The digital revolution has rapidly transformed the world. Along the move from whale-sized computers to plankton-sized chips, our lives have been impacted in countless ways and as evident from our plunge into the next wave — AI, IoT and automation — the surge is ongoing. And yet, the technology that has largely powered this evolution has not paralleled this progression in its own maturation.
Today, we still use the archaic internet infrastructure that was devised at the energetic end of the previous millennium; moreover, operating systems even now approach the internet as an application rather than considering connectivity a core component alongside processing and storage. Consequently, we find ourselves vulnerable to hackers and bad actors, big tech and large corporations**,** and invasive regimes.
To ensure our safety, to bring the power of data back into the hands of its rightful owners and to lay the foundation for a transparent platform that will enable numerous new economies to emerge and flourish (and established ones to evolve), massive modifications are being made.
There is a pair of frontrunners in this era-defining movement toward digital liberation: Solid and Elastos. Two open-source projects, sparked by passionate leaders driven by an extraordinary vision, that will be developed for and by the people to change the world (wide web).
A SILK PATCH
One of these visionaries is Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web as well as founder and director of the W3C: the consortium composed of multiple member organisations collaborating in the development of standards for the World Wide Web.
Over the years, Berners-Lee has shared his views on the polarity of his invention and in a recent post the knighted professor penned that “for all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas**.**”
The technology that brought us bold memes and “Nigerian prince” schemes rode the road to adoption with such velocity that we’ve deviated from the web as he envisaged it and moved into a place where underworking overbearing middlemen spy on and profit off our every action.
It is for these and many other substantial reasons that Berners-Lee and his peers have spent a decade and a half working on a solution, culminating in an exciting new project built to change the way we interact with applications: Solid.
Solid is a framework for developing decentralised applications. In the Solid ecosystem, all data is saved in personal online data stores. These PODs give users ownership of their data and control over which parties are permitted to read or write to parts of them. Photos and videos, chats and comments, documents, calendar events and your details can all be saved in your POD, which could be located on your home/work device or on a community-hosted Solid server.
Naturally, Solid’s functionalities require identification to handle permissions. This will be provided by your Solid POD, allowing you to use it to as a login across the web.
With data safely stored in PODs, anything saved through one application is available in another. A sight for sore eyes for the little fish as this allows for development without having to garner gobs of data, much of which currently quarantined by big tech — blood clots obstructing the flow of the blood of the web.
To illustrate, let’s compare the experience and background workings of a hypothetical social media application on Solid with Facebook’s (farming) process.
You sign up for a Facebook account: fill out the form and send your first batch of details to their data centers. You make friends, visit profiles and so on, all the while your interaction with their content feeds back into your “data image”, Facebook’s characterisation of you. This data image is continually being updated; your moves are monitored even outside of the Facebook (web) application. The accumulated information stored on their servers is used to serve targeted ads in the front and put to more nefarious use in the back.
In the Solid realm, you sign up without having to fill out your details, these can be read from your POD. You visit a profile and upon receiving permission (like an accepted friend request or joining a group) the application retrieves and displays the data from the profile owner’s POD.
That’s it.
The social media application is reduced to a layout, simply providing the environment for your online socialising — without gaining access to or being in control of any data. You can then opt into sharing certain data with the application, for instance, allowing access to your music library to receive tailored discounts on live shows or merchandise, turning your data into goods.
Fortunately, moving projects into the Solid ecosystem will not be an uphill battle: the framework works on top of widely used W3C protocols. To further aid adoption, Berners-Lee and business strategist John Bruce founded Inrupt, a VC-backed company focused on stimulating Solid’s development, providing support on both creative and business end.
Solid seems simple and on the surface, it is**:** PODs protect our privacy and the Solid framework turns us from the supply into the suppliers (in the data economy). In many ways, this project realises the web as originally envisioned without sacrificing any of the progress we have seen.
Still, there is a seminal conception that won’t leave our views on Solid unsullied for long; a grand undertaking that will take us from an unprotected web of information and sites to an impregnable web of assets and applications.
THE LAST OS
The brainchild of Rong Chen is the creation of a man well ahead of his time. After spending most of the ’90s working as a senior software engineer at Microsoft, Chen and some of his peers presented a proposal for what we can call an inkling of his masterpiece to company executives in ’99. Microsoft rejected the notion at the time, though years later — after a failed Windows Vista — the company applied its basic principles to Windows 10, successfully achieving the universal application, working across phones, tablets, computers and televisions**.**
Chen chose to pursue his dream of building his own operating system and moved back to China at the dawn of the new millennium to found Kortide Corporation. After years of low peaks and deep valleys, including the release of their state-of-the-art smartphone painfully coinciding with the onset of the Android and iOS era, the company was sold to Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer and coincidentally makers of the iPhone. In 2012 — with Foxconn’s support — the team decided to focus their efforts on providing a secure operating system for the industrial IoT, albeit not reaching production.
While their technology slowly matured over the years, it wasn’t until 2016 that things started coming together as Chen and his team discerned blockchain as the missing link. Integrating this novel technology with a distillation of two decades worth of code and perseverance has magnified the original scope of Kortide and led to what is likely the greatest endeavor on and for the internet since the invention of the World Wide Web: Elastos, the world’s first open-source internet operating system.
Rong Chen’s view on the next phase of integration of the internet:
What worries me is that we are now moving to build really safety-critical applications on top of this “broken” infrastructure.
Let us take autonomous cars as an example: how can we make sure that our loved ones are not hacked when they are being shuttled in an autonomous car? That was one of the triggers for us to realise that we will need a paradigm shift in networking for this class of applications. Instead of relying on the classical Client — Server architecture, over the past years we have developed an operating system for the distributed web**.**
Built as a secure decentralised infrastructure to safely link smart devices worldwide, Elastos provides the invulnerability required for crucial cases, such as medical data, governmental elections and autonomous vehicles, and applies it to the entirety of the new web, down to the smart-coffeemakers — making IoT pry-risk-free.
Elastos’ approach eliminates the threat of viruses, Man-in-the-Middle, DDoS and many more cyber attacks, and makes the new web censorship-resistant, while maintaining the ability to purge bad actors**.**
Projects built on or ported to the infrastructure can leverage its unprecedented capabilities to many ends, including platform agnostic development (so applications could run on any device that’s connected to the smart-web) and genuine digital scarcity (like limited edition albums or e-comics).
And like in the Solid ecosystem, Elastos allows for the privatisation and subsequent monetisation of data. Furthermore, original digital assets (videos, music, games, e-books, designs, etc.) can be monetised without middlemen taking sharp cuts, while purchased items can be sold secondhand, bringing resale economy to the digital realm.
The smart-web infrastructure achieves all of this through an astute amalgamation of the Elastos Runtime, Elastos Carrier and Elastos’ blockchain architecture — the fortress, the road system and the keepers.
Imagine, every smart device is a piece of land. A fortress lies on each piece of land, this is a safe space in which all work takes place: the Elastos Runtime.
The Elastos Runtime is the virtual machine that applications run on in isolation. This is a secure environment on each device that ensures applications have no direct access to the internet and the hardware, and no contact with device operating systems — extending Solid’s principle of separating data and application into the confinement of application.
The old public freeways have been abandoned; there is a collection of private hi-speed roads connecting the pieces of land to each other. All traffic goes through here and all cargo is transported in properly locked packages — this is the Carrier network.
The Elastos Carrier is the network connecting devices directly to each other (without any centralised servers). Traffic between virtual machines flows through the Carrier’s peer-to-peer pipeline encrypted end-to-end.
Keepers of this imaginary realm are strategically stationed at each fortress and road. The gatekeepers run a tight ship: absolutely no traffic gets past them without authorisation. The bookkeepers are just as meticulous, thoroughly processing and chronicling all open affairs. These critical tasks are performed by Elastos’ blockchains.
The blockchains serve as the trust-zone of the smart-web. Elastos’ main-chain processes monetary transactions and asset ownership transfers, while potentially infinite side-chains fulfill specific functions, serving as adaptable support layers for services and applications — separate from the main-chain to avoid congestion.
Elastos’ essential services are executed on specialised side-chains. Front and center is the decentralised ID-chain**:** the dependable database for the internet operating system, used for identification and authorisation.
By merge-mining with Bitcoin, Elastos’ main-chain gains the immense strength of the most tested and proven blockchain there is. This reliability moves downstream into side-chains that have chosen to merge-mine with the main-chain; applications use either off-the-shelf or customised side-chains and are free to pick the consensus mechanisms (method of validating blockchains) that best suit their use case.
Bitmain, the world’s largest manufacturer of mining equipment, is avidly committed to fostering the Elastos ecosystem and has kickstarted the merged-mining protocol by bringing in the collective power of the two largest Bitcoin mining pools.
From a consumer perspective, using the Elastos operating system is as easy as using the WWW: you log in to your personal computer in the cloud, and from there access your assets and applications — free to browse at will. Terminals could be your pc, phone, smartwatch, VR headset, etc., and peripheral devices like security cameras, smoke alarms and printers are securely connected to your cloud computer as well.
Building on the infrastructure is no different from the current modus operandi; Elastos provides the necessary tools, allowing energy to flow toward creative problem-solving.
Innovative projects being developed for the smart-web include a digital art auction house, a decentralised game distribution platform, and WeFilmChain — great aim, terrible name — which upon completion will allow anyone to invest in the production of video content (movies, shows, vlogs and so on) for a share of the resulting work, while providing content producers the means to circumvent middlemen like distributors.
IoT and file storage, integral ingredients of the infrastructure, are being developed in collaboration with the ioeX and Viewchain teams, respectively.
ioeX is an Internet of Things platform with its roots in Elastos ground. Together these projects break all adoption barriers for IoT: bringing security and privacy, device interoperability, governance and a clear business model to the space.
Viewchain is a distributed file storage system for the smart-web — powered by Zapya, a peer-to-peer file transfer application. Boasting an impressive 500+ million users on Zapya; ViewChain has set the goal of bringing one million of them to Elastos’ decentralised ID-system by the end of 2018.
All in all, adoption is moving along well, and the Elastos Foundation’s own target for the end of the year, 40k Carrier nodes (connection points in the network), has been surpassed greatly with the network standing at around 400k active nodes at the time of writing.
The ingenious infrastructure is expanding rapidly; growing more robust on a daily basis, and Elastos has attracted various high-level teams and companies to utilise newfound possibilities for the creative tackling of a variety of subjects.
It is but a matter of time before we turn the tide and leave the shark-infested waters of the WWW to safely surf on Elastos.
POST MARK
Two spiders hard at work: one fixing the old web for today, the other building a new web for tomorrow. Solid describe their PODs as secure USB sticks for the web; Elastos is the fortified infrastructure for a global decentralised network computer.
While Solid has the right idea of returning ownership and control of data to the individuals and groups that it belongs to, we must recognise that the “social linked data” framework is designed to fix only one thread of an inherently insecure old web**.** This is not for naught as the well-implemented separation of data and application provides a prompt patch for our present-day data predicament while Elastos lays the groundwork for the transition into a new web; designed to not catch bugs, with fault-free security, trust-less privacy, and economic freedom weaved into it silky-smoothly.
Though Solid and Elastos were pulled out of great minds, an even greater power resides in the people of varying talents that commit to pushing these open-source projects to their maximum potential.
Elastos, especially, has taken this sentiment to heart, sensibly preparing for an unprecedented method of governance to commence in August 2019; the Elastos Foundation will relinquish its authority and merge with the community to run the world’s wise web under the Cyber Republic banner: as Elastos’ Chief Marketing Officer put it, “an online country that will enable entrepreneurs and developers to democratically build the new internet.”
**Channel your inner spider:**solid.inrupt.comelastos.orgcyberrepublic.org