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> The only conclusion I can make from this article is to avoid services hosted in the USA The thing is, there are absolutely no guarantees it's any better in o

> The only conclusion I can make from this article is to avoid services hosted in the USA The thing is, there are absolutely no guarantees it's any better in other countries : the fact that NSA activities were revealed doesn't mean other countries don't do as bad. It's probably still a good idea to segments services across countries, though, so that it's not a single country who have access to all data. I was thinking something else, lately (and it was really weird to me, since I'm a webdev): why do we need webapps for everything? Maybe we wouldn't have so many problems if we weren't centralizing so much data. There are probably many apps for which native apps and p2p would do.

pdimitar 9y ago
I have asked myself the same. I see two-fold answer: (1) Business who are familiar with web tech and for them it's simply good business to not invest in entirely new (for the dev teams in there) stacks and data formats. (2) Political pressure -- we know that NSA successfully pushed a broken crypto once in the past, so it's not a stretch to theorize that influential people were whispering in the right ears at the right time. Even though #2 is just as likely as #1, please note that I think #2 probably happened much, much less than #1. We should never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence and short-sightedness. EDIT: There are several very good candidates for data formats out there which are much more efficient than JSON. Adoption is seldom an issue; if one corporation pushes for the format, it's a matter of several months at the most before that format becomes widely supported. Replacing JS might be much harder but efforts continue even today.
- oelmekki 9y ago
  Indeed, especially #1. There's a thing with the web : it's easy. If we start making more native apps, especially desktop apps, we then have to consider users' environment (we do not control the execution environment, like with a server), we have to implement error reporting, manage the propagation of updates, etc. Centralizing data is easier too : no need to manage data synchronization, it's just about putting everything in the same database. It seems like we'll have to wait for users to complain more about privacy issues before the effort is worth it, from a business point of view. The alternative, of course, being to find a way to make native apps as easy. Nothing prevent us to make updates automatically apply (many apps do that, actually). Applications can run in some sort of VM/container so environment is controlled. And regarding distributed databases, we already have a good idea of what it could look like with blockchains, even if it would obviously be way better to build something with databases in mind from the start. For example, servers could be used for people to register to a service and be added to groups. Then, clients contact servers to get a list of peers, and then they sync their group database by executing transactions (somehow like migrations).

pdimitar 9y ago

I have asked myself the same. I see two-fold answer: (1) Business who are familiar with web tech and for them it's simply good business to not invest in entirely new (for the dev teams in there) stacks and data formats. (2) Political pressure -- we know that NSA successfully pushed a broken crypto once in the past, so it's not a stretch to theorize that influential people were whispering in the right ears at the right time. Even though #2 is just as likely as #1, please note that I think #2 probably happened much, much less than #1. We should never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence and short-sightedness. EDIT: There are several very good candidates for data formats out there which are much more efficient than JSON. Adoption is seldom an issue; if one corporation pushes for the format, it's a matter of several months at the most before that format becomes widely supported. Replacing JS might be much harder but efforts continue even today.

oelmekki 9y ago
Indeed, especially #1. There's a thing with the web : it's easy. If we start making more native apps, especially desktop apps, we then have to consider users' environment (we do not control the execution environment, like with a server), we have to implement error reporting, manage the propagation of updates, etc. Centralizing data is easier too : no need to manage data synchronization, it's just about putting everything in the same database. It seems like we'll have to wait for users to complain more about privacy issues before the effort is worth it, from a business point of view. The alternative, of course, being to find a way to make native apps as easy. Nothing prevent us to make updates automatically apply (many apps do that, actually). Applications can run in some sort of VM/container so environment is controlled. And regarding distributed databases, we already have a good idea of what it could look like with blockchains, even if it would obviously be way better to build something with databases in mind from the start. For example, servers could be used for people to register to a service and be added to groups. Then, clients contact servers to get a list of peers, and then they sync their group database by executing transactions (somehow like migrations).