Thirty Years Ago, One Decision Changed Our Connected World

 Always interesting point of history how it has changed us.Will AI do the same? 

Thirty Years Ago, One Decision Changed Our Connected World

By NPR, May 1, 2023

The first page posted to the Internet. 

Today, nearly two-thirds of the world's population uses the Web to visit hundreds of millions of active websites.

The World Wide Web's launch three decades ago marked the beginning of the Internet's evolution into the revolutionary communications tool it has become.

Tim Berners-Lee conceived of the Web at Switzerland's CERN laboratory and persuaded the lab to release it into the public domain for free; he has since credited the Web's massive expansion to that decision.

By the end of 1994, more than 24 million people in North America spent an average of five hours a week online, while today nearly two-thirds of the global population visit hundreds of millions of sites via the Web.

Berners-Lee, who received the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for inventing the World Wide Web, directs the World Wide Web Consortium with the goal of keeping the platform neutral and universal.

From NPR, View Full Article

Regarding an NFT Bubble

This surprised me,  below is an outline, and then beyond.  Legit?  Following up.  I will remove if I find this invalid. 

From DSHR Blog:   https://blog.dshr.org/ 

I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Non-Fungible Token Bubble Lasted 10 Months

Although the first Non-Fungible Token was minted in 2014, it wasn't until Cryptokitties bought the Ethereum blockchain to its knees in December 2017 that NFTs attracted attention. But then they were swiftly hailed as the revolutionary technology that would usher in Web 3, the Holy Grail of VCs, speculators and the major content industries because it would be a completely financialized Web. Approaching 5 years later, it is time to ask "how's it going?"

Below the fold I look at the details, but the TL;DR is "not so great"; NFTs as the basis for a financialized Web have six main problems:

Technical:    the technology doesn't actually do what people think it does.

Legal:           there is no legal basis for the "rights" NFTs claim to represent.

Regulatory:  much of the business of creating and selling NFTs appears to violate securities law.

Marketing:   the ordinary consumers who would pay for a financialized Web absolutely hate the idea.

Financial:      like cryptocurrencies, the fundamental attraction of NFTs is "number go up". And much of the trading in NTFs was Making Sure "Number Go Up". But, alas "number go down", at least partly because of problem #4.

Criminal: vulnerabilities in the NFT ecosystem provide a bonanza for thieves.   ....   

(more at DSHR) ...  

Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us to 'Ignore' Web3

Too vague?  Also a hit on Blockchain as "too slow, too expensive, and too public.".

Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us to 'Ignore' Web3

CNBC News, Ryan Browne, November 4, 2022

ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web, considers Web3 nonviable for building the next iteration of the Internet. At the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, Berners-Lee called Web3 a vague term to describe a theoretical Internet that is more decentralized than the current Web, incorporating technologies like blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and nonfungible tokens. Berners-Lee described blockchain protocols as "too slow, too expensive, and too public." He said people frequently confuse Web3 with his Web 3.0 framework for reconfiguring the Internet. His new Inrupt startup intends to allow users to control their own data via a global single sign-on feature for universal logins, login IDs that let users exchange data, and a "common universal application programming interface."

Full Article   

Not Ready for Web 3.0 and Why

Good piece by Tim O'Reilly, intro below, more at the link.

Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3   By Tim O’Reilly

There’s been a lot of talk about Web3 lately, and as the person who defined “Web 2.0” 17 years ago, I’m often asked to comment. I’ve generally avoided doing so because most prognostications about the future turn out to be wrong. What we can do, though, is to ask ourselves questions that help us see more deeply into the present, the soil in which the future is rooted. As William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” We can also look at economic and social patterns and cycles, using as a lens the observation ascribed to Mark Twain that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

Using those filters, what can we say about Web3?

Decentralization versus centralization

The term Web 3.0 was used in 2006 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, as a look forward to the next stage of the web beyond Web 2.0. He thought that the “Semantic Web” was going to be central to that evolution. It didn’t turn out that way. Now people make the case that the next generation of the web will be based on crypto.

“Web3” as we think of it today was introduced in 2014 by Gavin Wood, one of the cocreators of Ethereum. Wood’s compact definition of Web3, as he put it in a recent Wired interview, is simple: “Less trust, more truth.”

In making this assertion, Wood was contrasting Web3 with the original internet protocol, whose ethos was perhaps best summed up by Jon Postel’s “robustness principle”: “TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.” This ethos became the foundation of a global decentralized computer network in which no one need be in charge as long as everyone did their best to follow the same protocols and was tolerant of deviations. This system rapidly outcompeted all proprietary networks and changed the world. Unfortunately, time proved that the creators of this system were too idealistic, failing to take into account bad actors and, perhaps more importantly, failing to anticipate the enormous centralization of power that would be made possible by big data, even on top of a decentralized network.

Wood’s point is that the blockchain replaces trust in the good intentions of others with transparency and irrevocability built into the technology. As explained on Ethereum.org:

Cryptographic mechanisms ensure that once transactions are verified as valid and added to the blockchain, they can’t be tampered with later. The same mechanisms also ensure that all transactions are signed and executed with appropriate “permissions” (no one should be able to send digital assets from Alice’s account, except for Alice herself).

Ethereum.org’s documentation continues:

Web2 refers to the version of the internet most of us know today. An internet dominated by companies that provide services in exchange for your personal data. Web3, in the context of Ethereum, refers to decentralized apps that run on the blockchain. These are apps that allow anyone to participate without monetising their personal data.

Crypto enthusiast Sal Delle Palme puts it even more boldly:

We’re witnessing the birth of a new economic system. Its features and tenets are just now being devised and refined in transparent ways by millions of people around the world. Everyone is welcome to participate.   .... ' 

Web As We Know it Ending?

 Changing yes, but ending now.  We are too dependent on it for too many things.  No doubt using it is getting trickier.  Need to look closer at risks and Threats. 

The Worldwide Web As We Know It May Be Ending   By CNN in ACM   February 25, 2021

Over the last year, the worldwide web has started to look less worldwide.

Europe is floating regulation that could impose temporary bans on United States tech companies that violate its laws. The U.S. was on the verge of banning TikTok and WeChat. India is now at loggerheads with Twitter.

If such territorial clashes become more common, the globally-connected Internet we know will become more like what some have dubbed the "splinternet," or a collection of different Internets whose limits are determined by national or regional borders.

A combination of rising nationalism, trade disputes, and concerns about the market dominance of certain global tech companies has prompted threats of regulatory crackdowns all over the world. These forces are not just upending the tech companies that built massive businesses on the promise of a global Internet, but also the very idea of building platforms that can be accessed and used the same way by anyone anywhere in the world.

From CNN

Worldwide Web as We Know Ending?

 Certainly changing.  What drives such changes, more legislation, which are likely to produce yet more and likely less creative participants.   It was lack of govt oversight that drove that creativity.  

The worldwide web as we know it may be ending   By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business

(CNN Business)Over the last year, the worldwide web has started to look less worldwide.

Europe is floating regulation that could impose temporary bans on US tech companies that violate its laws. The United States was on the verge of banning TikTok and WeChat, though the new Biden administration is rethinking that move. India, which did ban those two apps as well of dozens of others, is now at loggerheads with Twitter.

And this month, Facebook (FB) clashed with the Australian government over a proposed law that would require it to pay publishers. The company briefly decided to prevent users from sharing news links in the country in response to the law, with the potential to drastically change how its platform functions from one country to the next. Then on Tuesday, it reached a deal with the government and agreed to restore news pages. The deal partially relaxed arbitration requirements that Facebook took issue with.

In its announcement of the deal, however, Facebook hinted at the possibility of similar clashes in the future. "We'll continue to invest in news globally and resist efforts by media conglomerates to advance regulatory frameworks that do not take account of the true value exchange between publishers and platforms like Facebook," Campbell Brown, VP of global news partnerships at Facebook, said in a statement Tuesday.  ... " 

Remaking the Web

We need a remake.  With caution to include freedom of communication.

 He Created the Web. Now He's Out to Remake the Digital World.

The New York Times,   Steve Lohr,   January 10, 2021

World Wide Web creator and 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee hopes to bring the Web back to his original vision of a decentralized marketplace through personal online data stores (pods), with users controlling their data in individual vaults. Berners-Lee co-founded the startup Inrupt, which will charge licensing fees for its commercial software, using Solid open source software along with augmented security, management, and developer tools. Pods are free for users, and Inrupt expects initial sponsors will be trusted organizations. Increasingly intelligent data protection technology is placing competitive pressure on the big tech firms; Georgia Institute of Technology's Peter Swire said this creates "a market opportunity for Tim Berners-Lee's firm and others to offer individuals better ways to control their data."

Conifer: Revisiting Web Pages

Brought to my attention again, how effective is this to use?    Will be testing.

Conifer:  Collect and revisit web pages.
Conifer is a web archiving service that creates an interactive copy of any web page that you browse, including content revealed by your interactions such as playing video and audio, scrolling, clicking buttons, and so forth. ... 

Free accounts with 5GB of storage. Get more and support this project by becoming a supporter.

Conifer is an online service based on Webrecorder software.  ... "

Searching Websites the Way You Want

Interesting for non-programmers, to use API's.  At the link some technical examples.

Searching Websites the Way You Want
MIT CSAIL
Adam Conner-Simons
May 18, 2020

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed ScrAPIr, a tool that enables non-programmers to access, query, save, and share Web data application programming interfaces (APIs). Traditionally, APIs could only be accessed by users with strong coding skills, leaving non-coders to laboriously copy-paste data or use Web scrapers that download a site's webpages and search the content for desired data. To integrate a new API into ScrAPIr, a non-programmer only needs to fill out a form telling the tool about certain aspects of the API. Said MIT’s David Carger, “APIs deliver more information than what website designers choose to expose it, but this imposes limits on users who may want to look at the data in a different way. With this tool, all of the data exposed by the API is available for viewing, filtering, and sorting.” ... ' 

AI and Web Development

Like to see more specific examples of this, since it bears on the elements of complex goal directed process. Also the specific elements of efficiency.   But would not it expect to add to transparency.

AI Is Changing Web Development 
January 13, 2020 by Gilad David Maayan

According to Accenture, 77 percent of smart devices include at least one AI feature. It is anticipated that by 2025 the global AI market will reach $60 billion. The growth of AI has created greater demand for this technology from consumers and organizations alike. Both are embracing AI technology and driving further innovation with their adoption.

There is a range of tools for incorporating AI into your workflows and products. From plug-and-play components to machine learning-as-a-service (MLaaS), these functionalities enable developers to build AI into their sites and applications through an API or library integration. No longer do you need AI expertise to include it in your products. Unsurprisingly, this increased accessibility is affecting web development.

AI and ML are influencing web development in a variety of ways—from improving efficiency to increasing customer engagement. Below are the most prominent influences.

Coding and Testing

AI and ML can be used to speed development processes and improve the overall quality of applications, such as through AI integration with Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) or AI-based testing. IDEs are tools that combine code writing, editing, building and debugging features within a single platform. IDEs can help improve code quality with automatic vulnerability identification and auto-suggestions for coding best practices. These tools can speed coding with autofill features and real-time code analysis.

With the inclusion of AI and ML models in application testing procedures, these models can be used to analyze user interfaces, optimize test coverage and evaluate application or user behavior patterns, enabling streamlined testing. You can also use AI models to help minimize hard-coding in your applications, helping to reduce vulnerabilities and enable you to work from a smaller code base.

Censorship Evasion

Basically fooling the censors.   Is this breakable?

 AI System Evolves to Evade Internet Censorship
University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, & Natural Sciences

University of Maryland scientists led development of an artificial intelligence system based on genetic evolution that learned to automatically evade online censorship by repressive governments. The Geneva (genetic evasion) system was tested in China, India, and Kazakhstan, and learned to exploit gaps in censors' logic and flaws that humans could not spot. When operating on a computer that is sending out Web requests via a censor, Geneva tweaks the data's fragmentation and transmission so the censor fails to identify banned content, or cannot block the connection. Geneva assembles sets of instructions from small code fragments, which follow refined evasion strategies for breaking up, configuring, or sending data packets. Said Maryland’s Dave Levin, “With Geneva, we are, for the first time, at a major advantage in the censorship arms race.”

Making the Web more Secure, Optimized

 A very good goal.  Considerable article on the approaches at the link.   Something needs to be done regarding security, before the whole thing collapses.  Also note that this may be very useful for 'smart contracts' that we come to rely on.  How can we make sure they state what they claim they do?  Compliant to regulated standards?  Will look further.

Making it easier to program and protect the web
Professor Adam Chlipala builds tools to help programmers more quickly generate optimized, secure code.

By Rob Matheson | MIT News Office  July 20, 2019

Behind the scenes of every web service, from a secure web browser to an entertaining app, is a programmer’s code, carefully written to ensure everything runs quickly, smoothly, and securely. For years, MIT Associate Professor Adam Chlipala has been toiling away behind behind-the-scenes, developing tools to help programmers more quickly and easily generate their code — and prove it does what it’s supposed to do.

Scanning the many publications on Chlipala’s webpage, you’ll find some commonly repeated keywords, such as “easy,” “automated,” and “proof.” Much of his work centers on designing simplified programming languages and app-making tools for programmers, systems that automatically generate optimized algorithms for specific tasks, and compilers that automatically prove that the complex math written in code is correct.

“I hope to save a lot of people a lot of time doing boring repetitive work, by automating programming work as well as decreasing the cost of building secure, reliable systems,” says Chlipala, who is a recently tenured professor of computer science, a researcher in the Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL), and head of the Programming Languages and Verification Group.

One of Chlipala’s recent systems automatically generates optimized — and mathematically proven — cryptographic algorithms, freeing programmers from hours upon hours of manually writing and verifying code by hand. And that system is now behind nearly all secure Google Chrome communications.   ..... "

(Update) GDPR Impact a Year Later

Its made browsing and gathering technical information harder, but for the corporation? (Update) in Fastcompany:  " ..... One year in, GDPR seems to have helped Google & Facebook ...  New projections from eMarketer show that Google and Facebook are both continuing to grow their share of the digital advertising market in the United Kingdom  ...".   I assume by making it more difficult for competitors.

GDPR’s Impact One Year Later   Alex Woodie in Datanami

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) granted Europeans unprecedented rights to control their own data, including the controversial “right to be forgotten.” The GDPR has been in effect for a year now, but what’s been the overall impact?

One thing is certain: There’s been no shortage of complaints around GDPR. According to a February survey by DLA Piper, there have been 59,000 complaints of data breaches in violation of GDPR since the law went into effect in May 2018. However the same report found only 91 fines have been handed out.

The biggest fines have been handed out to social media giants, like Google and Facebook. In January, Google was fined $56.8 million (€50 million) by the French data regulator CNIL for failing to sufficiently inform consumers about collecting data used in online ads, citing a “lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent to personalize advertising.

Facebook is also bracing for possible GDPR fines as a result of a 2018 data breach, among other potential problems. The social media giant has stockpiled a reported $3 billion to pay Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fines that are expected as a result of its handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016.

But overall thus far, the GDPR hammer hasn’t come down to the extent that many expect it eventually will, so the jury is still out on that aspect of the regulation.

Compliance a multi-part affair when it comes to GDPR, and many companies around the world are at various stages of their GDPR journey .... "

From Web to Blockchain

Fascinating historical view of the Web, is the blockchain a natural architectural extension?

Moving Towards web3.0 Using Blockchain as Core Tech  By Shahid Shaikh

The invention of Bitcoin and blockchain technology sets the foundations for the next generations of web applications. The applications which will run on peer to peer network model with existing networking and routing protocols. The applications where centralized Servers would be obsolete and data will be controlled by the entity whom it belongs, i.e., the User.

From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0
As we all know, Web 1.0 was static web, and the majority of the information was static and flat.  The major shift happened when user-generated content becomes mainstream. Projects such as WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others are nominated as Web 2.0 sites where we produce and consume verity of contents such as Video, Audio, Images, etc.

The problem, however, was not the content; it was the architecture. The Centralized nature of Web opens up tons of security threats, data gathering of malicious purpose, privacy intrusion and cost as well.

The invention of Bitcoin and successful use of decentralized, peer to peer, secure network opens up the opportunity to take a step back and redesign the way our web works. The blockchain is becoming the backbone of the new Web, i.e., Web 3.0.  .... "

Curate Libraries for Truth?

Internet pioneer dicusses truth and knowledge on the Internet.  Mentions the rare word 'Internaut'.

Libraries Considered Hazardous   By Vinton G. Cerf
Communications of the ACM, February 2019, Vol. 62 No. 2, Page 5
10.1145/3302508

Do you remember the story of the room full of immortal monkeys typing on typewriters forever? Eventually they would produce all works ever written and that would ever be written. They would capture all truth but also everything that is false or only partly true. Were we to walk into such a place we would be confronted with an ultimate challenge: How to tell that which was true from everything else in this ultimate library?

In some ways, the contents of the Internet and especially the World Wide Web pose a similar challenge. About half the world's population is now online according to estimates by the International Telecommunication Union.a These approximately 3.8 billion people produce enormous quantities of information on Web pages, in databases, in social media, and other online platforms. While I do not mean to suggest these Internauts are no better than monkeys typing at random, there is a great deal of misinformation mixed in with very high-quality content. Some of that misinformation is a consequence of ignorance, but some is deliberately produced disinformation intended to confuse or to bend public opinion to achieve questionable ends. Ironically, some of the best quality, highly endorsed information is also wrong, not out of malevolent intent, but because it has been invalidated by the scientific method: theory, experiment, and measurement leading to proof or refutation.

If we are honest with ourselves, science is, at best, an approximation of reality. Even when they are not quite right, some theories can still be very useful. Newton's laws are useful for many computations but under conditions of acceleration, high-speed or intense gravity, one needs Einstein's refinements. And when we get to the ultra-small, we must move to quantum theory, but it doesn't account for gravity! The challenge for us is to know under what conditions the approximations are applicable.

How does all this apply to libraries? Libraries are organized accumulations of information. I almost wrote "knowledge" but that term seems to connote "truth" and we know now that all information is not true. As we accumulate more and more information, how can we curate this content so as to correctly distinguish truth from fiction? How do we cope with the discovery that what we thought was true is, in fact, false in the light of new information? Librarians have a role to play here as keepers of knowledge, but even they cannot be expected to be omniscient. What about digital content? What about online content? Can the curators of knowledge use online digital libraries to maintain and curate content, helping the users of the library to find truth and reject fiction (except, perhaps, when looking for entertainment)?    ...  "

Infographic Time Line of 30 Years of the Web

Nicely done infographic visual by AppInstitute.  Interesting given I have lived through all this, which events I can remember, and which not.

History of the Web Timeline Infographic: Celebrating 30 Years of the World Wide Web
Posted March 7, 2019 | Author: Nabeena Mali  

March 12th 2019 celebrates 30 years of the history of the web. From the first web page to the way humans connect, communicate, spend and live their everyday lives, we take a look at the major events that have shaped our lives over the past 30 years…

Berners-Lee Solid Project

More on Berners-Lee's SOlid Project, aimed to save the Web.  Informative.  Un-wall the gardens?  Better privacy and identity?   Too late?

Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid Project: Can It Save the Web?    By David Cardinal 

Not everyone thinks the web needs saving. After all, it’s a bigger and more essential part of our lives than almost anyone could have predicted when Tim Berners-Lee first wrote a browser for what became the World Wide Web. But the original peer-to-peer, open-protocol, read-write architecture has been overshadowed in many ways by walled gardens like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. One reason for that is that the original web protocols were limited. While they provided the means for browsing and linking, they didn’t come with standard solutions for identity, personal data storage, or social applications. So corporations stepped in to fill the void with their own best interests at heart and not those of their customers or the web at large. Decades later, Berners-Lee thinks he has a solution: his Solid (SOcial LInked Data) system.

Google Wants to Kill the URL

This really struck me .... I remember reacting to my first understanding of the concept.  Aha, they are universal locators!    That's very good.  So why are they not good anymore?    The basic argument is that they continue to get more complex and difficult to understand.   ...  Their Chrome Browser turns 10 today, and they are thinking new approaches.

See:

Google Wants to Kill the URL    By Joel Hruska in ExtremeTech   and  Also in Wired

ACM Article Examines Bias on the Web

An interesting and considerable look at many kinds of bias and how they are ultimately combined in algorithmic bias used in 'AI'  in subtle ways.   Good starting point.   Excerpt:

Bias on the Web  By Ricardo Baeza-Yates 
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 6, Pages 54-61
10.1145/3209581

Our inherent human tendency of favoring one thing or opinion over another is reflected in every aspect of our lives, creating both latent and overt biases toward everything we see, hear, and do. Any remedy for bias must start with awareness that bias exists; for example, most mature societies raise awareness of social bias through affirmative-action programs, and, while awareness alone does not completely alleviate the problem, it helps guide us toward a solution. Bias on the Web reflects both societal and internal biases within ourselves, emerging in subtler ways. This article aims to increase awareness of the potential effects imposed on us all through bias present in Web use and content. We must thus consider and account for it in the design of Web systems that truly address people's needs. ....
Conclusion:

The problem of bias is much more complex than I have outlined here, where I have covered only part of the problem. Indeed, the foundation involves all of our personal biases. On the contrary, many of the biases described here manifest beyond the Web ecosystem (such as in mobile devices and the Internet of Things). The table here aims to classify all the main biases against the three types of bias I mentioned earlier. We can group them in three clusters: The top one involves just algorithms; the bottom one—activity, user interaction, and self-selection—involves those that come just from people; and the middle one—data and second-order—includes those involving both. The question marks in the first line indicate that each program probably encodes the cultural and cognitive biases of their creators. One antecedent to support this claim is an interesting data-analysis experiment where 29 teams in a worldwide crowd-sourcing challenge performed a statistical analysis for a problem involving racial discrimination.3

In early 2017, US-ACM published the seven properties algorithms must fulfill to achieve transparency and accountability:1 awareness, access and redress, accountability, explanation, data provenance, auditability, and validation and testing. This article is most closely aligned with awareness. In addition, the IEEE Computer Society also in 2017 began a project to define standards in this area, and at least two new conferences on the topic were held in February 2018. My colleagues and I are also working on a website with resources on "fairness measures" related to algorithms (http://fairness-measures.org/), and there are surely other such initiatives. All of them should help us define the ethics of algorithms, particularly with respect to machine learning.

As any attempt to be unbiased might already be biased through our own cultural and cognitive biases, the first step is thus to be aware of bias. Only if Web designers and developers know its existence can they address, and if possible, correct them. Otherwise, our future could be a fictitious world based on biased perceptions from which not even diversity, novelty, or serendipity would be able to rescue us. .... " 

Consider the Bento Browser

Makes much sense if you do organize the information well.

Bento Browser Makes It Easier To Search On Mobile Devices
By Carnegie Mellon University, original article.

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have developed a new Web browser that brings order to complex searches in a way not possible with conventional tabbed browsing.

The Bento browser stores each search session as a project workspace that monitors the most interest or relevant parts of visited web pages, allowing users to move from site to site without having to keep every tab open for fear of losing information. With the Bento browser, these projects are stored for later use, can be handed off to others, or can be moved to different devices, according to CMU professor Aniket Kittur.

In user studies that compared Bento with the Safari browser, users said Bento kept their search better organized.

The researchers reported on the new browser at CHI 2018, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, last week in Montreal, Canada.   .... "