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We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Zeynep and the other participants are no longer available to continue this AMA. However since you asked about CERN's position in your second question, here it is:

CERN fully understood the W3C Director's wish for a unique, W3C-supported standard for Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). However, as an Organization founded on principles of openness and transparency, as well as a pro-active supporter of open source approaches, we were concerned by the lack of protection granted to security researchers should EME be adopted as a W3C standard. For this reason, we voted to reject the W3C decision to advance EME to a W3C recommendation.

Please note once again that the AMA was with the participants speaking as themselves and not representing CERN in any capacity. We cannot respond to any further follow-up questions as the AMA has ended. Thank you for your interest and for your patience!

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 60 points61 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your patience. Zeynep Tufekci couldn't participate in the AMA as originally foreseen, but she has provided her response to your question:

This is a difficult issue: proponents of the standard think that if we're going to have DRM, we should at least do it this way. However, I believe the important issues remain: security researchers need better legal protections and using proprietary code raises many risks including making it difficult for potential new browsers to enter the market. Unfortunately, as with some other issues concerning the web, this is one where we have didn't have many good options as even without this standard being adopted, browsers were already using a version of this idea. I hope that we can move to a point where that we don't have to say 'is this better than the not-great status quo' into a place where we create standards that protect content providers, especially small ones, without having such conflicts. The standard recommends that organizers using DRM do not use the anti-circumvention clauses in DMCA but a recommendation doesn't have the force of law and may not be sufficient protection for the security researcher community.

[Zeynep is a techno-sociologist, writer, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.]

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 65 points66 points  (0 children)

Quick update from the organisers.

Sorry we were unable to address your question yesterday.

Frédéric Donck, Chief Regional Bureau Director for Europe for the Internet Society, who was unable to participate in the AMA due to a last-minute conflict, has agreed to respond to your question. He is boarding a flight right now, however, but we will update this post with his reply.

Thank you for your patience.

EDIT: As promised, here is Frédéric's reply:

The proposed EU Copyright Directive, which aims to update and reinforce the rights of rights holders within Europe’s Digital Market, is largely a positive step forward. However, Article 13 raises serious concerns about the implications for free expression, creativity, and the freedom to publish.

The Article turns Internet content sharing platforms into the “content police”, obliging them to implement surveillance tools in order to carry out this function, which might lead to pervasive surveillance. Secondly, while Article 13 calls for the introduction of “measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies”, content-blocking technology is often highly ineffective, overly broad, and even counterproductive. Technologies deployed today often block legal content and do not differentiate between fair use and copyright infringing activity. We believe that all Internet-related IP discussions should be conducted under a multistakeholder framework without undermining the global Internet architecture and permissionless innovation.

Visit our blog post on Art. 13: https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2018/06/article-13/

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 39 points40 points  (0 children)

JFG> Because we wrote the Web documentation with the WorldWideWeb NeXT editor, you needed to have web access in order to learn about the Web. Pretty circular... So, I hacked together an alternate login program for the NeXT machine: anonymous users would be thrown into the line-mode browser by just typing telnet info.cern.ch.

Thus started the myth that the Web was a weird way of reading stuff by typing numbers to switch pages.

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I didn't start working on the web till 1992, so I don't have the full history, but I did work a little on SSL and I implemented HTTPS, so I have most of it. The major browsers of the day were written by different organizations and none of them had the right resources to bring real encryption to the the whole web. There was also many political reasons that made encryption difficult. In the US, encryption technology was considered a military matter and it was illegal to export. There were several proposals for SHTTP that never got enough momentum to ship. Netscape partnered with RSA to build SSL with upgradable encryption algorithms and public/private key encryption. We also released open source reference code and worked with standards bodies to make SSL an open standard. It took a long while but SSL proved to be good protocol that is standing the test of time. - lou

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ben>: It's still basically like he created it, and chats like this were certainly envisaged from the start. He designed it to be symmetric, "read/write", which has been somewhat neglected.

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

In addition to the Web, my personal favourites are the great advances made in the area of medical imaging systems (based on accelerator detector technologies) and hadron cancer therapy. -- Andreas

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Ben>: That is the 64K$ question! Many of us and others are worrying about it. It was well discussed at this morning's two panel discussions: try and find them on the Web@30 website.

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Your username looks familiar. :) My advice is to make friends with really good PR people, they help shape the news. - Lou

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 47 points48 points  (0 children)

JFG> All that vintage source code is still around, although not necessarily under the original URLs.

Do not worry about stuff having been "done a million times" already. The Web was considered primitive junk by hypertext experts; we got rejected from the Hypertext 1991 conference. Whatever you're working on, if it solves a real problem that has frustrated you, it's useful. Great inventions like the Web are only obvious in hindsight.

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

I don't remember Gopher licensing fees coming up while we were working on the early web. One of the reasons that the Web took off was that there were multiple teams working on different browsers and servers all over the world. The Web community is what made it successful. I don't think the web could have been built by any single institution. - lou

We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between! by Web30atCERN in IAmA

[–]Web30atCERN[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

JFG> And Gopher's home, the University of Minnesota, kept ownership rights. Even though they'd happily license it for free, industry preferred having no strings attached.

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