Re: [Social-discuss] Moglen on Distributed Internet

[Steven DuBois]

On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 17:29 +0100, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> Moglen says distributed Internet is best
> 
> I spent one of my Fridays last month sitting through a two-hour
> seminar on privacy in the cloud. Software Freedom Law Center's Eben
> Moglen was the guest speaker, and he raised many interesting points
> about cloud computing.
> 
> Moglen contends that the client/server architecture is just begging to
> be abused, and that cloud providers will always be one step ahead of
> efforts to protect people's privacy. He called for a peer-to-peer
> equivalent of Facebook that would work from a handheld device running
> open-source software.
> 
> Moglen believes that it is fundamentally important to return the
> Internet to the distributed architecture that it was envisioned to
> have in the first place. It will be an interesting effort to follow,
> but I am not optimistic that most people will be motivated or inclined
> to make the switch.
> 
> http://www.sdtimes.com/SHORT_TAKES_MARCH_1_2010/By_SD_TIMES_EDITORIAL_BOARD/About_APPLE_and_FACEBOOK_and_GOOGLE_and_OPENSOURCE/34161
> 
> 

I agree entirely that we need a decentralized social network, and i hope
GNU Social will accomplish this, but i disagree with Moglen with regards
to his call for this social network to run on "wall wart" servers. That
seems extremely impractical and while it may work for wizards and people
deeply concerned with their freedom online, it is not practical for the
less-than tech savvy computer users today.