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33 years ago today I submitted a proposal for a system called the World Wide Web
- app4soft 5y agoTim Berners-Lee tweeted today: > 33 years ago today, I submitted a proposal for a system called the World Wide Web.[0] > I'd normally publish thoughts on the state of the web. But these are not normal times. Instead, Rosemary Leith & I ask you to join us to #StandWithUkraine however you can. > https://webfoundation.org/2022/03/standing-with-ukraine-a-message-from-our-co-founders/ https://webfoundation.org/2022/03/standing-with-ukraine-a-me... This tweet also quotes Rosemary Leith's yesterday's tweet: > To mark the web's birthday this year, Tim Berners-Lee and I have donated to causes supporting women, children & journalists in Ukraine.[1] > Join us, if you can, to contribute and #StandWithUkraine. > https://webfoundation.org/2022/03/standing-with-ukraine-a-message-from-our-co-founders/ https://webfoundation.org/2022/03/standing-with-ukraine-a-me... [0] https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/1502594846044954630 https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/150259484604495463... [1] https://twitter.com/rosemaryleith/status/1502224095001382913 https://twitter.com/rosemaryleith/status/1502224095001382913
- skywal_l 5y agohttps://nitter.net/timberners_lee/status/1502594846044954630 https://nitter.net/timberners_lee/status/1502594846044954630
- neilv 5y agoSince they link to a Ukrainian Red Cross site... does anyone whether that's the best organization to donate to for humanitarian aid to people in Ukraine? And if it is, site looks like they use Stripe, but is it possible to donate directly from stripe.com, not using an odd Web site?
- airstrike 5y agoThe Red Cross is generally regarded as the best humanitarian aid organization out there, maybe tied with a couple others like Doctors Without Borders I was told a long time ago that one difference between the two is that the Red Cross will only go into territories where it is legally allowed to do so, whereas Doctors Without Borders will get into conflict zones even when not welcome and risk their lives in the process. My view is we're fortunate to have both.
- zozbot234 5y agoNote though that humanitarian aid (i.e. aid that's strictly focused on relief towards disaster zones) is generally harder and plausibly gets a lot less bang for the buck than efficiently targeted health- and development-aid. The latter also tends to get a lot less attention, which means even small-scale donors have opportunities to make a huge long-term difference if they direct their funds wisely. The charity evaluators I'm aware of have pointed out that trying to evaluate the effectiveness of causes like disaster relief is extremely hard, despite how popular that cause is in general.
- 0xy 5y agoNo, they aren't. They raised $500m for Haiti and either embezzled it or incompetently wasted it. [1] Their website contains claims that can only be described as fraud (claiming to help more people in an area than actually reside there, among other things). There administration fees were well over 1/3rd in Haiti. It's theft, basically. [1] https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...
- magicalist 5y agoThat's the American Red Cross
- 0xy 5y agoThey both work under the banner of the ICRC, which was involved in both the Haiti disaster (I'm talking about the Red Cross' incompetence, not the earthquake) as well as Ukraine operations. It's hard to see how a corrupt incompetent organization would be different because an affiliated entity is operating in another country (Ukraine also has its own corruption problems). After this much graft and incompetence, why trust them with more millions?
- app4soft 5y ago> Since they link to a Ukrainian Red Cross site... does anyone whether that's the best organization to donate to for humanitarian aid to people in Ukraine? Well, Ukrainian Red Cross & international Red Cross sometime acted controversial in Ukraine, but its only You who may decide how to help Ukrainians. JFTR, I'm Ukrainiain living in Ukraine. Here is my statement for HN:[0] Verified Ways to Help Ukraine: https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/02/27/verified-ways-to-help-the-ukrainian-army/ https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/02/27/verified-ways-to-help... My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/app4soft https://www.patreon.com/app4soft [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395897
- monkeybutton 5y agoI wonder what its like to see the proliferation of Russian propaganda via a medium you created, it must be very disheartening. At least he gets to see it used for good like this too.
- verisimi 5y agowell, don't worry too much. He's using the day to attempt to redress the balance for Ukraine and LGBTQI+ people in Ukraine!
- throwfaraway9 5y agolol
- t_mann 5y agoPutin seems to be rather shutting down web services in Russia. It's probably easier to control a narrative through TV (a medium that already existed 33 years ago) than through messy social media. So just in terms of the current crisis, I'd say this invention is arguably doing more good than bad on average (allowing refugees to connect to relatives, coordinating help, enabling OSINT, various projects to inform Russian citizens, like the website with advice for how to talk to Russian relatives who are in denial,...).
- Jerrrry 5y agoUkraine propaganda is not "good," Russian propaganda is not "bad" Not a single condemnation of the Nazi affiliation yet, from anyone in the Western media. They don't want to state plainly, that in this mega-reductionist viewpoint we all are conformed into, it is the Nazi's vs Russia. I don't support Nazis. Guess I'm pro-Putin.
- OnlyMortal 5y agoThough HTML was a DTD of SGML served up via a TCP socket. The only revolution was giving the SGML client app away.
- chrisseaton 5y agoSimple as that, huh? Everything sounds simple if you describe it in a facetiously simple way. Michelangelo's David is just some bit of rock that someone's chipped away at.
- justinator 5y agoEven simpler is the fact that all Michelangelo did was take away the bits of marble that weren't David.
- chasing 5y agoSometimes that's all it takes, man. Although I suspect there was a little more to it. Regardless, we're not celebrating the effort — many things take harder work to accomplish — we're celebrating the effect, which has been world-changing.
- tonymet 5y agodon’t forget the headers
- tpmx 5y ago> The only revolution was giving the SGML client app away. No, the revolution was this combination of three relatively simple protocols (HTTP, URL, HTML) which together were incredibly powerful. The SGML crowd never came up with anything like that. They just kept on adding more complexities... Reducing this to "giving away the client app" misses the point of the above so badly.
- zozbot234 5y ago> which together were incredibly powerful Incredibly powerful, but not nearly enough for many applications. We have not comprehensively adopted Linked Data, REST and HATEOAS principles which would extend these protocols to be useful with more than simple hypertext. Many of the public JSON-serving endpoints that currently enable much of the "modern" Web could easily be extended to conformant JSON-LD, which would open up a bunch of interesting use cases.
- tonymet 5y ago[flagged]
- yokoprime 5y agoOn the one hand Ukrainians with their exitential struggle against a foe which unprovoked has invaded their country and are killing civilians without scrutiny, on the other hand... consent dialogs. I can see the dilemma of choosing one or the other.
- tonymet 5y agowhy him though? consent dialogs are more relevant
- dmitriid 5y ago> i wish he would #standagainstgdprconsentdialogs It's amazing to behold how corporate leeches have brainwashed so many developers into thinking that its GDPR that is bad, and not the greedy bastards who want to siphon, buy and sell all personal data on anyone without any reprecussions.
- scarface74 5y agoIt’s more amazing that even though history has shown otherwise, every law that the government has ever passed has unintended consequences because 70 year old politicians don’t understand technology. They passed a 14 chapter 99 section law and all I got for it was fucking cookie banners all over the internet.
- dmitriid 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30659029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30659029
- scarface74 5y agoIf the government passes a law that makes it worse for the people, it’s a bad law. See also the “War on Drugs”, “War on Crime”, etc. Either it’s a bad law or a badly enforced law. Either way it shows the government’s general ineptness.
- bombcar 5y agoThe story so far: 33 years ago the World Wide Web was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
- djbusby 5y agoIt's an OK joke. But, wow, the Web is pretty awesome.
- morpheos137 5y agoMainly because it was commercialized. Of course that was always the plan. To get people really mad and harvest their emotions.
- marricks 5y agoWait till you hear about how the US government is already planning for the commercialization of space.
- Zenst 5y agoWhy, as it stands with the cost to get up there it is already Pay Per Veiw option with Amazon.
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoOh no, not space! We were supposed to be stuck on this planet and die out through self-inflicted global warming.
- morpheos137 5y agoWe are stuck on this planet. There is no other realistic place mankind can live. Near extinction from nuclear war is far more likely than global warming.
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
- onetokeoverthe 5y ago
- morpheos137 5y ago
- michaelmrose 5y agoThe page you mentioned is perfectly readable here in the US unlike much of the Propaganda on YouTube. Propaganda is effective else it wouldn't be of any use. People judge veracity in large part via ubiquity and truthiness not intelligent analysis therefore it is useful to block it as any other munitions heading your way. People can still get the other side of the argument by going directly to the source without organically encountering lies on YouTube and being influenced. Not blocking the Kremlin but blocking YouTube channels seems like a very balanced correct response. P.S. nobody cares about Hunter Biden
- didericis 5y agoYou're playing a very dangerous game, even if wartime changes the calculus. Though what you're saying about judgement is true, all of the worst cases of authoritarian repression were similarly justified. "We can't allow capitalist propaganda, we're facing an existential threat/they'll sabotage us", "we can't allow jewish propaganda, we're facing an existential threat/they'll destroy the race", "we can't allow communist propaganda, we're facing an existential threat/they'll destroy our freedom", etc. Viewing information as munition rather than a raw resource meant to be democratically parsed is something all repressive systems share in common. What distinguishes our society is our ability to self correct and our decentralized method of truth discovery. That can and does get used against us, as will our hypocrisy if we alter our approach. The solution to abuse of that decentralization is not to bureaucratize truth and create a mechanism for centralized information control, however well intended or carefully crafted to attempt balance. The system level solution is to make sure that those speaking the truth within our systems are protected and discovered. The societal level solution is to make sure that those people have enough credibility and leadership capital to be listened to and take that responsibility seriously. Our major news organizations have been burning their credibility and leadership capital for at least a decade. The willingness of people to defer to random online youtube personalities over more established sources is a failure of those established sources. That loss of credibility cannot be solved by blocking worse sources. Those more established sources need to be more honest, engage in more long form discussion and less narrative crafting, and most importantly, speak with more humility and without patronizing the masses that are falling for the propaganda. If the only people genuinely acknowledging certain grievances and speaking to an audience like equals are bad actors or influenced by bad actors, those falling for propaganda have no reason to switch sources. That's not to say there aren't other more immediately actionable solutions to online chaos and disinformation. From the technical side, there should be less algorithmic emotional hijacking/feed manipulation. If this industry hadn't pursued click maximization so aggressively and took viewpoint diversity more seriously as an essential design goal these platforms would be much more difficult to take advantage of by propagandists. I understand why things evolved as they did and understand a lot of people have been and are trying very hard to promote societal health, but there's a certain culture of arrogance and desire to tweak human behavior that's won out over a culture of viewpoint diversity that I think would have much more effectively inoculated people against the kind of destructive propaganda state actors we're seeing now.
- parksy 5y agoHappy birthday, the web. We're still ironing out a few things and I hope we figure it all out some day.
- m00dy 5y agoLightning only hits once.
- robbedpeter 5y agoRoy Sullivan would like a word with the manager... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan
- gjvc 5y agohttps://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=1440 https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=1440
- dirtyid 5y agoWonder what shortlist of proposed names was.
- rambojazz 5y agoI'm so tired of TBL self-celebration. Every time I read about him, he's there reminding us that he was the one who created the web, like we owe him something. It's like he wants to take credit for everything the web is, or is built upon.
- ck2 5y agoI remember setting up usenet<->fidonet gateways pre-www Absolutely wild what's changed in my lifetime.