3 ms·

Services are forever tainted. And services are the most interesting part of the puzzle. I see it as a plus. But I've been against the very concept of such ser

by Amadou 13y ago

Services are forever tainted. And services are the most interesting part of the puzzle. I see it as a plus. But I've been against the very concept of such services in the first place. I think most centralization is unnecessary, that the reason it is so common today is because it is a straight-forward business plan for a company to insert itself as an intermediary between all of the users and thus extract money (and therefore efficiency) from their interactions. Facebook's the ultimate example. Their popularity is a result of people needing a place to easily host and share their photos. But the cheaper storage and bandwidth get, the less utility Facebook provides compared to a distributed system. I think we are at a point today where high-end phones could host all the content that the majority of people want to share. Combine that with a little smart caching between "friends" so that their phones on wifi can pick up the slack when the original host is cell-only and throw in a distributed hash table for finding new "friends" and the value that facebook provides users by centralization drops precipitously. If these NSA revelations help kickstart a new (but actually old) paradigm where each internet user is essentially self-hosting, then I believe that will be a great boon in the long run.

bhauer 13y ago
Precisely! If there is any silver-lining to the NSA revelations (and there really is not a silver-lining, I'm just using it as a figure of speech), it is that the pendulum is swinging back to self-control of data and applications. I've for several years wanted to see a post-cloud model where an application and data host I control runs singular application instances for me and all my devices are merely views on those applications [1]. I call it personal application omnipresence, and the "personal" aspect is of chief importance. I see the current configuration of Internet services--what I call the "plain cloud"--to be a frustrating diversion, and one that passively or actives suppresses the "personal" aspect of applications. As Amadou points out, the plain cloud is facile because businesses can easily be intermediaries. Oh, it's so difficult to connect an always-on, secure, and self-controlled host to the Internet to share your photos with family and friends? Don't worry! We'll handle that for you. Oh and look, we also get all of your photos and data. But don't you worry, we're good people. Trust us. For years, it has irked me that so many have voluntarily forfeited control of their data and applications out of convenience when alternative models that would provide convenience without sacrificing control are fairly easy to conceive. With equal R&D effort as the plain cloud has seen, these alternatives could be realized. I was angry when Google made their terms of service for Google Fiber disallow home servers. I imagine Amadou was as well. (I don't have Google Fiber, but I want it or something similar with reasonable TOS.) Preventing home servers is just perpetuating the current narrow vision of centralized hosting, and that notion is overdue for disruption. Obviously that's favorable to Google, but I don't really care about what's good for Google. Data centers in general should fear symmetric gigabit+ to the home. I know that without a doubt if I had fiber to my home, I would pull my servers out of my data center immediately and put a rack in my garage. I want self-hosting demystified and mainstreamed. As the pendulum swings back to self-control, anyone who is working to make "self-hosting" synonymous with today's popular verb, "sharing" is posed to earn my business. The model should be embraced by open source advocates. I even suggest Microsoft should leverage the building momentum and be the first industry titan to champion disintermediating the plain cloud [2]. [1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao [2] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft

by Amadou 13y ago

bhauer 13y ago

Precisely! If there is any silver-lining to the NSA revelations (and there really is not a silver-lining, I'm just using it as a figure of speech), it is that the pendulum is swinging back to self-control of data and applications. I've for several years wanted to see a post-cloud model where an application and data host I control runs singular application instances for me and all my devices are merely views on those applications [1]. I call it personal application omnipresence, and the "personal" aspect is of chief importance. I see the current configuration of Internet services--what I call the "plain cloud"--to be a frustrating diversion, and one that passively or actives suppresses the "personal" aspect of applications. As Amadou points out, the plain cloud is facile because businesses can easily be intermediaries. Oh, it's so difficult to connect an always-on, secure, and self-controlled host to the Internet to share your photos with family and friends? Don't worry! We'll handle that for you. Oh and look, we also get all of your photos and data. But don't you worry, we're good people. Trust us. For years, it has irked me that so many have voluntarily forfeited control of their data and applications out of convenience when alternative models that would provide convenience without sacrificing control are fairly easy to conceive. With equal R&D effort as the plain cloud has seen, these alternatives could be realized. I was angry when Google made their terms of service for Google Fiber disallow home servers. I imagine Amadou was as well. (I don't have Google Fiber, but I want it or something similar with reasonable TOS.) Preventing home servers is just perpetuating the current narrow vision of centralized hosting, and that notion is overdue for disruption. Obviously that's favorable to Google, but I don't really care about what's good for Google. Data centers in general should fear symmetric gigabit+ to the home. I know that without a doubt if I had fiber to my home, I would pull my servers out of my data center immediately and put a rack in my garage. I want self-hosting demystified and mainstreamed. As the pendulum swings back to self-control, anyone who is working to make "self-hosting" synonymous with today's popular verb, "sharing" is posed to earn my business. The model should be embraced by open source advocates. I even suggest Microsoft should leverage the building momentum and be the first industry titan to champion disintermediating the plain cloud [2]. [1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao [2] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft