Sunday, September 30, 2018

Tim Berners-Lee — One Small Step for the Web…


Tim Berners-Lee - modern hero. The guy who really invented the Internet and is now engaged in re-inventing it so that it becomes more like the tool he envisioned but got hijacked on the way.

Medium
Tim Berners-Lee | Founder and Director of W3C, the Web Foundation and the Open Data Institute, and now Solid and inrupt.

* Reference to Neil Armstrong, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," as he took the first step by a human onto the surface of the moon.

See also
This week, Berners-Lee will launch Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over.
“We have to do it now,” he says, displaying an intensity and urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. “It’s a historical moment.” Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building....
FastCompany
Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web
Katrina Brooker

1 comment:

Noah Way said...

Armstrong's quote is wrong.

The real story is this: Armstrong's best friend was a guy named Manny Klein. Manny was married to a real shrew, who famously told him she wouldn't sleep with him until a man landed on the moon.

When Armstrong stepped off the lander what he really said was "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Manny Klein."