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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

#151

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?

I agree but I think just having your own VM in the cloud solves this. If each user has their own IP then you can basically get E2E encryption between users with SSL so you don't need to worry about encryption as a developer or user. I really don't like the idea of assuming people have access and relying on bulletproof encryption on a completely decentralized system. I would much rather trust a cloud provider that I'm paying for.

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

#152
I definitely agree with this sentiment but I think rather than reinvent the wheel we should be applying current web standards to users instead of businesses. If every user had their own static IP, sever, and SSL Cert, database, DNS entry, etc, we'd be able to create the web that Tim originally envisioned. And until now that would be prohibitively expensive and complex but could be real possibility now.

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

#153

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?

I'd rather pay for hardware I own than someone else's. (I accept the 'hardship'.) And that I can unplug should problems arise. (The cloud is okay for public things.)

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

#154

My problem with all those pro-privacy apps is that privacy has a price[0], and a price most consumers (me included) are not willing to pay. There are, essentially, two business models on the web. One is to provide the services for free and sell ads, the other is to charge for the services directly. To earn substantial amounts on ads, you need to track consumers massively. As a consumer, I definitely prefer being trac…

Radio, TV and magazine ads were minimally tracked and worked for years. The only people telling us we need tracked ads to make money are people selling tracked ads.

Radio, TV, and magazines all have the same thing in common: from the user perspective, they’re read-only. As broadcast media, their scaling models work differently than social media, which includes the storage and/or transmission of user-created data.

If Google, Facebook, et al had no costs whatsoever involved in scaling their businesses, then they could be replaced by non-profits providing the services pro-bono.

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

#155
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of email in particular, I'd be keen to chat to you lot about the JMAP protocol, which is hoping to provide some of the "modern data model" around email (and we're now working on Calendars)

The best thing there would probably be to reach out to the Solid community in general, through either the forums [0] or the chat [1]. [0] https://forum.solidproject.org [1] https://gitter.im/solid/chat

Thanks, I sent an email :) Being as how I'm into email and all that.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge.

If the data is not processed at the edge, how is nothing recorded? This smells like extremely minced words.

IANAL (definitely not a German one) but I'm almost certain that even post-2017 it's still illegal to take video in a public space and send it elsewhere, without a sign, even if that video is not in some sense "preserved" elsewhere.

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

#157
Like many others on this thread, I have a hard time seeing how it can succeed. I’ve been following anytype.io for a while and it seems like a much better solution that comes with a built in product. No need for pods since they live individually on each device. And it’s based on IPFS, which seems to be a much more established protocol for dealing with this sort of data.

It’ll be released later this year and hopefully it lives up to the hype.

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

#158
I'm sceptical about the economics of this. The first problem is the obvious idea of everyone storing their pod as many people have pointed out which is unfeasible, as inrupt itself points out.

The next step is that someone is supposed to host your pod in the cloud, but if this is supposed to protect your privacy the pod has to be encrypted. So then the question is how is the host making money? Charging people upfront for storage in a trade-off for privacy or control has proven to be a deal almost nobody is willing to make, we already have privacy respecting, more expensive services, they're largely fringe. Pods are a technical solution that only make this more complicated.

the fundamental issue that I think breaks this entire idea is that it vastly overrates how many people care about control or privacy.

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

#159
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…

Turtle is a very nice format to read and write RDF in. There is no same XML serialization of RDF. RDF/XML is very annoying and unintuitive to write and parsing it into triples requires a lot of work so you need a special library anyway. You might as well start with Turtle then.

That being said, it's easy to convert from one format to another: you'll get the same triples. So just use what you like.

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

#160
"Your data lives in a pod that is controlled by you. Data generated by your things -- your computer, your phone, your IoT whatever -- is written to your pod. You authorize granular access to that pod to whoever you want for whatever reason you want."

Whereupon they copy your data, aggregate it with other sources, and continue on their merry way. Security theater in action.

I wonder what the backup scheme looks like.

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