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And then your laptop gets stolen and everything's gone.
by s_kilk 10y ago
And then your laptop gets stolen and everything's gone.
- freehunter 10y agoOr you shut your PC down when you leave the house and then want to access your network from your phone.
- rocky1138 10y agoHow about this: you buy a physical device at Wal-Mart for $29.99, plug it in, hook it up to your wifi and leave it plugged into an outlet. It's got Mastodon or GNU Social on it and could look like this, but branded: http://thegadgetflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SmartPlug-01.jpg http://thegadgetflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SmartPlu...
- myrion 10y agoThen I have yet another device permanently plugged in and running, at a time where I and frankly all of us should try to reduce our energy consumption.
- shrimp_emoji 10y agoHa. Good joke.
- cryptarch 10y agoA Raspberry Pi is very low-powered though, it's completely insignificant compared to the power used by the webservices you use daily.
- lolc 10y agoI disagree. Google uses 1/4GW worldwide and that's less than a watt per user.
- Zaak 10y agoWhere does that number come from? One data center * 24 backup generators * 3 MW each = 72 MW per data center. Four of those = 288 MW > 1/4GW. Google has more than three data centers.
- lolc 10y agoAh yes, that number is from 2011, published by Google. Can't find the original. But it was widely reported[1]. Assuming that they're doubling energy consumption every year they'd have reached 8GW in 2016. That's 8W per user if we assume 1 billion users. Energy usage of a Raspberry is not insignificant relative to even this. Doing things at scale is vastly more efficient. And only a subset of Google services can be relegated to a Raspberry. Even if you host your own mails, are you ready to ditch the Google search index and Youtube? [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-and-defends-its-use-of-electricity.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-...
- reitanqild 10y agoIf the power consumption of a RPi for each household with someone like us is a major thing then I say we have come pretty far in reducing waste of energy. :-)
- cookiecaper 10y agoPeople don't want another thing to plug in even if it's low-power. IoT is still nascent and I already don't have enough outlets in my house...
- antihero 10y agoIt's always going to be running somewhere.
- Pxtl 10y agoI'd rather see a universal single consumer server with easy download and plugins for all of this stuff. Host my social network, my mail server, my cloud apps, etc. Basically, make social network a part of OwnCloud and sell OwnCloud boxes. Instead of a million small devices, I do one big one... and "big" can still be RaspPi.
- freehunter 10y agoAnd then my internet connection goes down. Power goes out. I run over my data cap for the month. Comcast shuts me down for running a home server. My home network gets DDoS'd. I miss a patch day and I get hacked. None of these things are a concern on traditional social networks. They have to be solved before the world has any chance of moving to a decentralized network.
- reitanqild 10y agoThey have to be solved before the world has any chance of moving to a decentralized network. I say no. Most of them don't have to be solved first. Feel free to convince me that 3 days of downtime on my personal messaging account cannot have my personal account is a problem.
- freehunter 10y agoIt doesn't matter how you feel about it, take a look at people complaining when Google put a news article about Facebook at the top of the results instead of the Facebook login page: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/11/facebook-readwriteweb https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/11/face... These are people who typed "Facebook Login" into a Google search, clicked the first result without reading, and got confused. Now tell these same users that Comcast blocked their social network or that they can't log in on their phone because their home Internet connection is down. If you want a social network filled with just people like you and me, look at App.net or GNU Social for inspiration. If you want average users to sign in, these issues absolutely do have to be solved.
- reitanqild 10y agoStill not convinced. It doesn't need to be for everyone in the beginning. The early web (when I entered and before) wasn't for everyone. And thats OK for me. Actually I think it is a good way to start.
- ReverseCold 10y ago
- corobo 10y agoPutting another barrier in front of it is not what's needed for people to use it. Treat it like email (or heck, early Facebook), get big clusters of users in by convincing universities and colleges to run a campus server. Businesses would also be a good idea but a harder sell
- rocky1138 10y agoI do quite like this idea. And, it has precedence.
- gknoy 10y agoSSB's central premise -- distributed users, making an ad-hoc network connection whenever they are physically close, or perhaps have some network connection -- bakes in an assumption that a user's ability to connect to the network is sporadic. It seems like the system would work just as well for people who decide to turn their system off when they go to work, or are on a sailboat. Of course it's not convenient in the same way that always-on social networks are, but that seems to be specifically not the point of SSB.
- rocky1138 10y agoMake backups. How is this any different than saving photos just in case you spill water on your laptop keyboard?
- ISL 10y agoIt's different precisely because most social/cloud networks abstract away backups. Very few people have considered whether or not they should attempt to back up their Facebook account. Same's true for Flickr, Twitter, and Gmail.
- rocky1138 10y agoMaybe they should?
- nickpsecurity 10y agoMaybe but the person's point stands. Facebook has multiple datacenters with probably some kind of backups. It keeps things for years at a time even when it doesn't need to. It likes to because it helps the business model. Hardly anyone's pics and stuff will disappear. Compare that to their experience at home with personal gear. Many like the convenience and reliability of Facebook over their own technical skills or efforts. You'd have to convince those people... a shitload of people... that they should start handling IT on their own. Also note that there's many good, smart, interesting, and so on people that simply don't do tech. Anyone filtering non-technical or procrastinating people in a service will be throwing out lots of folks whose company they might otherwise enjoy. So, these kinds of issues are worth exploring when trying to build a better social network.
- bigbugbag 10y agoIt only takes one time of having your account locked by facebook or google and said people are automatically convinced of the obvious advantage of being in control of your own data. Same with backups, lose your data to drive failure or theft once and suddenly having a backup strategy becomes a priority. But as long as they have not been bitten once they don't care enough to actually do something proactive.
- rakoo 10y agoIf I understand scuttlebut correctly, your stuff is broadcasted to whoever it might concern and the pubs. If you still have your private key, you should still be able to access whatever is in the ether, right ? You somehow become the recipient of your own messages. Only the thief will also have access to your private key, so the account can be considered compromised.
- AljoschaMeyer 10y agoYep, that's how it works.
- platz 10y agoso, data breach means all your private data is irrevocably publicized. What percentage of users do you think would be affected by such cases? If it's something over 0.001%, it's a huge problem for a social network. Sites like Coinbase and Github exist because they re-centralize distributed systems — users don't trust themselves to host their own data securely. Alternately, if this isn't a problem, why don't users simply host all their own infrastructure for existing tech problems today ? I'm sure someone capable of living in the Mojave Desert is capable of hosting their own infrastructure - is this network simply for those people, or is it also for journalists, trans people, and HR professionals?
- staltz 10y agoThis is a valid point and I don't trust my computer. I would trust, however, a Ledger Wallet http://ledgerwallet.com/ http://ledgerwallet.com/ and theoretically and economically it's feasible to have a Ledger wallet app to sign every SSB message. This would be awesome to have.
- matthewaveryusa 10y agoAnd then you remember you set up an automated encrypted backup to the cloud and thank your past-self. Now is the time to do it if you're not doing this: https://msol.io/blog/tech/dirt-cheap-client-encrypted-online-backups-with-raspberry-pi/ https://msol.io/blog/tech/dirt-cheap-client-encrypted-online...
- bigbugbag 10y agoWhy, oh why do we have smart individuals replacing internet with the word for the visual analogy we used to represent the internet to not knowing better people in position of power ? This is not a damn cloud ! This a remote computer you can access over the internet. Can we stop with this use of marketing lingo please ?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nicky0 10y agoSorry buddy, that ship has already sailed. Terms become popular because they are useful. We all know cloud means "a remote computer accessed over the internet", but that is rather cumbersome phrase. "Cloud" says it in 5 characters. Can you suggest a better term?