I've been talking about mesh-networks for some time. Lately almost everybody has a smartphone with as much compute-power and storage as a desktop PC from 2008, that's a lot of horsepower sitting around idle. Also, lately the Big Tech companies are getting kinda fascist in their rules and regulations. Twitter and Farcebook have gone so far as to censor the President of the United States. Who knows what they're already doing to you and me, right?
So here's a notion. I'm not recommending this company, because I don't know anything about it. Nobody does. But the idea is excellent. A de-centralized Internet that skips all the big companies and does the transactions on a block-chain, peer-to-peer level. It requires a lot of different technology for backups and storage, for which ThreeFold is building a variety of related technologies: peer-to-peer technology to create the grid in the first place; storage, compute, and network technologies to enable distributed applications; and a self-healing layer bridging people and applications.
Oh, and yes. There is a blockchain component: smart contracts for utilizing the grid and keeping a record of activities.
"Farmers" (read: all of us) provide capacity and get micropayments for usage.
I'd say it will require a lot of work, because the first thing that will happen is some asshole will try to turn the whole thing into his personal bot-net. But this mesh-network structure is the answer to Google, Apple and Microsoft. Peer-to-peer, created at the individual level instead of the corporate Big Iron approach. Personal computers instead of mainframes with dumb terminals, which is the model that we currently operate under. You -think- that because they call it a Personal Computer or a Smart Phone that the thing is doing the work and that you own it. But that is not true. All the work is done by a server farm with cloud storage. It is situated somewhere probably far away and under somebody else's control. Your smart phone is basically a dumb terminal. It barely does anything except play games.
That's the thing. Games are mostly local processing with a bit of network connection to a server, mostly for authentication. So the phone is certainly a capable machine. It can do things. But applications like Siri are mostly server-side processing with a bit of local hardware for the microphone management etc. It doesn't have to be that way of course, the phone is fast enough to do most of what Siri does, and it has more than enough storage to hold the Siri ap and its database. But Apple runs it server side because that gives them DATA on you, which they then sell to advertisers.
Which is why I never use Siri or the Android equivalent. Because that level of intrusion into my private life is not something I feel like cooperating with. They get enough free data from me already, I should actively help them? No way.
So the local-storage, local-processing model is how you beat Big Brother. If the data never touches their server, they can't copy it and sell it. A mesh-network doesn't use Big Iron cloud storage and huge servers to route the packets.
And really, there's no reason not to have both models going. Big Iron has its place, its just a bad idea to have a small number of companies (or governments) control everything. There needs to be an alternative, to keep them honest. This could be an alternative.
4 comments:
One minor thing I think you got wrong: you said your phone has enough processing power and storage to run the Siri app *and its database* locally. But I'm not sure; databases like Siri's typically (AFAICT) run into the tens or hundreds of terabytes, and even the most expensive phones right now are barely breaking a hundred gigabytes of storage. With a lot of other apps, you'd be right, but in the case of Siri, the database *has* to be outside your phone for the app to do what it does.
That nitpick aside, that peer-to-peer network idea sounds good on the surface. I'm a blockchain skeptic: I hear "blockchain" and I automatically think "vaporware". So many people have tried to turn the success of Bitcoin into a "grab investment money and do nothing with it" scam that I have a reflex reaction to the word blockchain these days. Though the "they don't talk much about what they're doing" aspect is promising: for once, this blockchain-using company might actually be legit. I'll keep an eye on it; thanks for the tip.
Hi Robin, I'm unsure of the actual requirements to run Siri, just using it as an example.
But you know, ten terabyte drives(10TB)are a thing now, they're ~$400.00. I have a NAS sitting here next to me with 8TB of RAIDed storage in it, pretty cheap little thing.
So -maybe- your phone doesn't have the horsepower this year to run all of Siri local. It could run most of it and use the web to call home to your PC for the hard parts.
That's really all it does now, it calls Apple and uses a PC in their gigantic PC farm. As a practical matter, pushing updates to users for an ap liken that would be difficult.
But if you remember back far enough, Dragon Dictate used to be a thing. They pushed updates on CD. By snail-mail.
The challenge involved in keeping your data on a home NAS would be walking computer-unsavvy users through the process of opening up a port in their router so that the app can phone home for its data. Once IPv6 is more broadly deployed, that might be partly solved because IPv6 deployments don't need NAT. But I suspect that IPv6-enabled ISPs will still deploy firewalls that block incoming connection attempts by default until you open up ports, just to keep people protected from their own ignorance about security.
But then, we started this discussion talking about a peer-to-peer distributed network, which might use different firewalling rules than conventional ISPs (where your home Internet connection is a little cul-de-sac on the information superhighway*: the only data that comes in was intended for your local network, and there's no through traffic coming down your road). With a peer-to-peer network, all points on the network would need to allow incoming & outgoing traffic by default, so yes, it might be feasible to keep the data on a home NAS. Have the NAS configuration display a QR code that encodes its network address (and possibly some config settings), and the phone app just needs to scan the QR code in order to use that NAS for data storage. That could work, even for computer-unsavvy users who don't know how to open a forwarding port in their router.
* Now there's a term you haven't seen in years, right? :-)
Add end-to-end encryption and I'll start to consider pondering thinking about perhaps taking it seriously.
Post a Comment