Inventor Of World Wide Web Warns Of Threat To Internet

[Flashermac]

London (AFP) - The British inventor of the World Wide Web warned on Saturday that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web.

 

Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called for a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the internet and ensure users' privacy.

 

"If a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites they go to, then they have tremendous control over your life," Berners-Lee said at the London "Web We Want" festival on the future of the internet.

 

"If a Government can block you going to, for example, the opposition's political pages, then they can give you a blinkered view of reality to keep themselves in power."

 

"Suddenly the power to abuse the open internet has become so tempting both for government and big companies."

 

Berners-Lee, 59, is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a body which develops guidelines for the development of the internet.

 

He called for an internet version of the "Magna Carta", the 13th century English charter credited with guaranteeing basic rights and freedoms.

 

Concerns over privacy and freedom on the internet have increased in the wake of the revelation of mass government monitoring of online activity following leaks by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

 

A ruling by the European Union to allow individuals to ask search engines such as Google to remove links to information about them, called the "right to be forgotten", has also raised concerns over the potential for censorship.

 

"There have been lots of times that it has been abused, so now the Magna Carta is about saying...I want a web where I'm not spied on, where there's no censorship," Berners-Lee said.

 

The scientist added that in order to be a "neutral medium", the internet had to reflect all of humanity, including "some ghastly stuff".

 

"Now some things are of course just illegal, child pornography, fraud, telling someone how to rob a bank, that's illegal before the web and it's illegal after the web," Berners-Lee added.

 

 

 

 

http://news.yahoo.com/inventor-world-wide-warns-threat-internet-224455080.html;_ylt=AwrTWf2ygCdUCj8AYlfQtDMD

[cavanami]

Who's this guy???

 

It was Al Gore that invented the internet, he said so himself :rotl: :rotl:

[My Penis is hungry]

Al Gore did play a key roll in getting the internet (ARPANET - which Robert Khan and Vint Cerf built with others) out of the control of DARPA and into the main stream, it's been acknowledged by many in the industry, by the people who did invent the interent!

 

He never claimed to have invented the internet, however he did say he "created" the internet in the same sense Eisenhower had said in the mid 60's that while as President "Took the initiative in creating the Intersate Highway System. Eisenhower didn't invent highways either.

 

Gore's bill took the non commercial ARPNET and turned it into the public access system we know today

<<Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted that,

As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1993. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises>>

 

Also the 1990's boom of WWW (the browser protocol's) would not have come unless Gore had also made the act,

Perhaps one of the most important results of the Gore Bill was the development of Mosaic in 1993.^[13][14] This World Wide Web browser is credited by most scholars as beginning theInternet boom of the 1990s: Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founderMarc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later So while it's a good sounding joke, he never claimed to have invented anything, he did though actually do some good, Pity he didn't become science minister rather than foreign affairs.

[Guest]

The internet has been hijacked by big business, and there will be more government control.

 

Perhaps someday in the distant future, the webcam on your notebook or the pc on the wall will not be able to be switched off so intelligence agencies can spy on you.

[cavanami]

> ...the webcam on your notebook or the pc on the wall will not be able to be switched off...

 

That's why God invented spray paint...

[Coss]

and hammers

[My Penis is hungry]

Imagine the NSA version of this http://www.gdeltproject.org/

[Guest]

It's aready here every mobile call, every text, every email, every blog and website someone is watching, listening and recording.

It's just time before the images of people that are collected, the finger prints, the DNA and other data all come together .....

[Guest]

Reword... Computers flag anything interesting to the people watching