Sharks With Friggin Lasers on their Heads
Rafael Laguna [..] argued in his excellent article on how PRISM [..] has poisoned cloud computing. Cloud technology is young so maybe it’s not all bad that [PRISM debacle] happens now?! From an engineers or design perspective it’s actually a welcome challenge because a fatal flaw has been exposed at an early stage. We should really be glad about the lessons learned and that this happens now rather than 10 years down the road [..].
[An alternative] could be floating data centers – a patent filed by Google in 2008. Placed in international waters their only problem is that there are no rules [..] Transparent design of such off-shore data-centers could be a first step in making this work in favor of strong privacy. But much more needs to be done!
Well.. dangers of “concentrated” servers storing everyone’s shit is nothing new. Such a structure, by the way, is in no way coupled to Internet’s inherent design in any way. The Internet is a distributed system, and in the future, everyone could run, or rent their own little server out there becoming a gateway for email, for search, for .. whatever they choose. We are now only at stage 1 right now.
The Third Wave is still coming.
And I love the idea of floating data-centers. No rules? I guess by no rules it is meant that whichever company who owns them could be “evil”. Or at a basic level, “pirates” could attack your data center. I have a solution for the second problem - you embed a tactical nuke in the middle of every floating data-center. Then basically what you are saying is - you approach my data center motherf..ker.. your ass is grass. #justkidding
Problem solved. Hell, the data-center doesn’t even have to be company owned.. It could be built, owned, by contributions that could come from many people. Since there are “no rules”, you would not need these giant entities that concentrate the patent portfolio (so they can fight patent trolls), concentrate knowledge (so they can make use of economies of scale), etc.. etc..