Assuming I'm an average user, this revolution would require my phone to double the time spent transmitting and receiving data, and block off a large chunk of its internal storage for information I don't care about. I cannot imagine as a consumer thinking these losses if battery life and data capacity ever being worth it.
A Revolution in Your Pocket
51–60 of 102 posts
Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket
#52Nice write up. I am straying off topic, but I am interested in local decentralized data, machine learning, and apps. I switched to iOS several years ago for privacy reasons, but at least a few years ago it was a nuisance to permanently install one’s own apps on your iPhone. My iOS developer account expired a few years ago so maybe this has changed. It seems important to be able to build apps from source code and inst…
I've been using a de-Googled Blackberry KeyOne. I adore the keyboard, and Blackberry is pretty low on apps with undisclosed and/or non-standard permissions[1]. Root's unavailable, but disabling everything down to, and including, Play Services, is good enough until the Librem 5 is available.
At this point I'm down to a minimum of apps from the yalP store (Firefox, Whatsapp, Signal, Wire, VLC), with everything else on F-Droid.
AndOSM is more than good enough for me; either it's right there within a search, or I find a website with an address, and add what was missing at my earliest convenience. It's not perfect, but data seems to be added faster than the world changes, suggesting Google will have to innovate or lose their lead in accuracy/completeness.
[1] http://eprints.networks.imdea.org/1959/1/An_Analysis_of_Pre-...
Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket
#53I'm definitely sympathetic to the ideas described in this article. I strongly feel that software should be designed to serve the interests of users, and running locally is structurally necessary to accomplish this. For some applications, it seems plausible that mesh networking and cooperative routing could potentially replace centralized communications infrastructure. It's probably OK if an email takes half an hour o…
>so anything that's already challenging current infrastructure, like livestreaming video, is right off the table
For a wireless mesh... yeah, probably. But if you relax the requirements to include things like small home servers (still using the internet), things that challenge centralized infrastructure can be very doable.
With good network connectivity, there are things that decentralized services already do better than centralized ones. Distributing files to a large group of people is much easier with BitTorrent than hosting the files directly would be; the bandwidth requirements are themselves less centralized in a peer-to-peer system.
Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket
#54A phone is good for talking to people. Don't need a computer for that. Much better audio (analog) would be a plus. I'd use a mobile-sized computer with no radios, just ethernet, USB (for a keyboard) and HDMI (monitor). Putting both in one package? just asking for troubles.
> I'd use a mobile-sized computer with no radios, just ethernet, USB (for a keyboard) and HDMI (monitor).
sounds exactly like Raspberry PI? (or any of the 100's of other cheap SBCs)
Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket
#55This is just... weird. We have centralized services for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that they're more reliable than decentralized systems. Phones get lost, stolen, drowned, and crushed. People drive through tunnels or into mountains without cell signal. Batteries die. It seems patently absurd to think that a P2P network of handsets is somehow going to replace The Datacenter, on any timescale.
Maybe there are just certain things that we currently store in datacenters out of convenience which we shouldn't be putting there. Why should my personal communications be stored in cleartext on someone else's servers? (Aside from letting that "someone" mine them for personal information.) Why should my todo list live on someone else's servers? That file that I really just want to move from one computer in my house t…
Well, full text search is really power hungry. Once you have few gigs of email, your phone's local full text engine is going to get too slow. This is a good reason to keep email on the remote server.
That said, your personal communication will be stored on the servers encrypted if you use encrypted chat like Whatsapp or Telegram.
I am not sure why you had to use cloud server when sending files over LAN. I've uploaded videos directly to iOS over ftp server, and Android has tons of apps to sync data back and forth, all locally.
I am not sure why your TODO list needs a central server -- Simplenote does not require login, and it totally happy to keep everything locally. There are integrated note apps as well.
So to summarize: everything is there already. But people prefer to choose a simple solution and use cloud-based service, instead of doing a little bit of work and creating "machines which can function as islands"
Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket
#56This is an idea that keeps coming back every 2 years or so. While it is enticing to think about, these ideas never manifest into anything. With most decentralized projects there usually hasn't been a big enough financial incentive to execute them.
I don't disagree, but... when Bitcoin came out I ignored it because of the long history of digital cash schemes that had failed. I assumed the same forces would give it the same fate.
If decentralized money can finally find some traction, maybe so can other kinds of networks. Maybe the financial incentives are a part of the context that could change.
Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket
#57What about the potential for malware propagation? Why should I trust the mesh network?
Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket
#58I really wish the OS vendors weren't asleep at the wheel on this one, or otherwise being distracted by the effort to just 'move everything to the cloud'.
Imagine if we had an OS that solved the usability problems of IPFS and made it immensely easy to publish content on ones own named segment of an IPFS network - instead of having things like Dropbox glom themselves around a paltry excuse for file-sharing system services that exist in most modern OS's today?
Wouldn't it be grand if someone write an email client - yes, EMAIL - that integrated with a smart contact system, allowing one to run and operate ones own social network without requiring any further infrastructure beyond local, private email services. Everything I do on Facebook, I was once able to do just as easily on Email - the interface is the only difference. I want social networking back under my control again, and a return to email, wrapped in a better local tool for providing the services, is the way to do it.
I also want to be able to turn myself off the Internet - having the ability to turn my phone off and be unavailable to the Internet at large - not just as a consumer, but also as a provider of information - should be a basic, inarguable right.
If the OS vendors weren't chasing the cloud bucks, this would be a reality.
I believe an opportunity for a smart team exists: build a Linux distribution which incorporates a few basic ideological rules:
* The user owns their data
* The user controls their data
* No new services or protocols are needed to provide better services: Use OSI properly or GTFO
* The UI is the final frontier for freedom
* If the user wants to fully disappear: OFF SWITCH
* If the user wants to engage in public discourse: ON SWITCH
* De-centralize all the things, bring control back to the local user always
As the years go by, I feel more and more inclined to start a test-bed Linux distro which uses these rules to build out a user-controlled OS designed for widespread content distribution on the basis of such things as IPFS, albeit with a much, much better UI for maintaining ones assets than currently exists. If anyone else is interested in such an experiment, I am all ears ..
Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket
#59This is just... weird. We have centralized services for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that they're more reliable than decentralized systems. Phones get lost, stolen, drowned, and crushed. People drive through tunnels or into mountains without cell signal. Batteries die. It seems patently absurd to think that a P2P network of handsets is somehow going to replace The Datacenter, on any timescale.
That's pretty much the intent and role of IPFS though. Based upon current saturation statistics for mobile telephone handsets (which has to be 95%+ for every person 15+ years old in the USA at least), you're only a few meters away from another handset that's likely GPS enabled. Why in the world do we need centralized mobile carrier infrastructure when mesh-based P2P comms are now possible over ISM band networks? An I…
Unfortunately Shannon–Hartley theorem is very harsh on mesh networks.
900MHz in US is 902-928 MHz, 26 MHz wide channel. The usual SNR ratio range is 0-40 dB. This corresponds to total bandwith over entire band of 26 to 172 Mbit/sec -- depending on the range. Let's be generous and say 100 Mbit/sec.
You are not going to get any sort of beanforming from the mobile pocket-held device, so your collision domain is going to be everyone around you. Say you are in the park, and there are 24 people around you, and you are all routing packets for each other, so each packet is transmitted twice before leaving the collision domain. In this case, single person's ideal, best case bandwith is 2 Mbit/sec.
In practice, you are not going to get anywhere close to 100% efficiency, so I'd expect internet speeds significantly less that 1 Mbit/sec. This is going to be very painful.
Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket
#60I really wish the OS vendors weren't asleep at the wheel on this one, or otherwise being distracted by the effort to just 'move everything to the cloud'. Imagine if we had an OS that solved the usability problems of IPFS and made it immensely easy to publish content on ones own named segment of an IPFS network - instead of having things like Dropbox glom themselves around a paltry excuse for file-sharing system servi…
Btw, "OFF SWITCH" is fundamentally incompatible with IPFS.
If you serve your website from IPFS, the first visitor will get the full copy and start serving it. You can toggle your switch as much as you want, this won't have any effect.
It's funny that Facebook is much better at giving control to user than email. At least in Facebook, you can delete post. And once you send email, there is no way to retract it.