He is the co-founder and CTO of Inrupt. Solid aims to give people control and agency over their data, questioning many assumptions about how the web has to work.
Solid technically is is new level of standard at the web layer, which adds things never put into the original spec, such as global single sign-on, universal access control, and a universal data API so that any app can store data in any storage place. Socially Solid is a movement away from much of the issues with the current WWW, and toward a world in which users are in control, and empowered by large amounts of data, private, shared, and public.
Sir Tim is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium W3C , a Web standards organization founded in which develops interoperable technologies specifications, guidelines, software, and tools to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
Image: CERN. A short history of the Web. Licensing the Web. Browse the first website. The WorldWideWeb browser. Surf the Web using a recreation the first browser that was written in Growing up, Sir Tim was interested in trains and had a model railway in his bedroom.
He recalls :. Then I ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made a compute r out of an old television set. Scientists come from all over the world to use its accelerators, but Sir Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing information. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer.
Tim thought he saw a way to solve this problem — one that he could see could also have much broader applications. Already, millions of computers were being connected together through the fast-developing internet and Berners-Lee realised they could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext. By the end of , the first web page was served on the open internet, and in , people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community.
As the web began to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.
At 63, Berners-Lee has thus far had a career more or less divided into two phases. But owing to his decision to release the source code for free—to make the Web an open and democratic platform for all—his brainchild quickly took on a life of its own. He has been knighted by the Queen. Berners-Lee, who never directly profited off his invention, has also spent most of his life trying to guard it.
While Silicon Valley started ride-share apps and social-media networks without profoundly considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has spent the past three decades thinking about little else. From the beginning, in fact, Berners-Lee understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation.
This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In , Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly , users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice. For the man who set all this in motion, the mushroom cloud was unfolding before his very eyes. This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee.
He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder.
In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new platform, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he had come to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he started in to protect human rights across the digital landscape. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to a fast-approaching future. As billions more come online, they will feed trillions of additional bits of information into the Web, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever.
The original idea for the Web was born in the early s, when Berners-Lee was growing up in London. His parents, both pioneers of the computer age, helped create the first commercial stored-program electronic computer. They raised their son on tales of bits and processors and the power of machines.
One of his earliest memories is a conversation with his father about how computers would one day function like the human brain. As a student at Oxford in the early s, Berners-Lee built his own computer using an old television and a soldering iron. He graduated with a first-class degree in physics, without any particular plans for his future.
0コメント