I like this and I'm in favor of decentralization. However, it's hard to imagine decentralized beating centralized when centralization has such a huge economic incentive. We need to create an environment where people and developers are incentivized to use/build decentralized systems. Maybe through law? Like a carbon tax would incentivize people to buy EVs. Data tax.
Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
121–130 of 263 posts
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#122How does this solve problems of data leaks? Let's say some social network uses this Solid framework and you login with your Solid POD. Can't the social network then just save your data into a database? Now when the social network gets hacked millions of personal data is still released into the wild?
What I'd like to see, is every device run a small process which can read the user's data. Html then has a syntax that can be interpreted like
{{ solid://mydata/name }}
{{ solid://mydata/profile.jpg }}
{{ solid://mydata/age }}
etc.
That data is on the user's device encrypted. Apps can never read your data, they can only tell your device to display that data.
That way developers cannot read your data, store them in their own databases, and then accidentally get their own database hacked and we are back to square one.
I'd like the data on your device to be encrypted and have some type of homomorphic encryption such that if an app were to show average age of users, then an app would be able to run some sort of `select average(age) from users` but since the encryption is homomorphic, the app never learns information about any individual user. This would apply for machine learning operations too, so that we could get netflix style recommendations of movies, without a company ever learning what movies we liked, our age, etc.
However, I don't know the first thing about homomorphic encryption so I guess I just have to wait until some great soul builds something like this for us.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#123Interesting idea, but I'm interested in the security implications. Now I have a Pod that has all my data in it, and I can host this pod anywhere I want. Great, but its now the single target for getting all data on me. I get that its great when its working and secure, and I can control it. But exploits happen, and now all my data is in one place.
I believe (from scanning the website quickly) that you can host your own pod, but you can also put your data with third party. Currently, it offers 2 free options from a commercial provider and a community provider. So in terms of security, you can choose to trust a 3rd party with hosting your data, keeping the apps etc up to day or you can host it yourself. I'm not sure what's better!
Any idea if data is encrypted by default? I didn't see any mention of encryption... or, TBH, much of anything other than rather ludicrous marketing language, which is very disappointing from TBL
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#124[deleted]
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#125What’s not clear to me is how this will work from a data storage and access standpoint. In order to have a permissions system, you have to have permissions. For example: read:photos, write:photos, read:running_data, etc In order to do that, there are a few hurdles: - You have to define ACLs for every type of data stored in everyone’s POD. - More complex is to define what parts of what data certain ACLs give access to…
Same questions I have from reading "Build a Solid app in your lunch break", the app leverages the friends stored data but makes no mention of how the permissions system might work.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#126After reading what little documentation is available and installing a single-user solid server myself, I wonder if this is how people felt when the World Wide Web was first invented. I find myself asking: Okay, now what? Except I think even the World Wide Web, when it was first invented, at least had a demo that worked. Solid doesn't even seem to work. Following instructions for "learn[ing] how to install and run you…
I hope there’s a lot more than that. I mean, they claim that they’ve been working on it for 15 years. “Solid has taken 15 years of development work to finally deliver this.” I probably missed something, but I didn’t see mention of Solid being taken through a standards body, either (even his own one). Web protocols were standardized early and were royalty free, with working prototypes. That helped lead to quick adopti…
To me it looks like as another incarnation of semantic web stuff.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#127Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The closest thing dialup ever got to instantaneous was text-based terminal interfaces. And I remember agonizingly slow load times in Lynx just as often as agonizingly slow load times in Mosaic, NN and IE. Our expectations change, however, and as tech speeds up, we ask “why aren’t people optimizing for what we care about, performance?” But there’s a multitude of answers, many of which are sadly non-technical. Speed an…
Yeah, didn't mean old modems, more like applications. My 300 baud modem was pretty slow. But applications were always very fast compared to most new stuff.
Yes, exactly. So while today on a slow connection you can find yourself waiting a long time for Gmail to load up and let you read your email, in the days of 300 baud your email would be downloaded in batch and your mail reader would come up instantly, letting you peruse and read your email at leisure.
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#129Who's "Inrupt"? The main Solid site is https://solid.mit.edu/" . Inrupt is not in Crunchbase. They don't have a business address on their site. They try to get people to sign up without giving terms and conditions first. And they want you to give them access to all your personal information. Right.
A company of some respected people it seems: https://www.inrupt.com/meet-the-inrupters/
Re: Solid – Reshape the web as we know it
#130The goals are laudable, and sometimes a backwards-looking implementation can get traction faster than a forward-looking one. But the reliance on Pods and URL location-based identifiers roots it firmly in the past. I think the future is the robust content addressable distributed web. Which could give developers the same flexibility, and users the same friendly experience, but with everything virtualized in a peer to p…
Would the content-addressable distributed web really "give ... users the same friendly experience"? I'm a bit outside my wheelhouse, and I don't fully understand what Solid means when they say "You own your data", but with content-addressable strategies, often users _don't_ really have ownership once something is published in the sense that you can't delete or change something if anyone else is serving a copy.
Very much depends on the concept of ownership, doesn't it? ;)
I mean, you own it, but so does everyone else. I think the traditional(?) concept of ownership you are referring to, that allows people to "delete" information is very unnatural and feels akin to trying to reverse entropy. You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world.