Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by kmlx » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:33 AM UTC

atoav wrote: post #32

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…

≥ 2) the majority of internet users are oblivious to the data collection tactics employed by half the internet and I can't picture folks raising pitchforks for "pods" to become a standard. Usually purely technical solutions to societal problems won't bring you far. It is still not bad to have them, because they essentially show what would be possible, if we just wanted. Helps in discussion as well if of all people Ti…

> What ad networks do is the digital equivalent of filming and spying on people who walk by your storefront. What they do, how they do it and the effects it has on society are wrong.

wait a minute. i know there are currently startups that offer this exact type of analytics. and from what i know these types of analytics are extremely beneficial to both consumers and store owners. what exactly is the problem here?

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

#52

Post by thinkloop » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:35 AM UTC

I wonder how much data sharing we would actually do if this did exist. For example, your Facebook friends list is not your Twitter follows, nor your YouTube subscribees, nor your phone contact list, etc. There's some overlap but essentially they're different lists. Isn't a lot of stuff like that?

It still would be nice to have control and visibility of all that data automatically.

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

#53

Post by koevet » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:38 AM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #40

koevet wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Why would people accept their data to be harvested? Same as always, to get services free of charge. If I want my photos to be searchable, I'm going to have to let someone run their AI on them. As an iPhone user, I have my photos in iCloud. I'm paying for it through high device prices and storage fees. But as Apple's business model is to sell expensive devices, they won't let me securely share my photos with my wife…

But what if pods are inherently "closed" as you imagine, but a company would actually have to pay a fee to access some of the data and run whatever algo they want.

Would this create a society where low income persons would be perennially targeted by intrusive ads?

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

#54

Post by black_puppydog » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:39 AM UTC

fuubi wrote: post #45

I am very excited about Solid. That motivated me to write my thesis about a decentralised wiki, where Solid is its foundation. For further information, you can have a look at my work journal ( https://ma.parrillo.eu ).

I'm very excited about your thesis! It's great you found a topic that you love. Keep at it!

Any chance we can get rss for that blog of yours? :)

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

#55

Post by thinkloop » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:46 AM UTC

ianopolous wrote: post #35

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…

If you like the idea of an encrypted personal data store on ipfs, then check out Peergos. That's exactly what we're doing. https://book.peergos.org https://github.com/peergos/peergos

I really like this. Is there any way to monetize it eventually?

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

#56

Post by tchaffee » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

discreteevent wrote: post #44

tchaffee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they already? The people in society pay for what matters to them. I think the real truth trying to get out here is that we wish what matters to society were different.

Buyer beware. I don't want that. I like the fact that there are building regulations where some official decided what was good for me because I don't have the time or knowledge to work it out.

You pay for those building regulations in the form of the tax revenue required to pay that official, along with the system that enforces it. I agree with you that it's money well spent.

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

#57

Post by bluesign » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:48 AM UTC

fuubi wrote: post #45

I am very excited about Solid. That motivated me to write my thesis about a decentralised wiki, where Solid is its foundation. For further information, you can have a look at my work journal ( https://ma.parrillo.eu ).

Great to see someone with experience with Solid. I have few questions, maybe you can answer.

I saw on your blog about wiki data model example. Let's say you built a Solid app around that one. Put on a website like superwiki.com, allowing users to create their wiki pages.

Now then later, wikipedia came to scene, published another data model, and made another Solid app, put on wikipedia.org.

- How will I move let's say my data from superwiki to wikipedia? - Does wikipedia then have to somehow implement some import functionality? - Or Solid has to have a protocol (standard) for wiki entries?

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

#58

Post by ComodoHacker » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

Actually people don't want to self-host anything. They want their data to live "somewhere in the cloud", accessible on demand. At most they wish this cloud to be "trusted" or "secure" or "privacy-respecting".

Until we find a viable business model for trusted and privacy-respecting cloud, we can't move on.

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

#59

Post by black_puppydog » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:50 AM UTC

bluesign wrote: post #37

This kills the innovation or puts too much power to the first innovator. - if solid will dictate a protocol for data, it should cover the common denominator: so if you have your email on gmail now, lets say solid is covering basic email structure, i can move my email data to another provider, but about my filters? On other tiny stuff that gmail builds on email - if i invent something new in a chat app, lets say stick…

Not saying this is not hard, but I assumed (without having read into it) that the protocol solid itself is much more low-level than that.

What you're describing sounds more like owncloud's level of operation: we host email / we host pictures

I'd expect Solid (or any competing protocol) to provide very low-level access to "data" in some form. A third party (let's call them smail) would then provide the service "send and receive email" (to stay with your example, although I'm unsure email is a good fit). Crucially, the value that service adds would not be hosting and backing-up of your email, but rather just the interface and functionality. Ideally, all the data would still be hosted on your pod. When smail does indexing of your email, they load them from your pod (after you granted them access to that data) and do their thing. The difference to now being that at any time, you could choose a different provider that provides a different interface to the same underlying data.

As I said, I didn't read into it, but that's what I would expect.

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

#60

Post by virtualritz » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 10:52 AM UTC

I recently got introduced to a company called Polypoly. They are working on exactly the same, in the EU.

They have an interesting setup as a collective. Users of the software automatically become members of the collective. The website talks of automatic partake in economic success.

Curiously they also use the idea of self-hosted pods to hold the users private data and they even use the term 'pod' for this.

When the founder, Thorsten Dittmer, gave me his elevator pitch he almost use the same line of reasoning as Schneier.

Basically: 25 years ago, we technologists (while reading Gibson, mind you) thought that the web will bring freedom, understanding and equality to the world. We were wrong. Now we have to fix our mistake because we're the only ones who have a chance at doing this.

It is probably not exaggerated to call these sorts of companies the biggest threats to the business models of the Googles and FBs of today.

[1] https://www.polypoly.eu/en/home-en