"Social networking—that is, the ability to use free form methods of communication from many to many, now, in an instantaneous fashion—changes the balance of power in society away from highly organized vehicles of state control towards people in their own lives."
I generally agree with Eben Moglen about the possible benefits of plug computers, and I'm running such a system myself. In addition to the freedom aspect it should also be emphasized that there are also many pragmatic and economic benefits to running your own server, especially if it's on a low power device which costs a negligible amount of money in electricity to run.
If you expect to get a high amount of web traffic, like Wikipedia or YouTube, then plug computing isn't a good solution, but if you want to run a personal home site to host your own content and blog then it's a decent alternative to the current "cloud" based offerings. For example, if I wanted to host the same amount of data as I'm currently hosting on DropBox then I'd be paying top whack (about $240 per year, or roughly the cost of a netbook), whereas hosted on the plug there are no additional costs. The same savings apply for hosting a web site, wiki or blog - all of which is possible in "the cloud", but which you usually have to pay a never ending subscription free for if you want a non-trivial amount of storage space. It is also possible to pay for a fancy domain name, but if you don't particularly care about that you can obtain free ones from DynDns.
With the first generation of plug computers you definitely needed to be technologically knowledgeable in order to be able to install and administrate it, but the software is getting simpler and much more consumer oriented, as described in this podcast about the TonidoPlug, so within a few years this should be something which is practical for a mainstream user base. As Moglen mentions in his speech there is also the Freedom Box Foundation, which aims to produce a Debian based distro oriented towards plug computer systems.
The typical sort of application for a plug computer would be storing music files, family videos/photos, or hosting a blog or web site. Some of this data you might want to be accessible only to a few people, or for personal use only, whereas if you put it into "the cloud" in an unencrypted form then potentially it could be accessed or copied by others without your knowledge or permission.
In my case I was less concerned about the freedom aspect than with more pragmatic factors, such as maintaining a web presence whilst keeping costs to the lowest possible level and enabling some resilience from the possibility of free hosting services becoming not so free under recession conditions. If I were a student or a soon to be made redundant civil servant who was planning a protest though then the freedom aspect would certainly matter much more to me. In that context freedom means the freedom to not have your cloud hosted web site or blog shut down because someone from the Home Office has made a discreet phone call to someone at Google (or whatever company is hosting the site), or made a bogus copyright violation claim in order to have the site removed. In the case of a copyright violation dispute at least if you're hosting your own data then you have the chance to negotiate with the claimant in a reasonable manner, and make any necessary adjustments, rather than just having your web site instantly removed by the hosting company.
0 comments:
Post a Comment