6 ms·

I'm extremely excited by the prospect of personal server management. I dream of the day when "the cloud" will consisy of just a bunch of servers sitting in ever

by danr4 11y ago

I'm extremely excited by the prospect of personal server management. I dream of the day when "the cloud" will consisy of just a bunch of servers sitting in everybody's houses - sort of like a safe - and we will be in physical control over our digital assets. This will happen one day, and I hope more will follow Sandstorm's path.

eljimmy 11y ago
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or... o_O
- sp332 11y ago
  No. The cloud turned out to be convenient, but a terrible idea for privacy and control of our data. Private clouds are currently deployed by companies for regulatory compliance or paranoia. But in the future they could be installed by individuals.
beshrkayali 11y ago
Agreed. I still long for the day where the use of "the cloud" will fade out though, not that it's major issue, but I do think that buzz words contribute to making the whole process more obscure to new comers...
warrentr 11y ago
And what happens when your house burns down? You must have at least two copies ... back to the cloud
- geofft 11y ago
  "The cloud" could mean anything from a server in colo, to a desktop in a close friend's apartment, to riseup.net, to Amazon, to Google. Right now only a few of those are practical, and even fewer are scalable.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Backups are much more practical to encrypt and put in the cloud than the software you're actively using. Though hopefully the software we're actively using can be encrypted too.
  - drdaeman 11y ago
    Well, we're still running machines with - NX bit aside - Von Neumann architecture. Software is still data, just the sort of data that makes meaning for computer to execute. Don't see any issues with backing up the software. I think I've heard of some approaches to conceal the actual algorithm from the computing unit (by obfuscation, or by distributing the actual calculation between multiple units), given that the software we're actively using doesn't do anything secret - and is likely to be a free and open source software, it doesn't make much sense to protect the executable code besides integrity checks.
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      The problem is that if our software on a cloud server has to use our encrypted private data, at bare minimum has to decrypt it, perform operations on it, and re-encrypt the revised data. Which can be resource-intensive.
      - drdaeman 11y ago
        If the server's capable to decrypt the data, unless you use a trusted HSM that keeps an audit trail, it generally doesn't make sense to encrypt in the first place. Especially with anything resource-intensive. When the server has everything to decrypt the data, the encryption only does the obfuscation, not any strong protection. Otherwise, if we talk about - just for example - a receiving mail server (MDA) that has encrypted mailbox storage like [1], then it really depends on how much mail you receive. For a typical personal mailbox, where the steady rate is less than an email-per-minute (and usual email size is some kilobytes, not megabytes), encryption overhead is negligible. Such server would sleep most of time anyway. [1]: https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...
state 11y ago
Wouldn't you rather it be in a data center somewhere? I mean, so long as you could still own the data...
- kentonv 11y ago
  Of course, if you're using Sandstorm, you can easily move between a home server and a datacenter as your needs change. The most important thing is that the app developers and the physical server host are different entities, so choosing an app doesn't lock you into a particular host.
  - state 11y ago
    Right! That's exactly what's great about it. I guess what I meant to point out is that the convenience of having a server in a data center is probably pretty significant for most people.
    - kentonv 11y ago
      FWIW, I generally agree. Particularly here in the US where last-mile internet is terrible. :/
  - yarvin9 11y ago
    Privacy advocates may still envision a world where most people keep their personal servers in data centers as a sort of snooper's Disneyland, because a global adversary could just trawl the whole machine room and get everyone's data. Physically, this is true. But politically, a well-designed personal server ecosystem is more robust than it looks against this attack. The key is, as Kenton points out, server mobility. The server that's your whole network identity has to be able to migrate easily, even automatically, between hosts public and private. One way to think about how mobility makes a personal server more private -- even against a global adversary -- is the epidemiological concept of "herd immunity." For any global network, the percentage of users who demand absolute privacy is small. It works better to host your machine in the cloud. But the costs and pain points of closet hosting are acceptable for this specialty market. What's not acceptable is a situation in which the pro-privacy users form a small isolated network which can only talk to itself, losing on Metcalfe's law. Instead they need to be externally indistinguishable from normal users. Moreover, they need to be able to switch back and forth from absolute to relative privacy -- cloaking and uncloaking, as it were. Normal users care only about relative privacy, ie, security against all non-sovereign adversaries. Excellent relative privacy is available from an ordinary data center. "Linode hacks" happen, but less and less often. But actually, just as the privacy-conscious users can blend into the herd of normal users, the normal users benefit from the small minority of privacy-conscious users. Any global adversary has to assume that anyone with something to hide has probably hid it already. So cost-effectiveness concerns decrease the adversary's motivation to search in data centers. Why would anyone with anything to hide, not hide it at home? Home searches are much more difficult. Moreover, most people computing at home probably have nothing at all to hide -- they are just normal people who care about privacy. So as long as they stick up for their digital rights, the global adversary remains politically quite weak.
walden42 11y ago
See MaidSafe.[0] It's what you describe. They're working on it, hopefully to be released some time this year. You upload something, it gets distributed to random nodes on the SAFE network. Minimum of 4 live copies of your data, and if any of them get taken down, another copy is immediately created on another machine. This completely eliminates the need for hosted servers for most types of apps. You can upload any files, including javascript, which means you can essentially run entire SPA and other applications using this network. [0] http://maidsafe.net http://maidsafe.net

by danr4 11y ago

eljimmy 11y ago

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or... o_O

sp332 11y ago
No. The cloud turned out to be convenient, but a terrible idea for privacy and control of our data. Private clouds are currently deployed by companies for regulatory compliance or paranoia. But in the future they could be installed by individuals.

beshrkayali 11y ago

Agreed. I still long for the day where the use of "the cloud" will fade out though, not that it's major issue, but I do think that buzz words contribute to making the whole process more obscure to new comers...

warrentr 11y ago

And what happens when your house burns down? You must have at least two copies ... back to the cloud

geofft 11y ago
"The cloud" could mean anything from a server in colo, to a desktop in a close friend's apartment, to riseup.net, to Amazon, to Google. Right now only a few of those are practical, and even fewer are scalable.
ocdtrekkie 11y ago
Backups are much more practical to encrypt and put in the cloud than the software you're actively using. Though hopefully the software we're actively using can be encrypted too.
- drdaeman 11y ago
  Well, we're still running machines with - NX bit aside - Von Neumann architecture. Software is still data, just the sort of data that makes meaning for computer to execute. Don't see any issues with backing up the software. I think I've heard of some approaches to conceal the actual algorithm from the computing unit (by obfuscation, or by distributing the actual calculation between multiple units), given that the software we're actively using doesn't do anything secret - and is likely to be a free and open source software, it doesn't make much sense to protect the executable code besides integrity checks.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    The problem is that if our software on a cloud server has to use our encrypted private data, at bare minimum has to decrypt it, perform operations on it, and re-encrypt the revised data. Which can be resource-intensive.
    - drdaeman 11y ago
      If the server's capable to decrypt the data, unless you use a trusted HSM that keeps an audit trail, it generally doesn't make sense to encrypt in the first place. Especially with anything resource-intensive. When the server has everything to decrypt the data, the encryption only does the obfuscation, not any strong protection. Otherwise, if we talk about - just for example - a receiving mail server (MDA) that has encrypted mailbox storage like [1], then it really depends on how much mail you receive. For a typical personal mailbox, where the steady rate is less than an email-per-minute (and usual email size is some kilobytes, not megabytes), encryption overhead is negligible. Such server would sleep most of time anyway. [1]: https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...

state 11y ago

Wouldn't you rather it be in a data center somewhere? I mean, so long as you could still own the data...

kentonv 11y ago
Of course, if you're using Sandstorm, you can easily move between a home server and a datacenter as your needs change. The most important thing is that the app developers and the physical server host are different entities, so choosing an app doesn't lock you into a particular host.
- state 11y ago
  Right! That's exactly what's great about it. I guess what I meant to point out is that the convenience of having a server in a data center is probably pretty significant for most people.
  - kentonv 11y ago
    FWIW, I generally agree. Particularly here in the US where last-mile internet is terrible. :/
- yarvin9 11y ago
  Privacy advocates may still envision a world where most people keep their personal servers in data centers as a sort of snooper's Disneyland, because a global adversary could just trawl the whole machine room and get everyone's data. Physically, this is true. But politically, a well-designed personal server ecosystem is more robust than it looks against this attack. The key is, as Kenton points out, server mobility. The server that's your whole network identity has to be able to migrate easily, even automatically, between hosts public and private. One way to think about how mobility makes a personal server more private -- even against a global adversary -- is the epidemiological concept of "herd immunity." For any global network, the percentage of users who demand absolute privacy is small. It works better to host your machine in the cloud. But the costs and pain points of closet hosting are acceptable for this specialty market. What's not acceptable is a situation in which the pro-privacy users form a small isolated network which can only talk to itself, losing on Metcalfe's law. Instead they need to be externally indistinguishable from normal users. Moreover, they need to be able to switch back and forth from absolute to relative privacy -- cloaking and uncloaking, as it were. Normal users care only about relative privacy, ie, security against all non-sovereign adversaries. Excellent relative privacy is available from an ordinary data center. "Linode hacks" happen, but less and less often. But actually, just as the privacy-conscious users can blend into the herd of normal users, the normal users benefit from the small minority of privacy-conscious users. Any global adversary has to assume that anyone with something to hide has probably hid it already. So cost-effectiveness concerns decrease the adversary's motivation to search in data centers. Why would anyone with anything to hide, not hide it at home? Home searches are much more difficult. Moreover, most people computing at home probably have nothing at all to hide -- they are just normal people who care about privacy. So as long as they stick up for their digital rights, the global adversary remains politically quite weak.

walden42 11y ago

See MaidSafe.[0] It's what you describe. They're working on it, hopefully to be released some time this year. You upload something, it gets distributed to random nodes on the SAFE network. Minimum of 4 live copies of your data, and if any of them get taken down, another copy is immediately created on another machine. This completely eliminates the need for hosted servers for most types of apps. You can upload any files, including javascript, which means you can essentially run entire SPA and other applications using this network. [0] http://maidsafe.net http://maidsafe.net