Re: [projectvrm] Why we need to escape the Land of the Silos

[Drummond Reed < >]

[Man, I can't believe how active the list is on a Saturday night! I'm killing time until Bill Hader's final SNL appearance starts in 20 minutes - is that what everyone else is doing??]

+1 to T.Rob's point that a dedicated personal cloud hosting solution like SpaceMonkey could really work for a lot of people, particularly with the redundant backup it provides.

On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 9:55 PM, T.Rob < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

+1.   

 

I *definitely* don't expect people to go to the extremes that I did and we know that functionality and ease of use sell.  I would expect that whatever first gains traction will be commercially hosted and that the availability of such solutions will encroach on in-home solutions due mostly to complexity.  What's more, in a fast growing market I'd expect many vendors will take advantage of consumer confusion and ride the wave of VRM, but selling products that are not very VRM-y but still offer compelling features and ease of use.  This would further skew the market away from self-hosted solutions.

 

As noted in the earlier reply, our job will be to make the infrastructure drop-dead easy.  For example, the Space Monkey product duplicates the storage and encryption pieces of my in-home solution but does so in an appliance form factor.  Plug it in, mount a share and all the cloud backup is taken care of.  So if someone built a Personal Cloud app that used Space Monkey as the back-end storage, the result is pretty darned close to a consumer-ready solution that could be hosted in-home and compete head-to-head with commercial hosting for ease of use. 

 

-- T.Rob

 

 

From: Johannes Ernst [mailto: " target="_blank"> ]
Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2013 11:41 PM
To: Bill Nelson
Cc: ProjectVRM list

Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Why we need to escape the Land of the Silos

 

The important point is the *option* to self-host. It keeps everybody honest. That doesn't mean that everybody or even the majority of people ever will.

 

 

On May 18, 2013, at 20:12, Bill Nelson < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Thanks for the clarification, Drummond.  Won't the self hosting aspect make this by its very nature a limiting factor in the adoption of personal clouds?   It does require some level of technology knowledge even to install network storage at home. 

Sent from my iPhone

On May 18, 2013, at 8:49 PM, Drummond Reed < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Bill, it's a fair question since a personal cloud is by definition something you control, even if it's hosted by a third-party service provider (actually, in VRM terms, I believe that would be a "fourth-party service provider").

 

Anyway, the simple layman's definition I would offer of "self-hosting" a personal cloud is when the owner is running it on hardware he/she personally physically controls, e.g., on their own home network. 

 

On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 5:42 PM, Bill Nelson < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I am coming into this conversation late and I am sure that this was discussed at the IIW, but what are you referring to when you say 'self host'?    Does a person need to have their own storage array at home?   Or are you referring to people having their own Dropbox (or other cloud storage) account? 

 

Please enlighten this unintelligent haggard. 

Sent from  my iPhone

On May 18, 2013, at 7:48 PM, Drummond Reed < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

+1. I think it's this simple: if you don't have the option to self-host it, it's not really a personal cloud.

 

On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 2:44 PM, Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

The key is to make personal clouds that are truly personal — in the sense that nobody else can hack into them. If we want to put our clouds in services that are not ours, that's fine — and I am sure will be a good business. But the ability to self-host needs to be a prime requirement.

 

Doc

 

On May 18, 2013, at 8:40 PM, Drummond Reed < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Dan, great stake in the ground. The issues you describe become magnified x10 when it comes to personal clouds, so as an industry we need to drive an even bigger stake in the ground on this topic -- one that will restrain governments all around the world, not just the U.S.

 

On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Dan Blum < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I've sniffed a whiff of the same stench from here in the land of the free. Some time ago I heard about an Air Force RFP for software to create artificial "friends" for use on Facebook, probably for background investigation purposes. With friends like these...in the electronic age, we've lost much of the freedom we once had. 

 

Please see my blog entry The Constitution and the Cloud in which I explore these issues.

 

Thanks!

Dan

 

 

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 2:50 AM, Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

... especially the ones that allow news like this to happen:

<http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/>