I've been thinking about this in light of recent events. I was going to blog about it but I'll jot down my thoughts here. At the moment we have companies makin

I've been thinking about this in light of recent events. I was going to blog about it but I'll jot down my thoughts here. At the moment we have companies making all sorts of set-top boxes, games consoles and media boxes which come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. It seems to me that we can rely on corporations to build user friendly devices for us to consume media. What we (as citizens) rather than as consumers need is a comms box or a social box or whatever it gets called. Some mentioned "personal data box" on here or words to that effect. We want (I'm going out on a limb to speak for other around here) secure, federated and private communications: chat communication (instant messaging), mail communication (email), audio communication (voice over ip), video communication (video over ip). Also we'd ideally like our digital social interactions kept secure, federated and private. Finally secure and private online storage of documents would be nice if only for convenience. And to top it all off what would be super-delicious would be a workable single sign-on thingy for the internet age. Please, pretty please? We only have to solve this once. We're at the threshold of the digital age, future generations will thank us for solving these problems when the issues cam e to a head (as they are now). What is needed for all this is _open federated protocols_. And the corporations that flog proprietary offerings have to embrace these protocols. As far as I can see we have those protocols for email (smtp+tls+...?), for voice over ip (sip), chat (jabber?), social (open soical?), online document storage (?), single sign on (openid?) We need all this in a box that people can just connect to the net via their router using wifi or whatever. We need it to be peer to peer so that large portions of it cannot be bought out and centralized after the fact. We need to shout loudly when companies roll back on support of open protocols. We need this in a box. My personal social comms box. I dunno. It seems like a huge but vital need. But we only need to get it right once. We can't trust those in power not to abuse this tech, there will always be an erosion of checks and balances so we need to build a technical solution while we struggle for better social and legal norms. Who's with me?