[iDC] Replacing Facebook

Sun May 23 18:42:23 UTC 2010

We discuss some of these issues in our "Liberating Voices" pattern
language book, notably "Open Source Search Technology"
(http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/print-pattern.php? 
begin=125).

One of the technological approaches to these problems seems to be
a distributed solution where the software that provides the functions
resides on a number of machines -- the "poor man's server farm."

I don't pretend to understand the technology but it seems to be an
approach that we should explore. (Which is undoubtedly already
happening.)

-- Doug

On May 22, 2010, at 11:57 PM, Elijah Saxon wrote:

> On 05/22/2010 03:12 PM, Andreas Schiffler wrote:
>
>> What is needed technically in my view, is a personal, encrypted,
>> portable virtual machine (VM) with preinstalled "seed" software
>> supported by readily available hosting services or personally owned  
>> 24/7
>> connected internet devices.
>
> That is certainly one option, but one that I don't think will pan  
> out in
> the long run. The reason is that people will not use a system that  
> is is
> prone to corruption and downtime. Anyone who has run their own server
> knows that they require skill, labor, and regular maintenance to keep
> running smoothly.
>
> Happily, I think there is a secure compromise: put the encryption
> responsibility on the client (a desktop app, a phone app, or even a
> html5 app running in the web browser), and then offload the storage  
> to a
> cloud server that only stores encrypted fragments of data. There are a
> couple applications that work this way now, like the free software
> Mozilla Weave, and the proprietary Wuala.
>
> This puts the uptime responsibility on the sysadmins, where it can
> actually be handled, and allows you to access and sync your data on
> multiple devices and location.
>
> Anyway, if anyone is interesting in the technical debates going on  
> right
> now around turning social networking into a general protocol of the
> internet, you might want to read the archives of this list:
>
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/social-discuss
>
> I think at least one person from every significant free software  
> project
> in this space is subscribed to the list.
>
> The archives are really long, really technical, and really political.
> There are few other technologies where everyone agrees that every  
> design
> decision has huge political implications.
>
> Here is a wiki page with what is probably the web's most comprehensive
> breakdown of current free software projects in this realm, and also  
> the
> relevant protocols:
>
> http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Project_Comparison
>
>> And one more really disturbing thing: If we really want to keep  
>> control
>> over our bits, we would need digital rights management (DRM) for  
>> _all_
>> the content. Because without DRM, it is virtually impossible to  
>> delete
>> something from a p2p system or public cloud.
>
> I think the situation is not so dire. First, it is certainly  
> possible to
> cryptographically grant access to a resource and then to later remove
> access to a resource. True, the recipient may have made a copy in the
> mean time, and you may want very much to destroy their copy. I think
> this is somewhat of an edge case, and not worth building an entire
> social protocol around. If you did want to encorporate DRM-like  
> expiry,
> researchers have been successful at creating self-destruct messages
> using the entropy of p2p distributed hash tables.
>
> -elijah
>
> --
> Elijah Saxon
> Sociology PhD Student
> University of California, Santa Cruz
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Sphere Project
      http://www.publicsphereproject.org/

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution  
(project)
      http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution  
(book)
      http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11601

Douglas Schuler
douglas at publicsphereproject.org

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Sphere Project
      http://www.publicsphereproject.org/

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution  
(project)
      http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution  
(book)
      http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11601