Maybe I can't tell whether the author is being ironic, or maybe I'm just old, but this is what we did in the past (10-15 years ago). Turned out to be noisy, unreliable, more expensive than you might think, and generally inconvenient, so hosting companies grew.
Home Servers – The future of the networked world
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Re: Home Servers – The future of the networked world
#12Computing expands, then it contracts, then it expands, then it contracts.
For every pro in any solution there's usually a similarly weighted con, both of which need to be balanced against the users technical ability, requirements, "infrastructure", etc.
There's no such thing as a silver bullet, but it's what makes the game fun.
Re: Home Servers – The future of the networked world
#13my home connection isn't quite comparable to google's; I think this holds for most other americans, too.
The homeserver can always be backed-up on an hourly basis as a fail safe. In case the home connection goes down, the backup server (maintained as a paid service by a company) can be used for a short while. I don't think traffic to the homeserver of any one family can be that huge. Torrent upload would typically have higher datarate than a regular house's upstream.
Re: Home Servers – The future of the networked world
#14I like how the title mentions 'the future' when what he describes is a thing that happened in the past.
Re: Home Servers – The future of the networked world
#15I'd like this to happen, for all of the privacy, freedom and decentralization reasons. I think the only way it is actually going to happen is if computation speeds/prices significantly outpace network speeds.
Take for example an AI that watches your facial expressions and helps you around the house. It might be cheaper/easier to have the computation happen locally and avoid the cost of streaming all of that data to a centralized location all of the time. Then again, having all of the data in one database may provide the AI with enough benefits that it is worth sending it across the wire - with aggregate data, valuable aggregate patterns can be found. It's hard to say at this point.
I have a really hard time seeing people buying a box to support the next facebook ...
Re: Home Servers – The future of the networked world
#16This is a horrible idea. Why would you take the job of computer security, management and purchase away from a centralized source and leave it up to the everyday laymen to handle. You say this would solve issues of privacy, but in fact would be a much less secure form of network and would likely increase the risk of security and potential data theft. I'm a System Administrator by trade and would not ever recommend a s…
There are numerous applications that currently run on our laptops (e.g., dropbox application) that could potentially steal all your data. As we trust third party apps to behave themselves on our laptops, so can we trust the apps installed on the homeservers. With sandboxing now coming to desktop apps (e.g., thru Mac App Store), this problem will reduce even further.
This isn't about malicious applications stealing your data. It's about misconfigured or buggy applications giving people more access to your computer than you intend.
Think about how many professionally developed websites fall prey to SQL injections, CSRF vulnerabilities, server exploits and the like. Nginx recently issued a warning about a big vulnerability in all but the most recent version. Github got owned by Egor Homakov using an old Rails exploit.
And those are professionally maintained. When your average "I'm not computer-savvy, but I can work Microsoft pretty well" user is the one setting up and maintaining the server, how long do you reckon it will be before somebody takes over his computer? My guess is that you're very optimistic if your answer uses hours as a unit.
Re: Home Servers – The future of the networked world
#17You might be interested in SourceForge's RetroShare. Direct encrypted Internet communication of all kinds between computers with no intermediate hosts.
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Serverless, encrypted Chat & Filetransfer
Multiple simultaneous downloads / uploads
Search Friends
Messages
Forums
UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding support
GnuPG Authentication
OpenSSL Encryption
Plugins support
Graphical User Interface written with Qt4 toolkit
System tray integration
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Re: Home Servers – The future of the networked world
#18I'd like this to happen, for all of the privacy, freedom and decentralization reasons. I think the only way it is actually going to happen is if computation speeds/prices significantly outpace network speeds. Take for example an AI that watches your facial expressions and helps you around the house. It might be cheaper/easier to have the computation happen locally and avoid the cost of streaming all of that data to a…
> I have a really hard time seeing people buying a box to support the next facebook ...
what if it would be the next web?