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I think a neat solution is home-serving. A little box with big storage which acts as a hub for your family's digital life. It relays all your devices, gathers a
by scalio 10y ago
I think a neat solution is home-serving. A little box with big storage which acts as a hub for your family's digital life. It relays all your devices, gathers all info they're spitting out, and works on it. Results are fed back to the UIs.
When you're out and about, your devices tunnel home automatically, knowing the endpoint is trustworthy (which is more than can be said about traditional VPNs). All your photos, tweets, posts, and all other brain farts straying into the open world are never sent out directly by the device they were produced on, but by the server at home instead.
Tor could finally work as intended, with millions of boxes in the network, all handling each other's traffic. Add new projects like IPFS, and the whole centralised cloud bullshit starts to crumble. Not just from a privacy pov, but features. Your home box talking to the neighbours' home boxes by itself is a whole lot more powerful than all parties meeting on some obscure server somewhere, although I find myself quickly coming back to privacy when thinking about advantages. I do hope there is room for other big features, otherwise getting this box into peoples' hands will prove difficult.
I see it as a kind of decentralised centralisation: your whole digital life is based on this one machine, but it's in your home, you own it, and you can do with it whatever the heck you want. No ads (!), no monetization of your private data, which stays in your hands at all times, except of course once you share. Still, then it will be in the hands of those you shared it with, and hopefully not huge corporations with little incentive to do no evil (who the hell thought this was an appropriate company motto?).
Most everything for which we turn to Google and Facebook can be done much more privately at home (office things, communication, sharing shit...), except maybe search. I have little problem in keeping Google as a search machine (they do a great job) once they stop waiting for me at every. single. corner, and following me around the bits inbetween. Decentralised search is hard, but I'm fairly optimistic once a basis is laid out, someone smart takes on the challenge (and is able to solve it, too!).
Regarding your last sentence, rethinking our economy isn't a bad idea in any case. Capitalism is fundamentally unfit to be a fair system, and if a socially fair system is what we want, we have to get rid of some ideas (like this infinite growth nonsense, or that education is obsolete. Education, in whatever shape or form, is the only way I know of how humanity is not going to spiral to its (intellectual) death).
- mbrock 10y agoSearch is cool, but Google-style universal search might be a bit overrated. Google still relies on institutions to provide data in indexable form, and those institutions build their reputations in ways that only partially rely on Google traffic. I mean, a competent librarian has a kind of expertise that Google's algorithms don't, so that's one situation to explore for a post-Google idea of finding information (of course it's also pre-Google). The social aspect of information discovery is something that Google and Facebook are kind of fighting over, but fundamentally it doesn't belong to them—it belongs to "us" intrinsically. They shut down Google Reader but they can't shut down the human tendency to share information! And the panopticon information provided by Google is often just a mesmerizing massive overload with no curation, weight, intelligence... Wikipedia is the top hit for so many searches that one could see Google as an interface for it. Add Wikivoyage/Wikitravel, some other community wikis, API interfaces a la DuckDuckGo, social curation, etc, and you might find that the value of Google Search is actually not that incredible.
- scalio 10y agoYes, google certainly isn't the best we can do in terms of finding stuff, but I think the sheer amount of data they're gathering enables the algorithms to appear more intelligent than they really are by processing more instead of better (as you say, there is little to no curation going on). This is one of the main reasons I think home serving is a great idea. It enables people with some interest in one another to connect directly, one-to-one, instead of running around in some third party's server. This opens possibilities for exchange and networking on a very personal basis that we don't have today mostly because of privacy concerns (virtual neighbourhoods and the like).
- na85 10y ago>Tor could finally work as intended, with millions of boxes in the network, all handling each other's traffic. Ultimately you'll never escape the fundamental flaw of Tor, which is that I, as a moderate bandwidth user, don't want to subsidize some leech's desire to download weird fetish porn in 4K with my connection. I live in Canada where the scumbag broadband companies all collude to keep prices exorbitantly high, and I pay a lot of money for what would be considered bottom-tier garbage service in e.g. South Korea. I don't run Tor because ultimately I want to use the bandwidth I pay for.