So far the "real name" policy is the only major, undemocratic, incident that I've seen from a centralized online service. Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers?
Nonetheless, I agree with him that we need to make decentralized computing practical. The best example I've seen of this is Opera Unite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivshJ-qyg5w
There is also Freenet, but so far (from reading their mailing lists) they are discussing about changing their load management. I've tried Freenet and it slows down my machine (not very practical), but it is the only software project I've seen that distributes the hosting of digital content among peers instead of a centralized server: http://freenetproject.org/
So far the "real name" policy is the only major, undemocratic, incident that I've seen from a centralized online service. Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers?
Easy access for law enforcement, easy access for the NSA, CIA, FBI, everyone else. The attack on Gmail by Chinese hackers used the interface that Google provides to law enforcement to use. There's also the commercial access part. Some companies sell their centralized databases to 3rd parties.
About freenet; it encrypts all network traffic so that no one else knows what is being transferred. That causes quite a bit of a slowdown. Also, it's Java and on some machines it can use up a lot of RAM, especially on older machines.
The alternative is encrypting your emails and letting GMail store that. The problem with that is that they still know when you sent an email, and who you sent it to. Just the fact that your email is encrypted can be taken as sign of guilt by law enforcement. But it's still an option.
> The alternative is encrypting your emails and letting GMail store that. The problem with that is that they still know when you sent an email, and who you sent it to. Just the fact that your email is encrypted can be taken as sign of guilt by law enforcement.
Not sure but thinking back to those Chinese hackers they might be interested in knowing who's talking to who.
It's also useful for anyone who wants to smear someone else. "Oh politician so-and-so is talking to such a person in secret, I wonder what they're saying".
Diaspora was/is a hint of the future for distributed social networks, but too bad it was/is a bit poorly executed.
To be honest, I had hopes that Google+ would be part of an open platform with federation, considering Google Talk already uses XMMP and Google Buzz used OStatus partially (just for broadcasting, not for receiving, though). I even commented about that, right here on HN.
The real-names policy changes all that, I lost my hope on Google leading a social network decentralization, so it's all a bit sour for me.
http://norayounis.com/2008/11/04/308
The impressive flickr account of blogger and friend Hossam el-Hamalawy
is facing censorship by flickr themselves! First they disabled
pro-palestine photos he had taken in Ireland, then they started
searching their old drawers for reasons to un-list his account from
public search.
decentralization-stories
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009100.html
The most credible voice in the Ossetian war, he tells us, was a
Georgian blogger who’d fled Abkhazia for Russia. His LiveJournal
account was highly critical both of Moscow and of Sakashvili, and was
widely read in the Russian blogosphere. But a flurry of denial of
service attacks, launched by a set of zombie computers likely
controlled by Russian hackers, disabled LiveJournal for an hour, and
forced the owners of LiveJournal to ask the blogger to leave the
service so that future attacks wouldn’t take down the platform. He
moved to Wordpress, but had the same experience. If governments are
able to unleash attacks that can disable whole platforms, it’s likely
that they’ll successfully silence many online voices.
decentralization-stories
http://elphabawest.blogspot.com/2008/12/microsoft-live-has-n...
Microsoft Live blogging used to support anonymous commenting, but they
were tracking the commenters’ identity --- and when they turned off
anonymous commenting, all the previously-anonymous comments became
non-anonymous. decentralization-stories
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1617
Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse
(AOL deleted a lot of people's web pages with scant 4 weeks' warning)
decentralization-stories
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/googles-lack-transpera...
Earlier this month, Google removed Grooveshark’s popular app from the Android Market for violation of the Android terms of service, later informing Grooveshark that the removal was related to a “complaint from the RIAA" but nevertheless refusing to provide an actual legal or policy basis for the takedown.
Nonetheless, I agree with him that we need to make decentralized computing practical. The best example I've seen of this is Opera Unite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivshJ-qyg5w
There is also Freenet, but so far (from reading their mailing lists) they are discussing about changing their load management. I've tried Freenet and it slows down my machine (not very practical), but it is the only software project I've seen that distributes the hosting of digital content among peers instead of a centralized server: http://freenetproject.org/