for pretty much its entire existence.
menacingly 10y ago
It seems a little disappointing because I have this fantasy that the goals and problems of the web are above the little hype tempests that happen to have dominated the news cycle for a few months. I'd like the face of the web to have a steadier vision, but I'm not sure how realistic that is

joshuaNathaniel 10y ago

We never had control of our personal data. The WWW wasn't designed with personal data in mind. If it was then https would be the standard. I'm hearing a lot of Chicken Littles. Either adapt to the new age or die. For us this should go without saying.

curiousgeorgio 10y ago

It's refreshing to read Berners-Lee's proposed solutions as they point toward more technical and market-based approaches rather than the typical "we need more legislation to fix these issues" incantation. I often hear many of the same people fighting "against government overreach in surveillance laws" (as Berners-Lee mentions) while at the same time advocating more legislation to govern information use/misuse on the web. I don't think it's realistic to expect government overreach to magically work where we want it and stop right where we don't. Many of these problems aren't on the forefront of most people's minds (yet), but as the issues become more publicized and people begin to understand their importance, then we (as in "the people", not the government) will have a greater voice - and more importantly, power through informed choices - to make a difference.

bnolsen 10y ago

Except for the private data part, I found this not very constructive. Too political. IMHO biggest problem with the web itself is snooping, tracking all driving an insane amount of bloat which clogs the internet. Any extra bandwidth or horsepower is immediately sucked and then some up by advertisers and tracking. There's nothing lean and mean about it anymore. The internet exists as an information resource that people need to be able to sift through themselves, not something that governments or other self selected groups decide to arbitrarily censor for whatever selfish reasons they have.

Tylerosaurus 10y ago

I thought Al Gore invented the internet

sauronlord 10y ago

He is advocating for censorship. Misinformation spreads everywhere not just the web. Who decides what is "misinformation"? All speech and information is political, because man is a political creature. Who decides what is "political"? His first point about losing control of our personal data is right on though. Even so called "heroes of the web/freedom" are on the "fake news bandwagon". What the hell have we come to when this is considered enlightening discourse. We're all in deep shit and this is a taste of things to come this century.

tim333 10y ago
He doesn't actually say censorship. He says "by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem." Just putting fake stories at 50th place in the search results say rather than #1 is not censorship.
- sauronlord 10y ago
  Who decides what is fake?

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