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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

#141

Post by kapnobatairza »

morelisp wrote: post #47
atoav wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not legal in Germany and Austria at least. The UK is one of the most surveilled places in Europe.

Some of the new JCDecaux digital signage I've seen in Berlin definitely seems to have a camera lens on its top. There's no posted notice concerning video recording, but I wonder if it's just a lens with no camera, a camera but not attached to the rest of the device, or only disabled in software.

I've worked on JCDecaux smart signage. The camera is used for analytics purposes using computer vision (people counting, attentiveness, demographic data, dwell times, etc.). Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge.

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

#142

Post by FreeHugs » 

    Everyone's pod would be on a computer they own
Why? Hardware is hard. Why not just encrypt it and let it live in the cloud?

    If you want your insurance company
    to have access to your fitness data,
    you grant it through your pod.
Or just give them a key that can decrypt your fitness data?

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

#143

Post by pjmorris »

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.

Dave Winer is fond of quoting John Gilmore, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." It feels to me like the current breach of privacy in exchange for 'free' services might now begin to be interpreted as damage.

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

#144

Post by mehh »

patrec wrote: post #74
mehh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> It is not hard to imagine your Web-enabled microwave oven consulting the frozen-food manufacturer's Web site for optimal cooking parameters. This is Berners-Lee being visionary about the potential of a world-wide network of computers. The problem is not just the terrible technical implementation, it's also that the vision behind all this semantic web stuff was one of soulless dorks who saw the world's population sp…

>It is not hard to imagine your Web-enabled microwave oven consulting the frozen-food manufacturer's Web site for optimal cooking parameters. >This is Berners-Lee being visionary about the potential of a world-wide network of computers.

That sounds very much like the sort of stuff that gets spouted by the IoT crowd too though isn't it?

>The problem is not just the terrible technical implementation, it's also that the vision behind all this semantic web stuff was one of soulless dorks who saw the world's population spend their days semantically marking up All The Things to get the most of their web-enabled microwaves.

Well, aren't there a huge mass of developers spending their lives writing custom code for every damn API, and then integrating with more custom code. And each time eventing new poor ways of describing the things and relationships?

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

#145

Post by hugodutka »

FreeHugs wrote: post #142

Everyone's pod would be on a computer they own Why? Hardware is hard. Why not just encrypt it and let it live in the cloud? If you want your insurance company to have access to your fitness data, you grant it through your pod. Or just give them a key that can decrypt your fitness data?

What you are suggesting sounds similar to https://blockstack.org/.

For me the problem with this approach is trusting that encryption will keep your data safe indefinitely. I worry that current encryption algorithms will become crackable at some point in time, let’s say in 50 years. I wouldn’t like for my current medical records to become publicly available then.

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

#146

Post by mehh »

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…

You don't have to use a single Ontology for your data. You can pick and choose a range of Ontologies or parts of, and the version of which that you like.

I would argue its more flexible than getting data from a source where you pegged against the APIs schema and version for the data you ingest, and the way they happen to have defined their API. Also, there being no reference to the object and fields beyond that companies API, i.e. much harder for data integration and discovery.

Even if API just used schema.org for defining their objects that would help IMHO

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

#147

Post by hinkley »

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…

> 25 years ago, we technologists […] thought that the web will bring freedom, understanding and equality to the world. We were wrong.

This is not hyperbole. Every time some new stupidity hits the internet I have a moment where I recall having these conversations with people, and I wonder, if I still knew those same folks, how that conversation would go today.

I think, in a way, all of these devs had a simpler understanding of group dynamics. We had all of these small, mostly self policing communities. Everyone should have this! But big communities don’t have the same dynamics.

The cynical saw things like this coming, and thankfully some organized early. The EFF, for instance, turns thirty this summer. Wow.

But even I would not have guessed... this. Maybe if we had there’d be more EFFs and they’d have deeper pockets.

If you’re 25 and reading this, know that at least some of us are sorry.

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

#148

Post by fuubi »

Vinnl wrote: post #123
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 ).

Hey, great that you're interested in Solid! It might be me not having paid attention, but I think I haven't come across this earlier. It might be interesting to share this on the forum as well, to get the community's input: https://forum.solidproject.org (Apologies if you already posted there.)

You're right. I wanted to introduce myself. Unfortunately, I didn't yet. That would be great. I look forward to the community feedback.

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

#149

Post by matlin »

gorgoiler wrote: post #10

This sounds great. I imagine a world where gmail had a setting whereby they had to use my storage for their service, mounted over the internet using SSHFS or something. This would be fantastic! No more IMAP syncing to backup my data. My data would already be my data . Even if the “pod” is a virtual one in a data center, as long as the webmail provider is a different company to the pod provider, the data access is gra…

I totally agree. And I'm currently building a tool to gather all of your data into one database and let developers create a way to interface with it. It solves the problem that you're describing but could also greatly simplify development. Very soon, I'll be releasing a CLI to index all of your data from platforms like Gmail, Spotify, etc. If you want to get notified when it's ready drop your email at https://www.aspen.cloud

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

#150

Post by pavlov »

Is Inrupt on a big PR push right now? I just saw an article about them in the FT, and now another.

This quote from the post suggests that the timing of this personal news is externally managed: “I joined the Inrupt team last summer as its Chief of Security Architecture, and have been in stealth mode until now.”

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