Tim Berners-Lee still believes the web can be fixed, even today
Phi Beta Iota: The article is worth reading — with high praise for what Berners-Lee did in the first place, we have to call BULLSHIT on his current claims. The Internet in its present state is like a syphilitic whore well past her prime, ready for a bullet in the head.
PBI Expert #1: The Internet can no more be “fixed” to meet the demands of this world than a horse can be “fixed” to act like an SUV.
PBI Expert #2: Like Vint Cerf, Dr. Lee is not exactly a guy who can fix what he screwed up in the first place. He can talk about a fix, but his assumption that the tragedy of the commons would apply to hyperlinks as well as to cows was beyond him. Good PR.
ROBERT STEELE: In 1994-1997 Robert Garigue and I and a few others — notably Winn Schwartau, Jim Anderson of NSA and Bill Caelli of Australia — tried to warn the US Government that cyber-security was going to be a major issue. We were ignored. Worse, NSA was allowed to gut all existing security measures for its convenience, and spawned the Chinese and Russian hacking industries. Below is the 1997 graphic that Robert Garigue and I put together to flip the system. We could not get anyone to listen to us and he, very sadly, died in his sleep in his 50's despite being extremely fit.
The Internet was designed for machine to machine communication in which both individuals and documents and concepts were incidental. The Internet is not designed for holistic analytics and true cost economics, it is not designed for paragraph-level linking and weighting; it is not designed for cummulative reputation and pervasive rights of anonymity, identity, privacy, and security.
As we now know, the existing browsers (eg Chrome) are pigs and swiss cheese. The emerging blockchain “solution” is also a pig (albeit moving toward credit card speed solutions) and has been cracked for over five years. There is nothing, today, that is secret unless you are both naked in a randomly chosen sauna and shoot the other person after you tell them the secret.
Lots to do.
