[p2p-research] personal server technology

[Matt Boggs]

Now here's something I know a bit about...
I had the luck 10 years ago to have very fast internet and a block of IP
addresses in my personal loft live\work space. There was none of the cloud
computing services offered at that time except for web-mail. As a computer
consultant and tinkerer, I had a full rack of computers and several
scattered around that were dedicated to things like music on my stereo and
movies on my projector. Later, friends would want me to share them and the
best thing available was FTP. The only streaming at the time was Shoutcast
for music, which I had set up as well. As for getting music\video from
others, my options were again FTP or newsgroups (now referred to as the
'Undernet'). Fast forward to 2010: The problems facing what Stephen Downes
suggest are as follows: first and foremost: Hardware\software failure. Your
personal server (PS) would need a hefty but not unreasonable system
requirement to compete with the ease of the 'cloud services'.  A PS needs
maintenance, sure, Microsoft has been working on a home PS for some time,
but, there are still lots of ways bad things can hurt your PS from the
outside if you don't maintain it. And lastly, people. The common man wants a
fuss free box they can simply plug in and out without a thought. Until
hardware prices come down and software becomes more self-aware, I don't see
a mass PS revolution. Add to that the ISPs will not be happy with all that
bandwidth moving about without any additional revenue from dedicated pipes.
Lastly, how would you index the information ? without an index, we go back
to the really old days of BBS and word of mouth. The PS for the home is not
an outlandish wish though, perhaps in 10 years if there is still an internet
as we know it.

Final thought: a peer based internet using an ISP backbone is certainly
possible and has been for a long time. Not only for sharing information but
for sharing memory and CPU cycles to tackle complex calculations or 3D
rendering. In addition, Peer based internet has other applications such as
TOR (for annoniminity). VOIP hardening (Skype uses this) and bit torrent
style secure backups where everyone has a piece of the backup so that if
chunks get lost, the swarm can regenerate the whole. I just feel it is still
in the realm of geeks at this time...still :-)
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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2010 14:03:36 +0700
From: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
Subject: [p2p-research] Fwd: on the importance of personal servers for
	the	new multi-literate society
To: Sepp Hasslberger <sepp at lastrega.com>
Cc: Peer-To-Peer Research List <p2presearch at listcultures.org>
Message-ID:
	<c776300b1002202303p73252d66v490cc48570a5b069 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear Sepp,

this quote by stephen downes seems important, and it's something I not fully
understand, I think our readers would benefit if you could explain the
benefitss of this strategy to them,

see http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2010/02/pew-report-interview.html