Berners-Lee: No Root? Your device serves others

“The right to have root on your machine,” full administrative privileges to access a device, such as a smartphone, is a “key question,” said Tim Berners-Lee to an audience at the 2013 Canberra Linux.conf.au conference.

“The right to have a root on your car is the right to own a thing that you can dispose of at your discretion,” he said.

Berners-Lee acknowledged that when a regular user has administrative rights on his device, this is a security risk — the applications he installs can inherit these rights and use them to perform various malicious actions.
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“In a situation where there are applications that work on someone else’s order, we need to work on a security model. The JavaScript security model, with cross-site scripting access, is the best we can do at the moment ... If you have ideas, how can we make it more manageable and reliable ... I would like to hear. "

Berners-Lee also spoke against the trend in writing a native application for each platform — one for the iPhone and iPad, another for Android, and so on. This duplication of effort and “boring developers” to write and test the same code on each device, he said.

More importantly, each application becomes an isolated island of information, rather than being connected to a live Web. “There is no URL above, and I cannot bookmark. I can't tweet. I can not put "like". And I can not put "Do not like." It is not part of the discourse, ”said Berners-Lee.

Businesses should instead use open standards like HTML5.

Despite the bulk of the specifications, the markup language now contains tags for introducing video and other graphics. With the addition of JavaScript and all its APIs, HTML5 can do almost anything that adobe flash or other proprietary web front-ends.

Berners-Lee noted the Financial Times mobile site (http://m.ft.com) as an example of what can be achieved. "After you load the site, it loads all the pages of today's newspaper, sticking them together ... as if they were an application."

“Think of the fact that with the help of HTML5 you can more and more do everything the same as native applications do.”

One of the key problems, however, is the creation of adaptive sites and corresponding authentication systems, with which we begin work on the “wristwatch” and continue seamlessly on the “large wall devices” with much more pixels.