ZLB

We are moving progressively more into the cloud computing world. That means that our data is more and more in the hand of third parties, usually companies, with interests which are contrary to our own.  With the likes of facebook with already risk our personal data being turned over to advertisers, or just being made public due to the privacy policies of facebook, it’s getting more and more tricky to protect our data if it’s in the cloud somewhere out there.

To change this trend we will need to do cloud computing and social networks in a decentralized way. This could be done by having standard protocols that can be implemented by anyone, much as e-mail has functioned for a long time. If you want to have a mail server, it’s easy just install one on your server machine. It can send and receive mail from any other mail server. The same should be true of social networks or cloud computing. This is the idea behind the facebook substitute wannabe, diaspora.

So basically what is needed is that the user itself has it’s own server running, and inside it there is  the social network service, the bookmarks sync server, the calendar sync service, the contacts sync server, and mp3 and video streaming service.

There are two big difficulties here:

1 - Most people don’t know how to setup a server.

2 - Most people don’t have reliable connections with good enough upload speed and a static ip.

Problem number two could be solved by better internet connetions, and in the future we are surelly going to go in that direction (30Mbps in Europe by 2020 is the goal).

Problem number one could be solved by plugcomputing, tiny boxes that you connect to the power socket and to the network and that just work, configured out of the box. See for example tonidoplug . We could then have this little servers pre-configured and it would be just a  question of entering a couple of informations in a simple web page to get it up and running. It would then sync with all computers and mobile devices that we happen to have. This would guaranty total independence from third parties, would protect our privacy much better and give our digital data the same protection from unwarranted searches that the home already had for a long time. It’s a lot easier for the authorities to just “ask” the kinds of yahoo mail or gmail to give them your e-mails than to bust the door of your house down (they will need a warrant for that)

Now it’s a question of making it happen !