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Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

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Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#21

Post by koevet »

cinquemb wrote: post #17
koevet wrote: post #6

As much as I like the idea (and the people behind it), I have an hard time seeing how this can succeed. The idea of pod reminds me of the self-hosting movement: people -including myself - host a bunch of services to avoid sharing fundamental data, like email, GPS-history or contacts. Still, "self-hosters" interact with all the big personal data hoarder out there (FB, Google, the many ad and tracking companies) which…

I wouldn't necessarily equate "distributed data ownership" with privatization of data, but more to the ability for more people to leverage said data more in their favor as apposed to what the digital overlords like FB et al. just allow people to do on their platforms (and their platforms only). I think as long a some internet users at the margins get exposed to the downsides of the asymmetrical relationship they have…

One way Inrupt approach could work is through Trans-national regulations (e.g. EU).

I still believe that a major change in the way data collection tactics are carried out should come from "below" (the people) rather than some incompetent digitally-challenged politician.

Practically, if all the technical challenges of Inrupt are sorted out - and I see many - this could become a standard enforced by "enlightened" governments.

This would probably take a lot of lobbying and can only work if

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#22

Post by TeeWEE »

Solid's goal is nice but its solution ia based on RDF and semantic web. Those technologies failed to take off for a web 3.0. I dont see this going to take off either. Turtle is just another syntax for RDF because XML is too verbose....

Anyway i do see a lot of value in IPFS, its solving a different problem, but it's related. It could allow for storing private data encrypted in a non centralized way, having the pinned copy owned by you.

I dont think the data format is going to be Solid based.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#23

Post by tasogare »

hobofan wrote: post #15

As much as I like the ideas behind SOLID, I just don't seeing it panning out. The semantic data model is exactly the same as the one 10 years ago when it didn't catch on. One of my biggest pet peeves there is that the default mode of operation is using a de-facto centralized ontology that is mutable and non-versioned. How is someone supposed to build up a semantic database when the semantics can be changed any time f…

It’s 20 years, not a decade. It’s like Sir TBL felt bad about not being able to capitalize more on its first invention (the Web), then spend the remaining of its life trying to reinvent it with a technology stack that got epsilon adoption.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#24

Post by zuckluni »

koevet wrote: post #6

As much as I like the idea (and the people behind it), I have an hard time seeing how this can succeed. The idea of pod reminds me of the self-hosting movement: people -including myself - host a bunch of services to avoid sharing fundamental data, like email, GPS-history or contacts. Still, "self-hosters" interact with all the big personal data hoarder out there (FB, Google, the many ad and tracking companies) which…

I don't think it's an existential threat to FAANG. Because they could request access to your data to perform their AI/analytics on it to then be able to deliver you value-added personalized services.

Most likely these sort of brokered accesses will be the purview of third-party data brokers who will handle your pods for you.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#25

Post by 4gotunameagain »

While I haven't studied their idea enough to be able to argue about it's effectiveness and/or flaws, I am glad that they are doing it, being who they are.

It really looks like we need a central paradigm shift. A free world designed for educated academics cannot survive the greed and stupidity of the whole world it seems.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#26

Post by cinquemb »

koevet wrote: post #21
cinquemb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't necessarily equate "distributed data ownership" with privatization of data, but more to the ability for more people to leverage said data more in their favor as apposed to what the digital overlords like FB et al. just allow people to do on their platforms (and their platforms only). I think as long a some internet users at the margins get exposed to the downsides of the asymmetrical relationship they have…

One way Inrupt approach could work is through Trans-national regulations (e.g. EU). I still believe that a major change in the way data collection tactics are carried out should come from "below" (the people) rather than some incompetent digitally-challenged politician. Practically, if all the technical challenges of Inrupt are sorted out - and I see many - this could become a standard enforced by "enlightened" gover…

>I still believe that a major change in the way data collection tactics are carried out should come from "below" (the people) rather than some incompetent digitally-challenged politician.

This is the only way as far as i'm concerned, if something is to be long lasting. People have to be living it in practice because of the inherit cost/benefits of system over another, no matter what any particular government makes a diktat for. Right now, most people are cost/benefits skewed towards the fb's (but that is slowly changing to me beacause the cost of computing continues to decline, while the knowledge of such increases at the same time as people at the margins experience higher perceived costs with the fb's).

>This would probably take a lot of lobbying and can only work if

Thats still playing the game of the giants… why play that game if trying to something new? Probably there are cheaper ways to subvert it, while making the giants pay increasing lobbying costs for ends that chip away at their power.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#27

Post by mehh »

TeeWEE wrote: post #22

Solid's goal is nice but its solution ia based on RDF and semantic web. Those technologies failed to take off for a web 3.0. I dont see this going to take off either. Turtle is just another syntax for RDF because XML is too verbose.... Anyway i do see a lot of value in IPFS, its solving a different problem, but it's related. It could allow for storing private data encrypted in a non centralized way, having the pinned…

I'm not sure that because Semantic Web didn't work that implies the technologies don't work.

The Semantic Web isn't the technologies it was an initiative.

Having said that the technologies you mentioned do have developer experience problems. Some think devs just don't understand them, which is partially true, but having a fugly toolchain doesn't help!

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#28

Post by tannhaeuser »

sn41 wrote: post #3

Somehow, Semantic Web and associated ideas does not seem to have panned out in practice. I wonder whether HTML is the ASCII of the web world - clearly just intended as a first step and supposed to be obsolete over time, but proving to be a survivor, and a hurdle against future improvements due to wide adoption.

I think HTML wasn't supposed to become anything - by the time TBL got HTML 0.9 or so out of the door, it was based on SGML which, in turn, was the meta-language invented to capture and evolve all kind of text notations (also covering, for example, Wiki syntaxes such as markdown and MediaWiki used for writing large portions of text we're reading on the web today, even though SGML was intended to generalize ad-hoc syntaxes of older text processing systems). What killed HTML as a representation format covering contemporary digital text was the introduction of CSS (as an arguably unnecessary additional syntax on top of mighty SGML) and JavaScript, and the relative stagnation of HTML in the presence of these other two languages that, once present in the stack, could be used for all the presentational tricks people were asking for. Maybe the problem was also that HTML parsing was hard-coded into browsers and couldn't be changed easily enough in the presence of the first wave of web content at scale around 1993-5. Also, there just wasn't a blueprint how to evolve a language for describing static text into one for "modern UI experiences", so a Turing-complete language had to be used for tinkering until such a time where the idioms for digital text presentation were better understood. IMHO, if anything, the web has stopped at that point, and JavaScript and CSS are hurdles for future improvements rather than the declarative HTML core.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#29

Post by threatofrain »

shubham001 wrote: post #19

There is a similar project by Rob Pike called Upspin. It is pretty interesting. That also looked very promising. https://upspin.io/

Is it still a living living (2x for emphasis) project? It was announced years ago and since then there hasn't been much word.

Re: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me

#30

Post by koevet »

zuckluni wrote: post #24
koevet wrote: post #6

As much as I like the idea (and the people behind it), I have an hard time seeing how this can succeed. The idea of pod reminds me of the self-hosting movement: people -including myself - host a bunch of services to avoid sharing fundamental data, like email, GPS-history or contacts. Still, "self-hosters" interact with all the big personal data hoarder out there (FB, Google, the many ad and tracking companies) which…

I don't think it's an existential threat to FAANG. Because they could request access to your data to perform their AI/analytics on it to then be able to deliver you value-added personalized services. Most likely these sort of brokered accesses will be the purview of third-party data brokers who will handle your pods for you.

Why would people accept their data to be harvested? I guess money could be an incentive, which is quite interesting because it would fundamentally revert the power dynamics between the big data abuser and the people.

Lots of food for thought.

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