[p2p-research] Google gets into the DNS business

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 12:35:38PM +0100, M. Fioretti wrote:

> agreed. One of the things I hope to cover in a "digital awareness"
> course I'll start next week is just the fact that people need to stop
> delegating this and the services below to others.

At the very least, they should avoid aggregating all those
services with one vendor, however convenient that may be.
 
> And the same applies to email, calendaring, etc

Email yes, though there are advantages in a platform that has
many users (calendar sharing). There are currently no easy
ways to seamlessly to aggregate and integrate individual
feeds. This is something which can and should be fixed.
 
> This said, it's not free, because to do things well you need to rent a
> Virtual Private Server in some professional data center, which means
> several Euro (>= 10/15) each month, so it's simply out of reach for

If you have a dedicated system at home it will cost you about that
much in term of electricity costs. Of course nowadays we have embedded
systems which take 5-10 W and can do most of the work required.
These can be easily findable using services like DynDNS or using
IPv6 tunnels.

VServers of course come with a highly available low-latency connection
and a static IP (or IPv6 subnet), and are very efficient energetically.

> many people, especially because this is something every individual
> should do by him/herself.

Well, there are some enduser products becoming available, e.g.
http://www.pogoplug.com/

Of course here you're relying on a company again, though that needs
not to be that way in principle.
 
> And it's not trivial at all. More exactly, it is trivial for somebody
> who already has the right basic skills, knowledge and attitude for
> messing with command line installation and configuration of server
> software. But that is just what, 3/4% of people?

I see this more as a business opportunity. If 1-5% of all customers
are interested in securely hosting their own storage and applications 
at home in a trusted environment provided it's trivial to setup that is a
considerable market. Drobo and PogoPlug are catering to that.
 
> For all the others (*), software is still equivalent to terribly
> complicated black magic: if you can't avoid it you use it, but don't
> even try to understand it, you don't dare alter the spells others told
> you to repeat and you couldn't imagine anything less productive, or
> more boring/dangerous, than reading the instruction manual for those
> spells.

Try setting up a Pogo Plug, just for shits and giggles. 
 
> This does not mean that that 3/4% of people are better or superior to
> all the others in any way, of course. I run my own mail server but am
> completely helpless in other areas. It only means that we're all
> different, and it would be counterproductive to forget it.

What I am missing is awareness in those potential 1-5% target that
they're having a particular problem, and that problem can be solved
painlessly with the right kind of appliance, or commercial service
which is not concentrated, and doesn't try to lock you in.
 
> I plan to write a piece on some of the social impacts of this by the
> end of the month, will post here the link when done.
> 
>     Marco
> 
> 
> (*) and this includes most people who are advanced MS Office or
> OpenOffice users, run a blog at blogspot.com, wordpress.com and
> similar, or spend their day in Facebook, Twitter and other social
> networks.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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