4 ms·

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.
    • kentonv 11y ago
      Agree with all of that. A related and somewhat more tangible point: Having the majority datacenter users using the _same platform_ with the _same apps_ as the pro-privacy users means that the pro-privacy users will have a much better selection of apps to choose from. Whereas today, non-SaaS apps are rather neglected due to their inability to reach a large userbase, but those non-SaaS apps are the only things the privacy-critical users can use.
• muyuu 11y ago
  I wouldn't. Much less if it's in the US.
• ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  It depends. I'm okay with being in a data center if it's impossible for the data center owners to access my data.
• sp332 11y ago
  Not personally. I like being able to make my own hardware decisions. But I'm probably weird :)