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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

#81

Post by Vinnl »

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 am inclined to be skeptical of semweb technologies as well, and certainly I think there are many in the Solid community that look at it as a sort-of second chance for it.

However, I do think many of the reasons I think it failed the first time around might not apply in the case of Solid, where it's used for modeling just personal data stored in a place under the user's control - which comes with its own unique challenges for which it might actually be a good match. I'm on a phone with bad WiFi now, but happy to dive into that more later if anyone's interested.

(Disclosure: I also work for Inrupt, but views are my own.)

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

#82

Post by arkades »

kmlx wrote: post #51
atoav wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

≥ 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?

> extremely beneficial to both consumers

What "extreme benefits" do I derive from being filmed and analyzed by stores I happen to walk past?

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

#83

Post by Vinnl »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #58

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.

Such a cloud provider could be the one that hosts your Pods...

(Disclosure: I also work for Inrupt, but views are my own.)

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

#84

Post by thinkloop »

bluesign wrote: post #70
thinkloop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should I ask solid to update protocol for this I imagined it more like a schemaless database. Apps could save and use whatever data in your pod without any protocol changes. > i can move my email data to another provider, but about my filters? On other tiny stuff that gmail builds on email The other provider would provide those integrations, or a superior competitor will. > Now all other chat apps supporting solid,…

"I imagined it more like a schemaless database." schemaless database would destroy the system immediately. All providers putting their own meta-extensions will make my pod trash "The other provider would provide those integrations" Yeah but imagine I moved from gmail to let's day new competitor smail, let's say they implemented filters too. Now they have 2 options, import my gmail filters, make new data structure as…

> All providers putting their own meta-extensions will make my pod trash

This is the way the world is now except that you don't even have the data. Otherwise you bring up some good points. I imagine the answer is that sites will be incentived to cooperate with each other creating informal mini standards along the way. Sites that disagree with the standards can build their own data structures but won't be able to leverage existing networks, so it better be worth it. Eventually you could have different flocks of semi-interrelated apps that each act on various parts of the shared data structure.

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

#86

Post by leowoo91 »

scribu wrote: post #85

> If you want your insurance company to have access to your fitness data, you grant it through your pod. Why would the insurance company trust that data? Since you're in control of the pod, you could alter it, no?

They would probably have to implement their own verification methods for this. If not, how about data owner asking a fitness center to sign the data?

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

#87

Post by luckylion »

theK wrote: post #78
andretti1977 wrote: post #76

Sorry but what happens when i grant access to a company? It will collect the data i granted access to and then resell them to other companies and buy data from other firms too so my data will be spread around exactly as now so even if i like the idea, what's the advantage? Am i missing something?

Well for one your data lives in a place where you can govern it. Nowadays your data lives in all places you use (Facebook, Gmail, Twitter). Ever tried taking stock of your data lately? It can take weeks to do it for all services and importing the exports into a self hosted alternative is nigh impossible. Still one risk I am seeing is that services might still want to intern you once you have given than access to your…

> Well for one your data lives in a place where you can govern it.

Only until you've shared it though, right? Whoever you allow to access it can copy it (and some will be required to do so by law), and you no longer have any control over what they do with it.

I may misunderstand it, but isn't it basically OAuth/"Sign on with X and control what they see" for all your data, not for authentication? It's convenient, but I don't know that it gives you (long term) control. I'd still like that for synchronization, but I don't see the big value.

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

#88

Post by Intermernet »

rohan1024 wrote: post #73
virtualritz wrote: post #60

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 f…

We humans have a tendency where: we invent something, exploit it only to realise at later point the mess that has happened and then correct our path. I see lot of negative comments on this thread but solid/polypoly is the beginning of that path correction for web. They might not succeed but something with the same underlying idea is going to.

Yep, the web is awesomely resilient in the long term to subversion. FB / Google etc. could completely privatize the entire internet and I guarantee people would work out something like PingTunnel[1] to get around it.

Sure, might need to operate at 1980's modem speeds for a while, but there will still be a link.

I have faith that the net will self-correct, but it might take longer than any of our lifetimes to do so. Such is the evolution of technology.

[1:] https://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/golem/tmp/ptunnel-0.61...

[EDIT]: Add link

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

#89

Post by tannhaeuser »

mehh wrote: post #27
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!

From what I understand, SemWeb is/was pretty much TBL's pet project at W3C, and the one thing he was interested tinkering with. SemWeb such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL, etc. isn't terrible to work with, and has found it's niches; for example I'm working right now on a project making heavy use of graph DBs and SPARQL for biochem, and the standardization has profoundly helped F/OSS and commercial software funding in that area, and has helped funding research (eg. identifying tractable fragments of first order logic with OWL/2). But OTOH the SemWeb stack feels very much a design-by-comittee, with lots of "reuse" of other unrelated W3C tech such as XML, and I don't think it will ever become mainstream apart from things such as Wikimedia's public data sets published as RDF where it seems a good fit.

The more problematic side with TBL's SemWeb love affair is that it has resulted in web core standardization to become neglected at W3C. For example, W3C HTML was last published in 2017 as a recommendation (with plans to merely "bless" WHATWG snapshots going forward, which however hasn't happened so far). Likewise, the SVG2 effort (with little but still welcome additions/cleanup compared to SVG1.1) has stalled, etc.

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

#90

Post by mkl »

theK wrote: post #78
andretti1977 wrote: post #76

Sorry but what happens when i grant access to a company? It will collect the data i granted access to and then resell them to other companies and buy data from other firms too so my data will be spread around exactly as now so even if i like the idea, what's the advantage? Am i missing something?

Well for one your data lives in a place where you can govern it. Nowadays your data lives in all places you use (Facebook, Gmail, Twitter). Ever tried taking stock of your data lately? It can take weeks to do it for all services and importing the exports into a self hosted alternative is nigh impossible. Still one risk I am seeing is that services might still want to intern you once you have given than access to your…

As soon as you grant access to some data in your pod to someone, they can make a copy and then it's out of your control. I don't see how you can govern it unless you just never grant access.
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