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Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

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Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#141

Post by righthand »

> Whether these providers are strictly cooperatives in the formal sense isn't what's most important here though;

I think the context of “encouraging people to switch” to a pds/solid/data coop, how they operate IS important. For two reasons:

- data coop and controlling data opens the door to a new market if we’re going to join data coops, then we may as well try to share the profits from said coop fairly. Otherwise Facebook can step in as a “data-coop” and keep-on-keeping-on

- a secondary effect is that now there is an incentive to move off facebook. If I can join my local Nowheresville.USA.town data coop and benefit directly to my community by storing data together then I am encouraged to switch to this new paradigm

That is the major undiscussed shift to me. I believe the only way out of the Big Tech dystopia is to incentivize the switch. Even if the reward is pennies. Invest in the community oil well.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#142

Post by AdrianB1 »

dd_xplore wrote: post #72

When I was a kid, a 4GB pendrive was a huge thing for me. I used to think my 40GB HDD would never fill up, but then Internet started to grow. Today it doesn’t even matter how muc storage you have it’ll always fill up. I have started to self host quite a lot of stuff but eve then every storage solution has a life of 5-6 years in which atleast one of the components would fail. We click enormous amounts of photos but th…

I run a NAS, in various forms, for almost 20 years. The lifetime is quite longer, I still have ~ 10 year old drives in the backup NAS built on a Ryzen 1600 (8 years) and the average power supply works for me 10-12 years. The primary NAS is still on hardware that is more than 5 years old, except the drives that I just replaced with higher capacity.

As I find the size of current drives bigger than my yearly additions (personal pictures and movies), I am quite happy with a 10 year lifetime at low usage. I would love some reliable and affordable long term offline storage, but backup tapes and a reader are not affordable and not in common use for end users. Otherwise I would build a tiered storage system with more reliability and even performance (nvme hot tier? maybe).

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#143

Post by AdrianB1 »

didip wrote: post #118

As in self hosting? I love self hosting idea for myself out of principles. But unforunately it will never take off in a huge way because convenience is king. Average Joe and Jane want to install things with as little efforts as possible.

You can self host, but in order to be reachable you need to be discoverable. If the discovery is based on a mechanism that is controlled by someone else that can become an evil party, self-hosting in isolation is not too useful.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#145

Post by mjevans »

oblio wrote: post #137
Dylan16807 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC has pretty much always been free without ads. You make it sound unworkable when it's become so much easier to run over time. And tons of forums are in the same category. Also there isn't a way for people to pay their share of server cost for services like that. For your average non-video communication service your options are paying 0x or paying 50x.

IRC doesn't offer multi device, high availability log archives. IRC doesn't offer a lot things, actually. Fairly sure the standards don't offer persistent identity.

All the things you describe are achieved via 'bouncers' or dedicated clients living in a server that an impermanent consumption device like a mobile phone might be able to connect to.

No, they're not native to the protocol, nor are they required. However it's an open protocol. You are free to pick from a number of solutions that compose that goal.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#146

Post by layer8 »

onion2k wrote: post #136
IsTom wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ and sort by amount, these are not small companies and amounts aren't exactly trivial either, with a mechanism to get bigger if ignored.

Meta appear 4 times in the top 10 with a total of about 2.25bn in fines. That sounds like a lot but it's only 1.6% of their revenue. As a cost of doing business that's probably acceptable to the Meta board. It'd cost them more to do things properly, so there's little incentive to do so.

The fines will increase if they continue breaking the rules, so there is incentive.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#147

Post by xp84 »

pavlov wrote: post #76
InMice wrote: post #26

Among the first page and 2nd page (top 60) there is always atleast 1 post about how we're gonnna "take back the web" or make it back into some form of our 90s millenial nostalgia memories, self hosting, federated this or that, etc etc. Meanwhile - Nothing changes, everything generally gets worse and younger generations come into the world with no memories of the 90s internet or the world before mobile devices or surv…

> “Applying for a job or apartment or anything today means creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc” This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information ill…

Was this posted from a Brussels IP? This certainly seems to reflect how the EU regulators see themselves, but I haven't met many real Europeans who have themselves realized any actual value coming from their laughable, vague attempts at legislating the problems away. The best they've managed is making some Europeans smug, but their data still exists in all the same places. Worst case a few fines get levied, for megacorps that can easily afford them, while small businesses grapple with confusing and vague language that threaten to punish them even absent any actual harms or even ill intentions.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#148

Post by dzonga »

I like the convenience of the cloud. but don't know whether its due to declining literacy rates / awareness etc. the cloud is nice and e.g google storage, iCloud but now with fast microsd's you can buy 1TB for $100. have a few copies then boom, you own your own data. but now phones don't allow you to have microsd's so here we are.

likewise things like email etc instead of all of us being on gmail we could have community email servers etc.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#149

Post by righthand »

browningstreet wrote: post #139
righthand wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment has inspired me to target SOLID and “things I can do to help” on my Sunday afternoon research block. This type of commentary is rife in this article thread and is now just a windmill. Next, please.

If Schneier can’t get more than 13 comments on a solid protocol crypto wallet, I personally don’t think that anyone will ever care about a solid protocol app of any kind. And I’m all for it, just calling it as I personally see it. Some things are fire, some things are warm, and some things are DOA. And I’m typing this on my Linux desktop (f’real). https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/07/data-wallets-...

A Solid protocol cryptowallet. Arcane on top of arcane.

I think it’s entirely unfair to dismiss technology because it hasn’t demanded immediate adoption by society. Solid is attempting to help define a better data future. We have working mechanisms in place but everyone is at a disadvantage except the people loyal to these giant corps. Attempting to give people the power to organize their data as they wish and to be used as they wish is worth it. Even if it doesn’t bring a renaissance.

Re: Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

#150

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #73
xandrius wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If even the people who experience a different time gives up because "nothing changes" then it's truly over. We need to do what we preach: sure, things are worse in certain things but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever. Also I think people forget to realise that the type of people who were online in the 90s are still online, many…

> We need to do what we preach You start. edit: I have no idea what people think they're talking about when they're like "people should just" and "you should just." The cage is not all in your mind, dude; it's an actual cage, guarded by people with guns.

[deleted]
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