(reworked mail I sent to a list in the last week)
To comment on “The Cloud” I think it is required to draw a few threads together.
In 2006 along with a chap I know we started a project called called gNewSense, it
is an FSF approved Free Software GNU/Linux distribution, that was the aim of the distro it was based on Ubuntu LTS, at the time Dapper Drake or 6.06, it is still developed today we are a lot less involved.
Since then the world has moved on, some things have become more “Free” other things less. Back then Youtube was a year old, Facebook was two and Twitter was a couple of months old.
Eben Moglen (the guy who helped Richard Stallman to write the GPLv2) has spoken recently against the cloud, how it is not great and allows
commercial proprietary companies spy on you. Eben made the point that the “wall wart” servers could displace the whole “Cloud / web 2.0″ thing.
I was talking Friday evening to a friend of mine who is a frequent contributor to various Free Software related things. His take more or less was that Eben had not taken into account the way the Facebooks of this world work, they allow people who have disconnected to “link up”.
You have tools, you have servers and you all networked.
You put your email in the cloud and you are told that no humans read it.
Slowly very slowly put this thought into your brain and ponder it.
What would it take to create a protocol let us call it Personal Data Protection Protocol, and implement it in software.
What would PDPP do, it is the ability to create the circles of contact for people.
Where you control how much you share or don’t. Just to scare yourself, go search for five people you know who twitter or facebook or blog a lot and then for five people who as far as you know don’t.
Such a protocol should have to link many different levels of service, securely or in plain text, removing the ability of those who are aggregating data in your personal space.
What is the price of this?
We want to be contacted by people we have lost contact with, however what is the price of making yourself public.
Ask yourself who would benefit from blocking such an effort.
In the end ask yourself what way would the Internet look if people pulled back from the public domain and went more private.
I do need to think more about this, anyone for a conversation on it?
Without regard to the debate or side you stand on the outcome will be at a minimum interesting.
