Tim Berners-Lee's keynote at WWW2005

Tim Berners-Lee gave the opening keynote at WWW2005. He spoke about challenges in keeping the web usable in the face of pop-ups, spam, phishing, trojans and viruses. All the cool algorithms and services being developed are worthless if people are unwilling to use the web because it's annoying and can't be trusted. He challenged that these problems must be dealt with now, before we develop new ubiquitous services based on flawed trust models, and before we move entirely to using the web on mobile devices.

Friends of his family had computers so virus-ridden that after they bought software to remove all the nasty files and programs on their hard disks, nothing was left and the computers wouldn't boot. They bought new computers, with a (wise) change of operating system. Tim doesn't want trojans and viruses on his mobile.

Some random quotes:

• Unexpected re-use is the value of the web
• Firefox is a tremendous improvement on other browsers

He then launched theMobile Web Initiative.

SydPUG meeting: change of location

Tomorrow evening's SydPUG meeting, has been moved to the Australian Computer Society on Castlereagh St, Sydney (between Market and Park Streets -- map).

I'll be talking about "Building Dynamic Video Webs", which involves using web CGI scripts and databases to recompose video, and other fun stuff that we've been hacking on at annodex.net.

So, it's an actual dry run. It's a fair guess we'll move to a nearby pub around 8pm :-)