181–185 of 185 posts
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Several projects are trying to achieve this: freedombox, yunohost, cozy cloud, sandstorm.io, ...
fwiw, sandstorm is not a business anymore.
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The consequences of that asymmetry go much further than just a price difference. It's about a whole raft of applications that are simply impossible or at best extremely hard. The internet was meant to be peer-to-peer not server-to-consumer. Adding more servers, even at $5 won't change that.
The internet started as a server-to-client effort, and the peer-to-peer nature evolved much, much later. The entire purpose of ARPANET et al in the early days was to give researchers access to national supercomputing centers across the US. If anything, what we're seeing today is a regression to the days of old because large corporations provide centralized value to consumers, and consumers can't pry themselves free.
From the network standpoint it is peer-to-peer as the internet is a network of dumb pipes with intelligence put in the periphery of the network. This is different from say the european minitel network[1] where dumb terminals were connected to a central intelligence.
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Try turning off any of the incredibly invasive features in Android. If you try to turn off constant location, for example, maps starts throwing all sort of cryptic messages at you. You can't use google play without an account. They want to get you to log into Chrome so they can hook up your desktop searches to your mobile searches and profile you. If you've ever used Ok Google, every word you've ever said to it is re…
I actually like what they started doing lately, where the answer to my query is extracted from the page, and shown at the top of the results, especially when it's something simple that I just want to double check. When's sunset today?, what was the name of that movie with surgeon turned spell caster?, how long does it take to go from A to B? Another way to say XYZ? Too many sites are full of crap, so this saves me a…
Way better, and I believe where google got its inspiration, is duckduckgo instant answers: https://docs.duckduckhack.com/welcome/how-ias-work.html
This is just unnecessarily divisive. Look, this is the way commerce works. Checks on corporate behavior come in two realms, legal and ethical. Companies will violate ethics if everybody else is doing it. Companies violate the law if they are the proverbial bad eggs. If unethical practices become normal, the thing to do is to get a law passed. It's the way this has always worked. Laws change the entire landscape of co…
> It's the way this has always worked Definitely not. Just go back a few thousands years and there was nothing remotely close. > The author's recommendation of a world without kings is a fantasy. Only go back 5 centuries or so for this one. This is very well summarized in writings by Etienne de la Boetie in his discourse of voluntary servitude[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitu...
And my point about kings also still stands. Yes, there was once a world without them. In these worlds, everyone had to do everything. Do you really want to be your own soldier, builder and priest?
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You agree with the sentiment of the article but then you're muddying the waters and shifting the discussion from Big Data companies like Google and Facebook to some abstract ideal of freedom and openness. The only "misleading language" that I see here belongs to you. The author is very clear about what disease has infected software development and the internet. I don't remember many spyware as a service and data coll…
On the flip side, I remember arguments twenty years ago about how the owner of a mail server had a fundamental human right to read all the mail that passed through her server. That the processor and hard drive were her property and that any government intervention that stopped that sysadmin from reading, saving, and distributing any of the messages that passed through was the first step to an Orwellian dystopia.
i.e. rights can be voluntarily waived by contract, and users must have the choice to choose who handles their mail, or what conditions (contracts) the agents must abide by to be permitted the job.