Tim Berners-Lee receives Turing Award
Sir Tim Berners-Lee has won the Turing Award. He receives the prestigious award for inventing the world wide web, the first web browser and the fundamental protocols and algorithms that made the web’s growth possible.
According to director Vicki Hanson of the Association for Computing Machinery, the organization that awards the prize every year, it’s hard to imagine the world before Berners-Lee introduced his invention. She emphasizes the enormous impact that the World Wide Web has had and continues to have. According to Hanson, Berners-Lee not only developed the core components of the web, such as URIs and a web browser to make it easier to use the web, but the scientist also presented a coherent vision of how all these elements could contribute to an integrated whole.
During the acceptance of the prize, Berners-Lee criticized the UK’s plans to break encryption. Minister Rudd has previously said she wants the government to be able to access messages on WhatsApp and other encrypted chat services to better fight terrorism. According to Berners-Lee, this has serious consequences. He argues that if the government can break the encryption, malicious parties are able to do so and can even become better at it than the government.
In addition, the British computer scientist has criticized a recently passed US resolution that allows US Internet providers to sell users’ browsing history to third parties without permission. Berners-Lee says in an interview with The Guardian that he is very surprised that the Republicans voted in favor. The scientist sees privacy as an impartial theme that, in his opinion, the Republicans may have fought for even more than the Democrats. According to Berners-Lee we are very vulnerable on the web, and partly from that perspective he calls the new arrangement a terrible development.
A few weeks ago, during the 28th anniversary of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee expressed his concerns about, among other things, the large-scale data collection by companies and the lack of control over it. According to him, the current business model of many websites consists of offering free content in exchange for obtaining personal data from internet users. According to Berners-Lee, we often voluntarily agree to this, even if it often means accepting lengthy and vague terms. The scientist states that “we are not taking advantage of the benefits that we would have if we had direct control over our data and the choice with whom we share it.” In addition, according to Berners-Lee, we miss the opportunity to indicate to these companies which data we would rather not share.
Berners-Lee came up with a proposal for creating the World Wide Web in 1989, when he was working at CERN. He came up with this because he saw that scientists were having trouble exchanging information about particle accelerators. TCP/IP already existed at that time and some scientists were already using the Internet at that time, but the ease of use was still limited. Berners-Lee suggested that scientists at CERN could share documents over the Internet using plaintext and hyperlinks. To this end he designed the http and html, which eventually led to the introduction of the world wide web.
The Turing Award is also seen as the Nobel Prize in computer science. The prize is accompanied by an amount of one million dollars, which is made available by Google.