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Another bucket of fuel to my pool of reasons to think the "Cloud" is misguided. Last time in a Pycon conference in Beijing, 5/4 speeches were about new cloud o

• uptown 14y ago
  VLC was available on the App Store for a very limited time. It was pulled over licensing issues: http://obamapacman.com/2011/01/vicious-nokia-employee-gets-vlc-removed-from-apple-app-store/ http://obamapacman.com/2011/01/vicious-nokia-employee-gets-v...
  • crististm 14y ago
    This makes it even more important that people should not trust Trojan horses in the form of "clouds". I happen to agree with the EFF position on this.
  • rmc 14y ago
    Wow that's a biased and skewed article. The truth is Apple do not allow GPLed software on the App Store, and hence do not allow easy install of GPL software on iOS (iPad & iPhone). Microsoft are fine with people installing GPL software on MS Windows OSs. The problem is Apple's strict rules about licencing and software installation, not a "vicious Nokia employee who just doing it because Apple & Nokia are compeditors". I assure you, there are many Free Software/Open Source developers who are ethically and morally opposed to the App Store idea.
    • aw3c2 14y ago
      From what I know the issue is that the App Store adds some DRM that the GPL would require to be open-sourced. Might be wrong though, I only have a vague understanding.
      • rmc 14y ago
        AFAIK one of the problems was that Apple disallow certain actions (like commerical usage) for software via the AppStore. You can only distribute GPL software written by someone else if you don't add any extra conditions. Apple won't distribute it via AppStore without the "no commerical usage" rules, so Apple can't carry it. DRM is fundamentally incompatible with open source licences like the GPL. You almost certainly cannot distribute other people's open source code with DRM. Other people wrote code and developed software that they'll give you the right to copy it under copyright law if you follow their rules. The AppStore does not meet those rules.
      • yoshamano 14y ago
        From my under standing that's pretty close. More specifically it has to do with the GPLv3's concept that the hardware cannot limit what you can do with the software. Its why the only GPL software still in OS X is GPLv2, and the only reason its still there is because it hasn't been replaced with a BSD licensed equivalent yet. The largest example of this is probably CLANG. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang
    • superuser2 14y ago
      Apple is also fine with people installing GPLed software on OSX. They just don't distribute it themselves.
      • 0x0 14y ago
        Oh, but they do. http://opensource.apple.com/source/bash/bash-86.1/bash-3.2/COPYING http://opensource.apple.com/source/bash/bash-86.1/bash-3.2/C... :)
    • bitcartel 14y ago
• ebiester 14y ago
  Two (sets of) questions. 1. What do you do if your house burns down? What happens to the documents you care about most? Do you keep a USB drive in a safety deposit box and retrieve it regularly? (I have a local USB backup, and I have a remote backup through the cloud.) 2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment?
  • meaty 14y ago
    What I do: 1. fire safe. 200kg one. Usb stick in it, although I'm considering switching to DLT. USB stick in my bag. Both encrypted with truecrypt at moment. 2. Do without it. Got a moleskin with everything useful in it. note: I use a film camera and have cds so my media load is quite low. Negatives live in the fire safe and I have a list of cds in a text file so will just buy them again. I also bin emails. My data volume is approximately 800mb. Not much.
  • mbell 14y ago
    > 1. What do you do if your house burns down? I backup important stuff encrypted to S3 with a script. > 2. Do you have this local cloud poked out to the outside? How do you handle security? Is there a simple web interface that you can get to something when you're away from the house and your personal equipment? I use pfSense [0] as a router / security appliance running on a Atom based micro ATX board with a 4 ethernet ports. I connect remotely using OpenVPN terminated at the pfSense box and use Viscosity [2] on the client side. File storage is on a FreeNAS [1] server. Very easy to setup if you have basic networking knowledge. The only downside is that there is no built in support for OpenVPN in iOS. There is an app that handles it if your device is jailbroken. [0] http://www.pfsense.org/ http://www.pfsense.org/ [1] http://www.freenas.org/ http://www.freenas.org/ [2] http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/ http://www.sparklabs.com/viscosity/
    • ebiester 14y ago
      I was making a point that you're using the cloud if you're doing remote backup, with point 1.
• Zirro 14y ago
  I use StreamToMe (http://projectswithlove.com/streamtome http://projectswithlove.com/streamtome) on iOS, and there are a number of similar apps.
• mbell 14y ago
  > (I have no idea on iOS, I suppose it is even worse, do they have VLC on iOS?) iOS's built in players will play arbitrary media files as long as the codecs are supported, you just need to have a file browser application that can open it locally or on an SMB share. I use one named 'FileBrowser'[0] on my iPad that has worked well so far. [0] http://www.stratospherix.com/products/filebrowser/ http://www.stratospherix.com/products/filebrowser/
• nzmsv 14y ago
  I found DLNA to be a better solution than SMB for this application, though it will still need a separate app on Android. minidlna should be a good fit for the Raspberry Pi. Apple is doing things their own way (DAAP), but you could probably run a DAAP server as well to cover all clients.
  • aes256 14y ago
    DLNA is awesome. I have a DLNA server set up to share my music, films and tv shows around my home network. All my TVs are DLNA enabled and on the network, and I just use NFS to access files from my desktop/laptop.
    • lysium 14y ago
      Off-topic: may I ask, which software is your DLNA server running? I'm trying to setup sth. similar.
      • aes256 14y ago
        Serviio is my current favorite. Was a breeze to setup on my file server (running Solaris for ZFS support; installing software is often unreasonably painful), actively updates its database as new files are added, and allows me to administer it remotely using the Serviio-Console GUI (e.g. to change the folders it scans, update profiles for clients, the directory structure it presents to clients) For a barebones implementation, minidlna is a fantastic piece of software. I see MediaTomb recommended a lot, and I'm sure it's fantastic, but I've never managed to get it setup properly.
        • lysium 14y ago
          Thanks a lot!
  • gbog 14y ago
    Yes, I think my next step is to give DLNA and UPnP a try. What I like with SMB is that it is a barebone tree of files, and so I get a better control than with tools needing a database, a protocol or anything more.
• StavrosK 14y ago
  I don't understand what the cloud has to do with the post, but you can run an HTTP server on your Raspberry Pi, and all the players I have on Android (mainly MX Player) work fine. Videos even open right from the browser in the player, without any hassle.
  • gbog 14y ago
    > what the cloud has to do with the post These USB stick stories tell us that, in fine, "existing" data has to have one physical location (or more). The cloud is not magically breaking this "existence principle". Instead, cloud user and data owners (or are they?) are just trusting a third-party service with the physical existence of their data. The fast that people are able to smuggle slices of the Web in SD cards should remind us that issue, as much as the next big data loss or leak.
• rb2k_ 14y ago
  Should people also have their own power plants, wells, car factories and farms? There are certain advantages when you "oursource" your basic infrastructure. As long as inter-device connections are still problematic (NAT, STUN, ...) and as long as harddrives die, I really enjoy being able to trade money for free time rather than setting up a redundant off-site backup system.
  • EwanG 14y ago
    Why not? I mean there are certainly folks doing "off the grid" experiments that are moving this way, and I can certainly see a future where you create enough power for most of your home needs locally, including using some version of a 3D printer to build common items out of stock you have around the house (once they can also accept such). Things that are too costly to build at that scale or require special feedstock could be built by a neighborhood machine (much like mills used to service their neighborhoods), with the feedstock being ordered as needed. Yes, as long as it is massively inconvenient there is a benefit for trading money for free time. But I would like to spend some of that free time making it possible for me to have a choice of my own - rather than a choice for my provider (who likely will eventually decide they need to make a profit).
    • MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
      We're just seeing economies of scale in action. It is cheaper per unit of energy to make a natural gas power plant and sell the power than it is to build a small-scale generator to power one home on natural gas. Once that model is established, there is resistance to local power generation. The same scale works at neighborhood level power generation. (Or construction, or manufacturing) Cost is the difference now between using the cloud and running your own hardware. It is cheaper both in time and money to let a company like Google run your e-mail than to run your own server. So people do it. It is a very simple matter of convenience. I don't expect a backlash until people become mistreated to the point of breaking. I am an enthusiast of 3D printing and I like the vision you've laid out, but I see it always being cheaper per unit to make 10,000 of something than 1 of something. So delegation will continue unless the underlying behavioral incentives, cost and convenience, change.
• piggity 14y ago
  Nothing wrong with using the cloud as long as you really understand what you're getting yourself into. * Use a vendor specific extension - e.g. EBS + snapshots to mount customer data volumes - make sure you can work around it easily if you move to another provider. * Backup data inside the same cloud provider? - make sure you backup the backups in case of catastrophic cloud provider failure - not doing that? then you need to understand what your risk profile is? * Only use 1 provider? What is your strategy if they fail, temporarily or permanently? Where is your data? How do you fail if they fail? So on and so on - these are standard considerations in a business risk analysis / disaster recovery plan - but I many IT shops in the cloud are staffed by people who are great at code, but have never dealt with the vagaries of business practice - not their "fault" - but it is a blind spot I see quite often.
• nathan_long 14y ago
  >> people should use open tools, running on devices they own, storing things on some storage they own and control. I agree with your sentiment that "we shouldn't let others control our stuff." However, that doesn't mean you have to completely forego the advantages of cloud services. For example, you can encrypt your data before backing it up to a storage providers. You haven't lost any freedom there; the worst case scenario is that they don't provide the reliability you paid them to provide. You can mitigate that risk by using more than one provider.