A storm trooper and a little robot guarding Google servers. Are the script kiddies going to have that on the darknets? Here's the tour.
So here's the latest boy wonder making "a Google alternative".
He's now building an operating system that anyone can use to replace all of the services that Google provides — or any other cloud company, for that matter. Email, chat, file sharing, web hosting: With Cook’s arkOS, you’ll be able to run all of those essential services on a secure, private server in your own home that’s about the size of a credit card.
“Google, while it is a great service that has done wonderful things for the Web, is showing some troubling signs,” Cook told me. “Their shutdown of Google Reader earlier this year means that none of the services [we] rely upon are sacrosanct if they are not profitable enough for them.”
I couldn't complain, at one level, because we all need Google alternatives.
It's creepy the way you now go to google.com and it has this giant big log-in interface with ONE in big letters that lets you know that you are now logging into ALL Google services AT ONCE.
There's something unsettling about all their services now in that funny block that looks like an I Ching up on the right-hand corner. You go to your email, or your Google Docs, or G+ or some other G thing, and you feel that all around you is the heavy breath of Google scanning you for ads to pitch and things you've said that it will crib for those ads.
I guess my theory about Google lately, now that we have not only Team Snowden but also the beginnings of the Wired State shaping up (and those last two go together, but are in tension and even at odds, i.e. Jacob Appelbaum stops any association with the Guardian) that eventually, Google might turn into a normal company. You know, as normal as IBM or Xerox, which isn't saying a HUGE amount, as they will still be venal Big IT, but Google might become more accountable to customers and the general public as IBM and Xerox have over the years. And that's all a good thing. I guess my end game for Google is that it breaks up like Ma Bell, and is forced to calf off those hardware things like driverless cars and that it is forced to do more for privacy like get out of our email. But that's a long ways off...
I could see signs of normalcy straining to break through the geek weirdness when Google made a Halloween Doodle that was actually nice, instead of one of those things that look like it came from the Soviet Academy of Science's pick of the week, like the 108th anniversary of some obscure scientist. And it started doing that when it realized it needed to sell tablets, phones, normal things that people will buy who don't want all the geek culture crap to come with the product, they want normalcy.
To be sure, we've got alternatives. Bing is one, of course; Yahoo, if it is scanning my email, is sure doing a lousy job of it because all it pitches to me is car insurance (I don't own a car) and stuff about moms going back to school on Obama loans (sorry, I wish I had the time but I don't). That's a good thing, if it "doesn't know". Meanwhile, I write an article for naturalgaseurope.com, and go to that page quite a bit, and then every other page I visit thinks I'm a corporation and tries to sell me natural gas stuff. Facebook is still trying to give me attractive men in my region, Ugh boots, Ellen de Generes' TV show, Joe Biden, and furniture stores. None of them are relevant, but I leave them all alone or it could get worse...
But...despite needing alternatives, there are only new sets of challenges and problems that come with making a scrappy one.
Here's what I had to say about this:
Hmmm. Ordinary people won't be able to use it because it's Linux and open source nerdy stuff.
And instead of losing things we like such as Google Reader because of Google's business reasons (not enough people in fact did like it for them to bother and it competed with their drive to socialize people's reading on G+ to pitch ads through that system) -- now, we'll be dependent on the open source cult. Will they come to work, or will they be busy at a WoW raid? or they don't feel like it or ran out of Red Bull? Or they committed suicide? (Diaspora). Or they have to go get a real job because Kickstart didn't raise enough?
It's no better, truly.
Of course, I really don't have anything technically relevant to say here, so listen to a guy who seems to know what he's talking about, elforesto:
And let's be honest: if the feds want your data, they will get your data. It does not matter if the data is hosted with Google, with Bob's Web Hosting, or on your Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/Time Warner/etc home connection. The only way to safeguard said data is to encrypt it in transit (which pretty much everyone already does) or at rest (which almost nobody does). Cook is freely admitting that he doesn't know much about crypto and it kind of shows. So what if you control the SSL certs if the receiving mail server has an NSA tap and you didn't use GPG to encrypt it? This doesn't actually improve the security of your data at all.
Look, good for you for thinking about these things, but a lot of us with a LOT more experience doing this are going to give you the best advice you're going to get: go back to the drawing board. You're trying to fix a human problem with software and that simply will not and does not work. Want people to take owning their data seriously? Do workshops to help people setup their own hosting account. Want to help people secure their communications? Guide them through setting up GPG and give them a thumb drive with Tails. Asking them to install a Linux distribution on hobbyist hardware may be an effective use of buzzword marketing, but it will not solve the problem in any kind of meaningful way.
Cook then answers him by basically demanding more user education. That's what the geeks always do, and that's always a fail in my book.
Naturally, the idea of having some little jet pack that holds "your very own server" that enables you to have a kind of walkie-talkie with all the other kids in the neighbourhood outside the bad "Internet" that is now all "militarized" seems awfully cool. I bet this will really sell, at least, as he says, to "hobbyists" lol. In fact, local intranets and Open Garden and all that kind of stuff is very attractive to people who want to go out of the commercial Internet into the darknets, which are likely to be random patches loosely knitted together, or they'd merely replicate the original problem. I can't help thinking this is all like reverse-engineering of Second Life and the making of Open Sim and Kitely. Anything that is made outside of Google will perforce have to rely on Google products, capacity, hardware items, etc. etc. Imagine, having to Google to find the free nodes, and so on.
As for Google Reader, well, I don't miss it, to be honest. And to be even more honest, I had ceased to go to it every day after making it and filling it up with customized stuff. I rapidly developed blog bankruptcy with hundreds of people's blogs sitting there unread. I got the Google alerts on news topics in my mail box and stopped "going there" to look for stuff -- and those still work.
No, I don't "go there" to G+ as a replacement for Google Reader (their idea) because:
o too busy -- too many pictures, too many gifs, too much
o too many strangers, too many Google engineers without social graces
o too harsh rules, i.e. you get ban warnings over nothing, worse than Facebook
o too high risk of losing your content over a speech offense, i.e. some thin-skin geek decides to punish you for your legitimate criticism, and now you can't access your Google docs or email -- they're all related.
So as I've always said, spread your privacy erosion over diverse platforms.
In fact, the hilarious thing is that Yahoo now has a clone of Google Reader on its new Yahoo email interface. It does all the same thing, the weather, horoscope, the news you can pick, etc. And it's purple.
Also Windows 8 has a thingie where you can make a reader based on Bing which is perfectly fine and just as customizeable as Google Reader was.
But as I keep saying, Twitter is my magazine and newspaper now, I read that. I unsubscribed from the Times around the time that Risen ran the interview with Snowden so uncritically but I also just got tired of it billing every month when my own reading of it waxed and waned. I am waiting for the Internet people to come up with wallets to pay for individual articles much more easily and cheaply, and also tip bloggers easily.
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