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Douglas Rushkoff: Abandon the Corporate Internet

  • Posted on January 4, 2011 at 3:17 pm

facebook network Douglas Rushkoff: Abandon the Corporate Internet

Of course the Internet was never truly free, bottom-up, decentralized, or chaotic. Yes, it may have been designed with many nodes and redundancies for it to withstand a nuclear attack, but it has always been absolutely controlled by central authorities. From its Domain Name Servers to its IP addresses, the Internet depends on highly centralized mechanisms to send our packets from one place to another.

The ease with which a Senator can make a phone call to have a website such as Wikileaks yanked from the net mirrors the ease with which an entire top-level domain, like say .ir, can be excised. And no, even if some smart people jot down the numeric ip addresses of the websites they want to see before the names are yanked, offending addresses can still be blocked by any number of cooperating government and corporate trunks, relays, and ISPs. That’s why ministers in China finally concluded (in cables released by Wikileaks, no less) that the Internet was “no threat.” [...]

Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed, many of us who wanted to network with our computers used something called FidoNet. It was a super simple way of having a network – albeit an asynchronous one.

One kid (I assume they were all kids like me, but I’m sure there were real adults doing this, too) would let his computer be used as a “server.” This just meant his parents let him have his own phone line for the modem. The rest of us would call in from our computers (one at a time, of course) upload the stuff we wanted to share and download any email that had arrived for us. Once or twice a night, the server would call some other servers in the network and see if any email had arrived for anyone with an account on his machine. Super simple.

Shareable: The Next Net

(via Disinfo)

I’ve covered how CouchDB can create a more distributed web. Also, Openet is working on creating a mesh network of mesh networks. BitCoin and Freenet are worth looking at as well.

DARPA’s working on wireless mesh networks as we speak.

From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/DR0hbOrPcoY/

My Predictions for 2011 at ReadWriteWeb

  • Posted on December 30, 2010 at 12:42 pm

Here are my predictions for 2011:

Predictive analytics will be applied to more business processes, regardless of whether it helps.

The U.S. will add new provisions to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to include leaked classified information.

Despite this and other measures taken by governments and corporations, leaking will continue.

Cybersecurity hype of 2011 will dwarf that of 2010.

We’ll see more CouchApp clients for popular web services.

Almost all the big social enterprise players will have some sort of “app store” offering.

Adobe will try to acquire Joyent.

ReadWriteWeb: 2011 Predictions: Klint Finley

Explanations for each is available at the link.

More predictions from RWW staffers:

From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/aKfF-AhA0jA/

More on Decentralizing the Web: My Interview with Unhosted’s Michiel de Jong

  • Posted on December 27, 2010 at 4:24 pm

unhosted More on Decentralizing the Web: My Interview with Unhosteds Michiel de Jong

I’ve followed up my interview at ReadWriteWeb with CouchOne‘s J Chris Anderson with an interview with Unhosted‘s Michiel de Jong.

de Jong takes Richard Stallman’s critiques of cloud computing seriously. But, he says, “People want to use websites instead of desktop apps. Why do they want that? I don’t think it’s up to us developers to tell users what to want. We should try to understand what they want, and give it to them.”

de Jong acknowledges the many advantages to running applications in the cloud: you can access your applications and data from any computer without installing software or transferring files. You can access your files from multiple devices without syncing. And web applications have better cross-platform support.

So how can you give users web applications while keeping them in control of their data?

The basic idea is this: an Unhosted app lives on a web server and contains only source code. That source code is executed on a user’s computer and encrypts and stores data on another server. That data never passes through the app server. Therefore, the app provider doesn’t have a monopoly on your data. And since that data is encrypted, it can’t be exploited by the data host either (or at least, it probably can’t).

The data can be hosted anywhere. “It could be in your house, it could be at your ISP or it could be at your university or workplace,” says de Jong.

“We had some hurdles to implement this, one being that the app cannot remember where your data lives, because the app only consists of source code,” he says. “Also your computer can’t remember it for you, because presumably you’re logging on to a computer you never used before.”

The Unhosted team solved the problem by putting the data location into usernames. Unhosted usernames look a lot like e-mail addresses, for example: willy@server.org. Willy is the username, server.org is location where the data is stored.

ReadWriteWeb: Unhosted: Breaking the SaaS Monopoly

From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/DNyNs6Z655U/