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A Revolution in Your Pocket

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Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket

#61

Post by devoply »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #6

I'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…

I was thinking today why not just create an overlay network on top of the internet that throws-back to a place without corporations or governments?... Back to the 90s internet. With its own DNS servers, etc. Which does not resolve anything outside of the overlay network. So no facebook, no Google, no cloud services... Maybe a user run directory like Yahoo! used to be. Nothing but realms run by webmasters. A walled garden of the people by the people for the people.

Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket

#62

Post by simonh »

sorrowfulgeek wrote: post #31

This is not a new idea. Apple already emphasises that they do all the machine learning on your own device and no data is sent to the cloud. But this approach only works well for a small class of problems. For other types of problems you need to look at data wholistically at a large scale in order to see patterns and you need a cloud service. But more importantly we know that complex services break once in a while. If…

I agree it looks like Apple is the only mobile vendor who's business seems to align well with a vision like this. They're already taking steps in that direction, which are hard for rivals to take because this approach closes off revenue opportunities for them.

Every now and then I see a suggestion we should move towards federated services and mesh networks because it would give people more control and freedom, but the cost of that is complexity. It's like the classic reply on HN when Dropbox was announced, along the lines of why would anyone ever want this when they can 'just' run rsync against an SVN repository?

Any solution that expects average users to become sysadmins is DOA. It was true when people were pushing for it in the 90s and it's still true now.

Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket

#63

Post by NotUsingLinux »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #6

I'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…

Regarding where to get the machine learning data: Check out ocean protocol https://oceanprotocol.com/

Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket

#64

Post by fit2rule »

theamk wrote: post #60
fit2rule wrote: post #58

I 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.

So, I don't put anything on IPFS that I don't want to be able to turn off. Things I want to be able to turn off, I leave on my local machine, and when it is off, things are off. The point is that the OS UI should accommodate this use case just fine.

Facebook/Email: and again - this is a UI problem, not a transport one. If I send a mail saying 'delete the last message I just sent', the UI can do that for me. Its a UI feature, not a bug.

Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket

#65

Post by ilaksh »

I like a lot of these ideas. And eventually it seems like mobile devices is where it could go.

But before we are entirely reliant on mobile, we may be able to do a lot of it on our home computers over the regular internet using decentralized protocols.

But back to mobile, does anyone know of any open decentralized identity solutions that will run on a smartphone?

Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket

#66

Post by tomxor »

fwip wrote: post #38
tomxor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure those aren't the expensive 1k phones the author was highlighting. Also the world is bigger than America + China.

They're two separate sentences. Many, maybe most people have smartphones. The most expensive of those have these stats.

> They're two separate sentences.

Right next to each other, in the same paragraph... are you really arguing it is not implied that high specs are intended to be relevant to the authors argument? If so what is the purpose of this sentence?

Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket

#68

Post by dillonmckay »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #6

I'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…

Seems like a good use-case for LoRa, except for video.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa

Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket

#69

Post by dillonmckay »

devoply wrote: post #61
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #6

I'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…

I was thinking today why not just create an overlay network on top of the internet that throws-back to a place without corporations or governments?... Back to the 90s internet. With its own DNS servers, etc. Which does not resolve anything outside of the overlay network. So no facebook, no Google, no cloud services... Maybe a user run directory like Yahoo! used to be. Nothing but realms run by webmasters. A walled ga…

Tor?

Re: A Revolution in Your Pocket

#70

Post by TeMPOraL »

abecedarius wrote: post #56
jcfrei wrote: post #40

This 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.

Cryptocurrencies are special in that, almost from their very inception, they could be used to make money. There are at least four ways one can make money with them: those with access to cheap electricity and enough starting capital can literally print money out of thin air; they form unregulated exchanges to gamble on; they're very useful for scamming people; they're also useful for laundering money and buying illicit goods. These four things give cryptocurrencies a lot of interest and participants.
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