On 31 August 2010 04:11, Ted Smith
<address@hidden> wrote:
On Mon, 2010-08-30 at 18:39 -0700, Jason Self wrote:
> Thomas Cort wrote...
> >
> > I live in Gatineau, Québec, Canada, and the Terms of Service for the
> > ISPs in my area prohibit residential/home users from running servers.
> > Is anyone doing anything on this front? Either coming up with a way to
> > securely push data to a server somewhere out on the net or trying to
> > persuade ISPs to loosen their Terms of Service?
>
> Change plans with your ISP, or change your ISP.
>
> I have a "business" account with my ISP, and they let my run my servers from my
> home. Sure, it costs me about twice as much as it otherwise would but we're
> talking about freedom & autonomy here.
autonomy for the rich only is not freedom or autonomy.
I think the best way to deal with such policies is through massive
disobedience campaigns, and where possible, implementing local resilient
networks outside the control of any authoritarian entity (such as a
state or capitalist). It doesn't seem like OStatus is a protocol
well-designed for this - or at least, the way it's currently implemented
in StatusNet now.
Not entirely surprising when you look at who designed the OStatus protocols:
LRDD - Yahoo
WebFinger - BT?
Activity Streams - Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Six Apart, Google, Microsoft
PoCo - Google, Google, Six Apart
OStatus - Status.net
Salmon - Google
Obviously and understandably the spec authors are going to take into account a wide range of considerations.
That said, you have to start somewhere and we're getting to proof of concept and running code, which is the forte of the folks of GNU. I do have faith that the right thing will be done long term.
Additionally, GNU Social has excellent FOAF support, which is another way to create distributed social nets at web scale. So hopefully over time, the best of all worlds can be achieved.
Hopefully in the future, there will be some support for protocol-level
encryption in the same manner as implemented in most BitTorrent clients
now. I wonder if Diaspora has considered this, since they are running
right up against this common ISP policy.