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You raised some very valid questions. I'm speculating here, so take my answer as sort of sci-fi premise. I think as the internet and IoT grows, it becomes more

You raised some very valid questions. I'm speculating here, so take my answer as sort of sci-fi premise. I think as the internet and IoT grows, it becomes more decentralized, it will be come unfeasible for all these nodes to communicate to some central nodes (i.e. servers), so we will move toward automated peer-to-peer communication, with some simple routing and optimization rules. These of these nodes automatically detect, connect, and communicate with the nearest node. Think of it as bluetooth vs wi-fi hybrid of the future. The aim is to make a more resilient internet by eliminating single points of failure (i.e. AWS servers down), but the end result will be some sort of rudimentary network, that will lead to "emergence" of some sort. I just realized I've been describing "Edge computing".

theamk 6y ago
I cannot imagine this happening in the world we live in. I would not my IOT lightbulb (or worse, a camera) to communicate with my neighbor's house -- there are significant availability, privacy and security concerns. The same way, I remember seeing lots of open WiFi networks, twenty years ago... and now they are virtually gone. Instead, it would be still centralized servers, but with more reliability -- think fiber + 5G backup at home, and multi-region/cloudfare workers approach in the cloud.
- sadness3 6y ago
  There are precedents for this type peer-to-peer operation, where inherently limited protocols achieve a subset of functionality with acceptable privacy implications. For example, videogame distribution clients which download using a torrent-style process.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    I believe there is an option to download/upload Windows updates in the same way.
  - theamk 6y ago
    Sure, but while the data is peer-to-peer, the control is fully central. Those clients are not going to be doing anything without command from main server.
- wintorez 6y ago
  I really don't think we get to decide if we allow this or not. A company like Cloudflare or any other edge computing provider is easily in the position to make this happen, for completely innocent and valid reasons. What I'd like to emphasis is what I'm suggesting will be the unwanted side-effect of this type of peer-to-peer communication.
  - theamk 6y ago
    It'd still be pretty centralized though -- it will be like bittorrent, not like gnutella. Organizations want statistics and usage data. People want to be able to connect from anywhere, even when far from home. Saving bandwidth is useful, but I see no future for de-centralized control. The control connection is cheap and allows a lot of things that would be hard with decentralized control -- health monitoring, staged rollouts, instance security updates. You can see this trend even today -- there are all service meshes like Tailscale, BeyondCorp-like distributed systems, hey, even Google Wifi -- which have central control and distributed data. So even if something strange emerges, once it starts taking up non-trivial resources, it will be logged by central server, detected (by humans) as a bug, and killed with a routine firmware update.

theamk 6y ago

I cannot imagine this happening in the world we live in. I would not my IOT lightbulb (or worse, a camera) to communicate with my neighbor's house -- there are significant availability, privacy and security concerns. The same way, I remember seeing lots of open WiFi networks, twenty years ago... and now they are virtually gone. Instead, it would be still centralized servers, but with more reliability -- think fiber + 5G backup at home, and multi-region/cloudfare workers approach in the cloud.

sadness3 6y ago
There are precedents for this type peer-to-peer operation, where inherently limited protocols achieve a subset of functionality with acceptable privacy implications. For example, videogame distribution clients which download using a torrent-style process.
- Shared404 6y ago
  I believe there is an option to download/upload Windows updates in the same way.
- theamk 6y ago
  Sure, but while the data is peer-to-peer, the control is fully central. Those clients are not going to be doing anything without command from main server.
wintorez 6y ago
I really don't think we get to decide if we allow this or not. A company like Cloudflare or any other edge computing provider is easily in the position to make this happen, for completely innocent and valid reasons. What I'd like to emphasis is what I'm suggesting will be the unwanted side-effect of this type of peer-to-peer communication.
- theamk 6y ago
  It'd still be pretty centralized though -- it will be like bittorrent, not like gnutella. Organizations want statistics and usage data. People want to be able to connect from anywhere, even when far from home. Saving bandwidth is useful, but I see no future for de-centralized control. The control connection is cheap and allows a lot of things that would be hard with decentralized control -- health monitoring, staged rollouts, instance security updates. You can see this trend even today -- there are all service meshes like Tailscale, BeyondCorp-like distributed systems, hey, even Google Wifi -- which have central control and distributed data. So even if something strange emerges, once it starts taking up non-trivial resources, it will be logged by central server, detected (by humans) as a bug, and killed with a routine firmware update.