Is this legal? No farangs welcome...

[webfact]

Berners-Lee says World Wide Web, at 30, must emerge from 'adolescence'

By Tom Miles

 

FILE PHOTO: World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks during the inauguration of Web Summit, Europe's biggest tech conference, in Lisbon, Portugal, Nov. 5, 2018. REUTERS/Pedro Nunes/File Photo

 

GENEVA (Reuters) - The fraying World Wide Web needs to rediscover its strengths and grow into maturity, its designer Tim Berners-Lee said on Monday, marking the 30th anniversary of the collaborative software project his supervisor initially dubbed "vague but exciting".

 

Speaking to reporters at CERN, the physics research centre outside Geneva where he invented the web, Berners-Lee said users of the web had found it "not so pretty" recently.

 

"They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realising that this web thing that they thought was that cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well," he said.

 

"It seems we don't finish reeling from one privacy disaster before moving onto the next one," he added, citing concerns about whether social networks were supporting democracy.

 

People who had grown up taking the internet's neutrality for granted now found that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump had "rolled that back".

 

There was also a threat of fragmentation of the Internet into regulatory blocs - in the United States, the European Union, China and elsewhere - which would be "massively damaging".

 

In an open letter to mark the anniversary, Berners-Lee said many people now felt unsure about whether the web was a force for good, but it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that it could not change for the better in the next 30 years.

 

"If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web", he wrote.

 

"It’s our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future".

 

But he was optimistic because of a strong resolve among governments to avoid balkanisation of the Internet, and a strong resolve among people in social networks who had - surprisingly - been shocked at people trying to hack elections.

 

He said the editorial power of Facebook's algorithm was "scary", but Facebook was clearly thinking about such questions a great deal, and that it and other social media firms backed the principle of letting users extract and move their data.

 

Amid the concern, Berners-Lee said the anniversary was something to celebrate, and warmly recalled how his boss ordered a computer model that CERN did not possess, a deliberate "plot" to enable his project under the guise of testing the interoperability of different computers.

 

The boss, Mike Sendell, had pencilled in an assessment of his idea as "vague but exciting".

 

"Thank goodness it wasn’t 'Exciting but vague'," Berners-Lee said.

 

(Reporting by Tom Miles, editing by G Crosse)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2019-03-12

[Cryingdick]

This being a story on TV is no small amount of irony.

[Samui Bodoh]

"...The fraying World Wide Web needs to rediscover its strengths and grow into maturity, its designer Tim Berners-Lee said on Monday, marking the 30th anniversary of the collaborative software project his supervisor initially dubbed "vague but exciting..."

 

What a fascinating subject!

 

I think that the Web is the epitome of the old adage that something in and of itself is neutral, but how it is used defines it. A great example of this concept is nuclear power; used one way it is a clean (ish!) source of almost unlimited energy, used another way it is a destructive force almost beyond imagination.

 

Twenty years ago I was doing some post-grad schooling in the UK, and one of my Profs said "the Internet is going to be the defining technology of humanity, if humanity can utilize it in a positive fashion". I must admit that at the time I thought he was being a pretentious anchor (spelling), but in fact he was being prescient as hell.

 

Is humanity up to the task of harnessing the tremendous power for good of the Web or will small groups of people utilize its scope and reach to do harm?

 

While I am not sure of the answer, I fear the outcome greatly. Simply put, it is much, much, much easier to destroy than it is to build, and I (sadly) suspect that the destroyers will win the day.

 

As the old Chinese curse goes, 'may you live in interesting times'...

 

 

Edited March 12, 2019 by Samui Bodoh

[pedro01]

"They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realising that this web thing that they thought was that cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well," he said.

 

I see - well, I'm glad we have academics like this to tell people how they should vote. Better clamp down on the web till people vote the right way.

[lannarebirth]

2 hours ago, Samui Bodoh said:

 

I think that the Web is the epitome of the old adage that something in and of itself is neutral, but how it is used defines it.

 

 

I tend to think of it as the epitome of the old adage that "the medium is the message'.

[Proboscis]

2 hours ago, pedro01 said:

"They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realising that this web thing that they thought was that cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well," he said.

 

I see - well, I'm glad we have academics like this to tell people how they should vote. Better clamp down on the web till people vote the right way.

He was referring to the sort of interference and manipulation by foreign and deep pockets in the election/referendum that resulted in Trump and Brexit rather than the actual choices that people made. He was not trying to tell anyone how to vote. He was worried about the plebicide process. Please try to keep up.

[pedro01]

6 minutes ago, Proboscis said:

He was referring to the sort of interference and manipulation by foreign and deep pockets in the election/referendum that resulted in Trump and Brexit rather than the actual choices that people made. He was not trying to tell anyone how to vote. He was worried about the plebicide process. Please try to keep up.

Aaaah - so when people voted against your own desires - the internet made them do it?

 

It's nonsense. There is zero evidence that 'interference' swayed even a single voter. There is no evidence that interference was one sided.

 

There is plenty of evidence that butt-hurt people can't understand their loss, look down on those with a different opinion and have a seemingly endless supply of 'reasons' the lumpenvoterate voted against their own desires.

[BritManToo]

5 hours ago, webfact said:

"They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realising that this web thing that they thought was that cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well," he said.

More like "not serving those who control the traditional news sources"

Globalism & Multiculturalism wants to hide from the people, because the people don't like it.

Edited March 12, 2019 by BritManToo

[BritManToo]

6 hours ago, webfact said:

People who had grown up taking the internet's neutrality for granted now found that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump had "rolled that back".

Like anyone believes Facebook, Twitter, Google, Paypal, et al were ever neutral.

Toe the Globalist, multicultural, feminist, LGBT, anti-white-man line or have all your accounts and websites cancelled/blocked with no recourse in law.

Edited March 12, 2019 by BritManToo

[roquefort]

13 hours ago, Samui Bodoh said:

Is humanity up to the task of harnessing the tremendous power for good of the Web or will small groups of people utilize its scope and reach to do harm?

Whenever science puts new tools into man's hands there will be someone, somewhere who will abuse those tools for their own selfish purposes.  That is an unfortunate truism about human nature.

 

It hasn't happened (yet) with nuclear power but it will. It is just a matter of time. And don't even get me started on AI and gene editing. I'm glad I won't be around when the s**t really hits the fan.