81–90 of 194 posts
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Yeah there's actually powerpoints from the snowden leaks showing how much they ingest per month and how much of that they keep, etc.
So how much do they keep?
I looked at this briefly for a security module for my MSc and from what I vaguely recall they were tapping roughly half of all data going through AT&T on the West coast
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Isn't git decentralized?
In theory, but who uses something other than either Github or Gitlab? Obviously I know some people do, but I've yet to work on a project that doesn't just stick with the one.
But, as you're saying, rightfully, hosting of the remote repository is in the hands of Github. So its not decentralized.
These discussions tend to be like the ones involving 'conciousness'. Until a clear definition of the term is agreed upon, it is impossible to talk about it. Going around measuring with a yard stick requires that the stick is calibrated to a yard and everyone agrees it is a yard. May be you can do some probabilistic measurement (consensus of people whether something is decentralized or not), but it's pretty useless.
I haven't really understood how the "decentralized" comes into place. My notion of decentralization is the existence of multiple instances managed by unrelated people, such that the service keeps going if one actor falls down. From what I see here, the decentralization lies in the fact that the central service stores the data across multiple servers. So it's not technically speaking a lie, but i would say it is a bit…
Centralized: most of the data and compute lives in one place and is controlled by one entity. This is standard issue SaaS, etc.
Federated: anyone can run a server and the servers can talk to each other somehow and either propagate messages or replicate data, but still centralized from the client point of view since each client connects to one or more servers. While anyone could run a server it often requires a lot of administration overhead, storage, and often "peering" permission from at least one other server.
Decentralized: clients are servers and everything connects in some kind of mesh graph.
It's not a binary thing, more of a gradual shift. Bitcoin for instance is somewhere between federated and fully decentralized. Technically anyone can run a node and they connect in a full mesh, but most users don't use it like this and the cost of running a node is at least "annoying" for most people (a lot of bandwidth and storage).
Centralized systems are the easiest to engineer by far but come with the obvious downsides of single point of failure, moral hazard, censorship, lock-in, latency issues if you are not near the servers, etc.
Federated used to be very very common. Classical e-mail, Usenet, FidoNET, UUCP networks, etc. are all federated systems. The old school file server with mirrors paradigm is also a simple from of federated network. It declined in popularity when all the old systems fell victim to spam but is rising again in the form of things like Mastodon.
There are not very many fully decentralized systems in common use. The most well known is probably the BitTorrent magnet network. Fully decentralized systems that are secure, robust, fast, and light on resources are incredibly difficult to engineer.
Edit: if you look deeper it gets more complicated though. Google, Facebook, and most of the other "hyperscalers" are federated systems under the hood but this is all hidden from the user. They are still "logically centralized" though.
It's possible to further break things down by what is decentralized. You can have decentralized or centralized compute, storage, trust, control/administration, and so on.
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Are you looking for Syncthing? https://syncthing.net/
Syncthing doesn't do smart sync. The library of stuff I want available is larger than can fit on my phone.
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There was a propriety implementation a few years ago (written in Rust of all things), but I think it's dead. I think the bigger problem is that both iOS and Android are doing everything they can to deprecate the concept of a filesystem. Android has a history of killing filesystem features, receiving tons of developer backlash, and then hacking in workarounds with reduced performance. I think the writing is on the wal…
As long as Android has a Linux kernel running in the background there will be filesystem access. If Google ends up switching to Fuchsia this might change but we're not there yet. General purpose tools seem to run just fine on Android for the most without the need for much porting as can be seen by glancing through the list of patches [1] needed to build a host of packages for Termux. [1] https://github.com/termux/ter…
[0]: https://www.xda-developers.com/termux-terminal-linux-google-...
Why did you all decide to go with Storj, a fairly centralized distributed storage aggregator, rather than a decentralized storage network like Filecoin or Sia/Skynet?
Who pays for the storage on Storj? For a tool to be decentralized, the user needs a means to pay a node directly and the ability to seamlessly move between providers, ie interchangeable and zero lock-in. Does Storj allow crypto payments and this type of mobility?
Also noticed the app runs on Firebase/Google, are there plans to move away from this?
Who are the targeted users of this? If I want full control of my data, shouldn't I just use a self hosted solution?
On the other hand you can use any other service and encrypt your data first if you just need an off-site backup.