Living on the Edge: Danny O'Brien's talk about moving our personal info off Web 2.0 and onto our computers

Here's some (way shakycam) video of Danny O'Brien's OpenTech presentation, "Living on the Edge," an extremely provocative and interesting talk about how we might restructure the Internet so that our personal and important moments aren't hosted by YouTube, Flickr, and Blogger, but rather on our own machines. Link, Link to slides

[#1 posted by zikman , July 24, 2008 11:19 PM]

whoa, screwy HTML there. totally wangin' up the front page

[#2 posted by BGTA , July 25, 2008 1:56 AM]

there is some spanish blogger group that had these debate from a long months ago and make a complete DIY instructions do the same:
abandon the dependence of google,flick youtube, etc on the net

http://www.deugarte.com/blog/moleskine/caja-de-herramientas

[#3 posted by things , July 25, 2008 2:09 AM]

yes, this is quite jarring. Run through a Motion steadying filter plz...

[#4 posted by zuzu , July 25, 2008 10:11 AM]

I've been saying this since "Web 1.0". Does no one else remember the Cobalt Qube? Or does no one running OSX notice "Web Sharing" (i.e. Apache) or "File Sharing" (i.e. FTP) under Sharing in System Preferences?

Also, there's a service called dynamic DNS you may not have heard of (::sarcasm::). It's supported by most firewalls and wireless routers, whether DD-WRT Linux on your Linksys or a dual-WAN Netgear FVS336G IPsec VPN firewall.

Considering that Network Attached Storage (NAS) is nowhere near as expensive as it was in the days of the Qube, or that many people now have a spare antiquated OSX computer (e.g. PowerMac, PPC MacMini, etc.), running your own server from home is way more feasible for people that in was then in the days of ISDN.

[#5 posted by Anonymous , July 25, 2008 10:34 AM]

I just wanted to remark that many people don't want to keep their "precious private memories" private at all, but are really taking videos, making digital scrapbooks, and posting pix for OTHERS to view. It's a form of exhibitionism, of arrogance -- thinking that the whole world is interested in your little Kaylee's or Connor's grade-school triumps, or the wedding pix of you and your honey (who will be divorced within a year of so), or the Girls' Toenail-Painting and Power Shopping Nite Out!!!

Remember the parents in Japan qho insisted EVERY CHILD in the classroom have the lead in the Snow White play? Same thing.

[#6 posted by Lexica , July 25, 2008 12:14 PM]

Anonymous @ #6: It's a form of exhibitionism, of arrogance -- thinking that the whole world is interested in your little Kaylee's or Connor's grade-school triumps, or the wedding pix of you and your honey (who will be divorced within a year of so), or the Girls' Toenail-Painting and Power Shopping Nite Out!!!

Wow, projecting much? The only arrogance I see here is in the person accusing others of being arrogantly exhibitionistic.

Like a lot of people who have a blog or blog-like-thing, I have absolutely no illusion that the whole world is interested in what I post — I wouldn't want it to be. The photos I put up are for myself, my family, and my friends. Anyone else who comes across them is welcome to view them, but that person isn't the intended audience.

Saying (explicitly or implicitly) "Here are some photos and some some stuff I've written about things I'm enthusiastic about" is not the same as saying "I'm hot shit and you suck".

[#7 posted by trr , July 25, 2008 1:10 PM]

Cool. So I'm like cutting edge and stuff cuz I've always kept my personal info to myself and not put it on the web?

[#8 posted by nprnncbl , July 25, 2008 3:06 PM]

@Zuzu #5- A home-based server is great, but the bandwidth needs of a server are very different from, say, a home. I currently have DSL; does anyone still call it ADSL, or did they stop advertising the asymmetry? In any case, the download speed is typically fast enough for my speeds and the upload speed is fine for batch uploads to other sites (like flickr) which do have plenty of bandwidth, but it makes a publicly-accessible home server impossible.

And I guess that's one of the threads of his talk, that the raggedness of the edge compared to the convenience and polish of the center is what encourages us to aggregate our data centrally. But the lack of privacy and transparency is a problem.

Where's my co-lo server with process-level encryption?

[#9 posted by Nur , July 25, 2008 3:09 PM]

I run servers for various purposes from my home connection and the only problem I have with it is simply the speed of data transmission that I get, because transferring larger amounts of data is less fun than using it for playing games. Moving a 10MB picture across a 60Kb/s upload line is a slow process.

[#10 posted by Danny O'Brien , July 25, 2008 11:20 PM]

#6,#8
Keeping everything to yourself, and sharing info selectively with your friends is different. Many people use centralised servers now to share only with their friends, in the same way that you don't share everything about yourself with everyone. In fact, you're getting a distorted view of the Net, because you're *only* seeing what people put out in absolute public. There's lots of people with the same levels of privacy as you, who are just sharing with friends. And with major corporations, because Google + Facebook + Livejournal are their only ways to just share with friends.

@zuzu -

The fact that it's easier to host on the edge is part of the point: but currently you can't do everything you do on Facebook on your own server, because we've centralized the information about our friends

[#11 posted by zuzu , July 28, 2008 12:16 PM]

The fact that it's easier to host on the edge is part of the point: but currently you can't do everything you do on Facebook on your own server, because we've centralized the information about our friends

Friend of a Friend (FOAF) does what Friendster / Orkut / MySpace / Facebook have been doing all along, but in a distributed "home page" deployment.

The "certainly you can't do" mindset is most of the problem, methinks.

A home-based server is great, but the bandwidth needs of a server are very different from, say, a home. I currently have DSL; does anyone still call it ADSL, or did they stop advertising the asymmetry? In any case, the download speed is typically fast enough for my speeds and the upload speed is fine for batch uploads to other sites (like flickr) which do have plenty of bandwidth, but it makes a publicly-accessible home server impossible.

Yes, this is where the Net Neutrality politics of Bob Frankston and David Isenberg come into play. But supposing you're in a region where symmetric 20Mbps FiOS (i.e. fibre to the curb) is available, you can begin to realize the potential of returning to a truly end-to-end (i.e. P2P) Internet topology.

Also, the aforementioned dual-WAN bandwidth balancing / link aggregation routers which are becoming increasingly popular (and inexpensive) for SoHO (like the Cobalt Qube did) conveniently double as a way to pay for two uplinks to get twice the bandwidth from your ISP. This is extremely convenient in cases such as Verizon's FiOS which charges $150/month for 50-down/20-up, but $60/month for 20Mbps symmetric; so instead you could pay $120 for 40Mbps symmetric. (As this is approximately their price for "triple-play" service, but then again you can always get $10/month unlimited UMA service from T-Mobile and download all of your regular television viewing with such bandwidth.)