The creator of the World Wide Web said on Thursday night that the Internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the Web in the early 1990s, says that if the Internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness.
And Spam. DonÂ’t forget about the Spam.
Berners-Lee's creation has transformed the way millions of people work, do business and entertain themselves. But he warns that "there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way." He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the Web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.
Shucks, I suppose this is where we should thank Fred and the moderators for doing such an excellent job of making sure all posted material comes with links.
Berners-Lee believes devotees of blogging sites take too much information on trust. "The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them.
You mean like that “World’s Funniest Joke” bit of stupidity?
You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust. That, if you like, is a very simple system, but in fact the technology must help us express much more complicated feelings about who we'll trust with what," he said. The next generation of the Internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest. Berners-Lee was launching a new joint initiative between Southampton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create the first degree in Web science. The two schools hope to raise the standards of Web content.
Cool! A PhD in Geek.
"Our plan would be to run similar courses on either side of the Atlantic," said Wendy Hall, head of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science. It is little more than a decade since the Web was just a glimmer in the eyes of a handful of scientists, but Internet-savvy students will get the chance to study online phenomena like Google. The vision for Web science embraces traditional technology subjects such as computer science and engineering, but also brings in other areas of social studies and academic thinking. Students will be expected to explore questions such as Internet privacy and regulation, as well as investigating the social trends behind massively popular Web sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com.
I’d prefer if they spent some serious time advocating for severe penalties to be imposed upon virus writers and spammers. This is one of the greatest threats to the Internet at present. We have “junk fax” laws, why not junk email laws? Freedom of speech does not necessarily allow you to come into my home and mouth off.
Much more important is increasing the penalties for virus and worm writing. Current penalties are laughable. These maggots actually obtain street credibility that they then use to obtain employment at computer companies. Solutions should include:
1.) Mandatory felony records and hard prison time for convicted virus writers.
2.) Exclusion from employment in computer-related fields that limits the ability to profit from a criminal enterprise.
3.) Possibility of a lifetime ban from the Internet for egregious cases of damage.
4.) Mandatory reparations to be paid individuals who release harmful or damaging viruses. Lifetime attachment of wages must be a possible result of causing major harm to the computing community.
5.) Much harsher penalties for mass Spammers. This one phenomenon is sapping national productivity. It must be halted in the interest of quality-of-life and workplace profitability.
Prospective researchers will be encouraged by new figures that indicate that the Web is growing at an unprecedented rate, having doubled in size in less than two-and-a-half years, and with more than 1 billion people around the world now connected to the Internet. The new discipline is expected to gain widespread support from huge Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon, as well as more traditional computing giants such as Microsoft and IBM. The ultimate task for students of Web science will be to come up with the next generation of the Internet -- and bring about the "semantic Web," a more intelligent version of the systems we use today. But Berners-Lee said that his only intention was to make sure the Internet of the future remained free and open for anybody to use.
Something that Google and Yahoo are actively undermining by assisting censorship in communist China. This must become a central issue in future Web development.
"We're not going to be trying to make a Web that will be better for people who vote in a particular way, or better for people who think like we do," he said. "The really important thing about the Web, which will continue through any future technology, is that it is a universal space."