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Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#61

Post by Geee »

motives wrote: post #56
Geee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managing and using private keys safely is still a huge unsolved problem in general.

If it wasn't considered a solved problem, we wouldn't have public CA's for our browsers to trust, as their very premise is based on having a secure way to store private keys. I think a FIPS-140-2 level 4 HSM and hashicorp vault enterprise will cover 99.9999% of all other use cases for private CA's and PKI.

Security is solved in these use cases, but not usability while maintaining security for personal use.

Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#62

Post by de_nied »

saurik wrote: post #45
Geee wrote: post #42

You can own your data if you use client-side encryption with cloud. When encrypted, you don't have to trust the cloud provider. This opens up new possibilities such as P2P networks with fair pricing, no provider lock-in, equal access and censorship resistance. I'm excited about Sia / Skynet which enables these kind of apps.

That works fine as long as you don't care that advances in computers and cryptography would one day (maybe after you are dead, and likely only with some notable effort) allow someone to read your data and (much more practically) you are extremely confident you can't lose control of your key somehow.

This is if you are storing all your data together in a single location. If you decouple it, using multiple accounts on the host, or even several hosts, you might have some of your data decrypted, but it would be worthless. If you decouple correctly, you should have data that is meaningless without some other data that is hosted elsewhere, on an account completely unrelated and unconnected to your other host accounts.

Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#63

Post by oscargrouch »

pdimitar wrote: post #12
dvt wrote: post #3

These kinds of ideas always get traction here on HN or similar places (slashdot), but I think that ship has long sailed. People, by and large, seem to be totally okay with storing data in the cloud -- from Dropbox, to Google Docs, to InVision. All things considered, data breaches are rare, and if they do happen, they're usually to be blamed on configuration blunders, not the services at large. Other than a few highly…

You seem to underestimate the pressure from the market. At one point the younger generation does not even remember there was a local-first software. Sadly the relentless efforts of the corporations are paying off. That doesn't mean people are okay with it. It means their choice is made for them.

Not just that, but there also a lot of cases that the local-first software will perform much better given the resources might be cached.

If you mix the two crowds: the people that actually care with the people that will just want faster apps, you get a powerful bootstrap traction.

Lets also not forget that things might just vanish and when we are able to collect them and make personal relations that make sense to us, we will want to be secure that things that matter to us wont go away because we are keeping them. Its pure psychology.

The parent poster is forgetting that before we get use of how things are right now in the digital realm, we had to deal with the material world and thats how we shaped our minds. And in that world we learn how important is to keep things nearby and have mnemonics to help our minds that needs to keep so much information that our devices become our second brains.

I'm working on a fancy chromium inspired prototype to tackle this exact issue and just with what i got here working in "prototype mode" i kind of don't want anything else.. it's just.. another level.

Its technologically superior and even ordinary, unaware people will just want this. Cloud have its place of course, but "local-first" will eat a lot of their lunch in the coming years.

Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#64

Post by astrange »

mvzvm wrote: post #29
codemac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most that I talk to do - but it's similar to how they care about the national debt. There's nothing they can do, they have no realistic expertise or control, and they vote with what - dollars once every phone purchase?

I think this is a good analogy, because the national debt is not a good measure of anything. People bring it up at all the wrong times, and takes grandstanding postures around it. Just like this, eh?

At least there might be a reason to care about privacy, but there actually isn't a reason to care about the national debt. There's no evidence the model of it being debt means anything - it certainly isn't household debt when it's in a currency you can just print more of.

And even under the model where printing money causes inflation, we're in a negative interest rate regime meaning printing money would cause /deflation/.

Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#65

Post by deckard1 »

southerntofu wrote: post #41
Spivak wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're giving people enough credit. It's not exactly a mystery at this point that Facebook/IG make their money by selling access to your information to advertisers. People really just don't care which doesn't make them ignorant and doesn't mean they're wrong to not care. We're the privacy obsessed weirdos. I've been in conversations where people talk about products they "discovered" through IG ads. The…

We may be interested in the deep details/debates the general public has no knowledge about. However i can assure you many people care about their privacy. They're not all ignorant, but they're usually powerless. Wanna keep in touch with friends? Gotta use facebook. Wanna watch cool videos? Gotta use Youtube. etc. But there's a very strong movement of non-tech persons for privacy, decentralization and free software/cu…

Malice, apathy, ignorance, or simply don't care. They all look the same from a distance. With the same outcome.

You eat your ham sandwich. But did you hear the pig cry out at the slaughter? The same people reading your comment right now are the same people sticking the knife in you.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair

In 1998 people turned their back on the FSF and joined the "open source" initiative. Everything that has happened since has been inevitable.

Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#66

Post by josephg »

tmotwu wrote: post #47
josephg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern CRDTs like Automerge and Yjs should be able to perform basically just as well as an OT based systems (like my own ShareDB) now. I ran some benchmarks using Kleppmann’s approach a few months ago[1] and I think a well implemented crdt should easily be able to do millions of edits/second. The thing that’s holding us back at the moment is the lack of good high performance native implementations of these systems. B…

If javascript/non-native CRDT implementations are responsive enough compared to existing algorithms for collaborative editing like OT, what incentives or cases exist to demand high performance native implementations? To be clear, I think this is exciting stuff and your article is great. I'm just curious if there are any open research problems in this area that would make them more appealing in production.

This sort of data structure is extremely hard to well optimize in javascript because a lot of the performance comes from finicky datastructure optimizations to keep allocations down in the fast path. JS implementations will be "fine", but I think there'd be a 20+x performance uplift between yjs and a zero allocation style rust/C implementation using btrees / skip lists.

So on the server I'd rather have a native implementation - which would also remove the need to bundle a JS VM in databases. And if we have that, it should be pretty easy to pack the same code into wasm for the browser.

And this is all assuming a JS-native web world. I also want CRDTs for native apps like Bear. And it'd be much easier to use a rust library than link to v8.

Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#67

Post by hippira »

sportsaw wrote: post #53

I love this: > In the Trellis project we experimented with a “time travel” interface, allowing a user to move back in time to see earlier states of a merged document, and automatically highlighting recently changed elements as changes are received from other users. The ability to traverse a potentially complex merged document history in a linear fashion helps to provide context and could become a universal tool for u…

Martin Kleppman has been writing quite a lot about auto merge data types.

Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#68

Post by prophesi »

saurik wrote: post #45
Geee wrote: post #42

You can own your data if you use client-side encryption with cloud. When encrypted, you don't have to trust the cloud provider. This opens up new possibilities such as P2P networks with fair pricing, no provider lock-in, equal access and censorship resistance. I'm excited about Sia / Skynet which enables these kind of apps.

That works fine as long as you don't care that advances in computers and cryptography would one day (maybe after you are dead, and likely only with some notable effort) allow someone to read your data and (much more practically) you are extremely confident you can't lose control of your key somehow.

It's funny that you mention the breaking of keys using outdated algorithms; I booted up my Standard Notes app and there's an "Encryption Upgrade Available" notice at the bottom which has you enter your password to locally regenerate your keys. I could imagine something similar working here, and perhaps let your progeny have access to your credentials postmortem.

Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#69

Post by aklemm »

sportsaw wrote: post #53

I love this: > In the Trellis project we experimented with a “time travel” interface, allowing a user to move back in time to see earlier states of a merged document, and automatically highlighting recently changed elements as changes are received from other users. The ability to traverse a potentially complex merged document history in a linear fashion helps to provide context and could become a universal tool for u…

Google Wave?

Re: Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud (2019) [pdf]

#70

Post by dnautics »

pdimitar wrote: post #12
dvt wrote: post #3

These kinds of ideas always get traction here on HN or similar places (slashdot), but I think that ship has long sailed. People, by and large, seem to be totally okay with storing data in the cloud -- from Dropbox, to Google Docs, to InVision. All things considered, data breaches are rare, and if they do happen, they're usually to be blamed on configuration blunders, not the services at large. Other than a few highly…

You seem to underestimate the pressure from the market. At one point the younger generation does not even remember there was a local-first software. Sadly the relentless efforts of the corporations are paying off. That doesn't mean people are okay with it. It means their choice is made for them.

everywhere outside the US this may be true, but in the US there is the millennial age group, which is a mini-population-boom. The millennial age group remembers stuff like handbrake and bittorrent, is socially conscious about the effects of centralization, and is about to become the largest demography with consumptive power (they are in their earnings/savings prime right now and having children).

Increasingly, millennials also are having children, and I think there is a market opportunity for these sorts of products (e.g. I want to sort pictures by my kids, but without giving facial recognition to fb/google).

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