Slashdot Mirror
Free Software To Save Us From Social Networks
Glyn Moody writes "Here's a problem for free software: most social networks are built using it, yet through their constant monitoring of users they do little to promote freedom. Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and the legal brains behind several versions of the GNU GPL, thinks that the free software world needs to fix this with a major new hardware+software project. 'The most attractive hardware is the ultra-small, ARM-based, plug it into the wall, wall-wart server. [Such] an object can be sold to people at a very low one-time price, and brought home and plugged into an electrical outlet and plugged into a wall jack for the Ethernet, and you're done. It comes up, it gets configured through your Web browser on whatever machine you want to have in the apartment with it, and it goes and fetches all your social networking data from all the social networking applications, closing all your accounts. It backs itself up in an encrypted way to your friends' plugs, so that everybody is secure in the way that would be best for them, by having their friends holding the secure version of their data.' Could such a plan work, or is it simply too late to get people to give up their Facebook accounts for something that gives them more freedom?"
....and suggest that most people don't care.
You mean people would actually have to SPEND MONEY? And even worse, on an actual PHYSICAL OBJECT? No way, not in a million years would something like this replace a simple, free online service.
Better known as 318230.
Seriously, its a dumb plan. My girlfriend is on Facebook, and I'm pretty sure she would have the following objections:
1) New people couldn't find her.
2) This new plan is already WAY too complicated. She can't point a browser at some weird piece of hardware that she has to install herself, no matter how "easy" it is to install or point to.
3) She can't play with her facebook farm(s).
Remember that facebook is now the #1 site when it comes to traffic. You aren't going to get it's 500 million or so users to migrate to a self configurable system simply in the name of privacy. What percentage of the users on facebook actually care? On quarter of one percent? Even that would be a stretch. People aren't going to leave their hard earned farmville accounts because facebook is using their personal data to market to them. It's not a concern in this day and age.
It's a fabulous idea. Sign me up. However in terms of penetration, it will be the rare paranoid slashdot reader that values privacy enough to take such measures. Social networking is here to stay and is possibly the most effective tool for destroying freedom. Why should the NSA go after people when they can simply get the people to come to them?
I am getting pretty tired of other people telling me what freedom should mean to me.
What freedom means to me, what I am frightened of and / or prepared to sacrifice is not a temporally static concept. 10 years ago I wouldn't even publish my mail address online. Now I have my entire cv on xing. These are rational decisions I made according to costs I perceive (correctly or not) with publishing personal information, or not.
Sure, some people make poor choices about publishing personal information (sexting, anyone?). But some times openness is an indicator for a "safe" society.
Just my thoughts.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
Let's just go with how the conversation with any non-geek person/friend/spouse/family member would both start and end: Wait, Facebook already is free. I don't get it.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Who the hell would use this? How many people are really that desperate to escape social networks? People who REALLY didn't want them would never have signed up in the first place. People who used to like them and don't anymore, can just spend a couple hours tracking it all down. Mightn't people who use this want to customize its exact effects? Isn't the easiest way to do that...to just close your accounts yourself?
This sounds like something a sixth-grader would come up with...
The problem is free software is used to voluntarily erode privacy rights.
Not anymore! Now we have a server that looks like a night-light, just plug it in and it will do all your social networking for you! It's magic! No longer will you have to give up your privacy rights! ...
Do I have the argument right?
So, you've got all your personal data backed up from Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, whatever, and your accounts are closed. Now what? Does this thing actually run a usable social networking site? And, even if it does, is it one that everyone will want to use?
I don't see this happening, ever.
Could such a plan work, or is it simply too late to get people to give up their Facebook accounts for something that gives them more freedom?
This plan assumes that your average Facebook user wants freedom and/or privacy.
this is my sig
The network effect has already kicked in. If you want to replace Facebook it will have to be with a product that offers more value on an individual user basis AND can interface with Facebook so users will have access to those social networks as well as access to the additional functionality. If you start there you can wean people off of the older application. While the approach you describe may give users more freedom from corporate/government/whoever control it gives them less freedom to do the activities they now do on the social networking site.
So what is this "your data" that he wants to fetch? I don't think most people are aware of having any "data" on social networks. Their favorite bands, their favorite movies... that's not "data," it's information about themselves that they post to social networks because they want other people to know it.
The problem with commercial social networks is their interpretation of what "your data" is. The stuff they're interested in has less to do with whether you say you like Blink 182 and more to do with who all your friends are, how often you communicate with them, what keywords show up most often in your posts, what groups you join and who else is in them, and all that other stuff that can be data-mined. In other words, it's the record of your social interactions that's the "data" -- so why would you want to preserve that in a brand-new network?
Breakfast served all day!
I have pondered the idea of a decentralized Social networking protocol, similar to email/Jabber/etc. Standard IM protocols along with standard (XML based?) data formatting for social information would be used to allow socialnetworking servers to talk to each other, and find friends.
The issue is that SOME sort of centralization is probably best for this kind of online interaction; the question is to what extent your secure content is hosted and in your own control.
Best option: Don't put private shit in a public place.
Maybe. This kind of P2P social networking could take off if a certain biG company took up this idea ran with it. Not that this would improve the currently horrible privacy situation. But for bells and whistles they could piggyback another P2P technology on top if it (for your pictures and family videos!), and auto-harvest/safe your data from facebook.
If these wall plugs are fast enough, they could provide CPU time and crawl the net in the meantime while someone else pays the electricity bill. And if all your internet traffic goes through it as well...
I think i better stop giving them ideas.
P.S.: How decentralized can this Wave thing actually run, it seemed like an interesting concept.
So, the people at facebook "constantly monitor users" and "do little to promote freedom"? And we wonder why the FSF is written off as a fringe organization?
Do you have ESP?
Speaking as one who uses Free rather than Open Source to characterize software, and admires Richard Stallman....
Why does every piece of software on the planet need to promote freedom? Isn't it enough that a whole lot of it does? And why shouldn't I feel free to put selected information about myself in the public view? (Seriously, you're all welcome to whatever is on my Facebook account. There are things I don't want the whole world to know about, and they're not on FB. I trust FB to respect my privacy in much the same sense that I trust mousetraps to catch and restrain blue whales, but I don't have to put stuff on it.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Cut all the bull out and he wants to go back to homepages. Oh okay, so this homepage is in your home behind the router to your ISP and not on a server at your ISP, but that is what he is talking about.
And how would you index that? You can't. So you have freenet, the darknet version. A crypto nerds wetdream and unusable.
The problem is simple. How do I join a network from which I don't know anyone? How do I join your circle of friends, if I don't know any in the circle?
Darknet has that problem. Yes, you can exchange files but only with people you know from some other means. And then you exchange files only between that small number of nodes and no way is the secret world government that controls everything unable to just listen in on your connection that goes through your ISP who knows you address and see where the packets go. And that is not a problem even, because they can't look inside the package and that works in places like North-Korea and even China were the secret police is just going to give up if they can't read the package they don't want you to send unless they can open them and not just hit you until you confess.
Crypto nerds, they are like real nerds, but with the practical usage.
This idea of homepage servers, won't work. Facebook works because it allows you to find people that you lost contact with and even new friends.
And if he really wants to test it, go ahead. Try "Opera Unite". No need for a silly plug, your own site, right in your own browser.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Social networking sites are far more than "informatiuon about a few million people". Their value comes from the relationships between those people. This have value to the people themselves, and, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on where one lies on the marketting/privacy divide, to others. It's restricting this access to others and controlling information about one's self, that's the appeal of this device.
However, maintaining all those relationships distributed across they myriad of individual servers in each home will prove problematic: one essentially has a distributed database. The first issues that come to mind are location services, mapping "friend" links to their wall-wart servers (yes, this is DNS, but do you want to be that visible?), as well as backups. The network traffic involved in simple "friend of friend" graphing starts to get significant.
In such an environment Facebook would likely spider all the wall-wart servers in a Googlesque manner for (a) marketting, and (b) convenience.
Still, it's a concept I've pondered for a while: I should control information about me, and who I share it with. Replication and backup becomes a separate problem: perhaps I want some storage service provider to host it... perhaps not: connections to port 25 at a server resolved from my domain name have terminated on a PC in my home for years: if my physical mailbox is outside my house, why should my electronic one not be inside (cursing static IP rental costs aside)?
In this model, "Facebook" becomes an "app", that people download to their home servers and use to establish and publish relationships between their friends.
In Liberty, Rene
It's called the World Wide Web. People hated it because it wasn't constrained and limited enough.
I am totally serious. It's one of those things (actually a very common phenomenon) where putting constraints on something, opens peoples' eyes as to how it can be used, and makes it seem cooler. But then they forget that they can still do those same things, even without the limitations present. Life is weird.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Well, I for one wouldn't have any use for that, because I'm not on facebook & co. anyway.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I deleted my Facebook. Everyone asks me why, here's why:
The quality of communication on Facebook is poor. The most indepth conversation you can have is what someone is doing and what they have done. You are not promoted to have an intellectual debate (Read: Why the hell am I on Slashdot then?) I much prefer to use email although If my email clients were more like how you send messages to people on Facebook it would make me very happy.
The people on Facebook for me are the wannabe trendy people. One or two years ago I tried to get my friends to join Multiply, it focused on contribution of blog postings, news, links, pictures and videos. It was difficult to get people to contribute things that were worthwhile.
All your messages and photographs are stored remotely. Facebook also converts your photographs downward in quality and makes them easier to share with people so most people only ever see the low quality pictures. In other words, it's not a lossless backup medium. At least with email, my email may be hosted but I can still download my own copies.
I may be a Windows user but I love keyboard control, I write this in VIM and my mail client is ALPINE.
On all the browsers I have used Facebook is slow. I underclock my laptop and it's annoying to have to return to normal speed just to use a website.
Mark Zuckerburg is not very nice. I do not believe in software patents but apparently he stole ideas from his fellow classmates. You can understand if you had an idea and someone stole it, without giving you credit. Zuckerberg sued by classmates. When some of the Facebook PHP code was leaked (Revealing Errors, Facebook source, it was rather disturbing what was written: 'put hotties there'. Also the news that the master password was once 'Chuck Norris' (master password) is rather disturbing. I do not think the developers are competetent. Especially something as privacy critical.
The potential for abuse in Facebook is huge. Law enforcements can request practically all data about you see this Cryptome leaked document. The amount of marketing information they can collect on you is more than anywhere else, they have your profiles, your fan pages, browsing habits and internet usage patterns.
The applications are ins
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Free Software had first mover advantage over the big brother social network sites but it didn't innovate fast enough. Remember blogs? What happened? The community couldn't agree on standards for providing advanced social applications that people wanted, so the walled gardens sprang up that provided them. Seriously, remember the years of dumb ass bickering over RSS or Atom?
I personally am very sad that large parts of the social experience online are now within wall gardens, I see it as AOL's revenge from the grave. It says something about the limits of open processes that hopefully the Free Software movement and others can learn from.
I've already deleted my Facebook account. Got tired of all the boringness of it all.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
This could definitely work. But nix the ethernet jack, give it wifi, and a rechargeable battery. Make it the same as an ipad in form factor, but on FOSS OS.
While you're at it, I have ideas for the new FOSS OS/Social Network:
First, don't close your FB MS and other social network accounts. Leave them open, and automagically allow all of your friends updates etc. to come over as if they were native. There will always be some friend who is stuck in the dark ages on geocities that you might need to still talk to (that example was intentionally bad).
Second, we need a more intuitive interface. Clone FaceBook and MySpace exactly, and set those as options, but then also make a vastly superior interface. I would use one of the many great GPL'ed 3d engines, such as ioquake3. Then let everyone's webcam build a custom 3d avatar based on their actual face/body, and have their avatars be able to interact real time on screen, complete with real time 3d positioned VOIP. Of course this functionality could be turned on or off with a simple mouse click.
In addition, allow a 3rd party plugin system that can create whole new 3d experiences in this virtual world. Build a couple of fast easy ones right in: Chess, checkers, Cards..... And allow anyone to autmagically sign on to their FB, MS, email, IRC, AIM, hotmail, yahoo, or etc. and be able to talk with, and PLAY a card game with as many of their other friends as are currently online.
Third, make all the tools to interact very, very easy to do from an android phone. Pictures, Audio and Videos should be able to be uploaded instantly, and in open formats like .PNG and .OGG. In addition, Video and Audio should be possible to broadcast real time, to any other user with a FOSSpace account.
With this design, you could easily supplant YouTube, Picasa, MySpace, Facebook, and all other social networking sites, very quickly. In addition, as most people would only require this and a Firefox plugin, you could also supplant Mac and Windows, virtually over night.
The final part of my plan to supplant corporations with personal freedom involves replacing the ISPs. With a system of FOSS routers and repeaters, and with all devices and phones acting as potential relays for a truly open ad hoc networking system, we could easily rest control of the entire internet from corporations and governments and truly begin a world of freedom and open information for all.
Other "Plugins" that I would like to see implemented in the 3d virtual space:
Boggle
SNES emu
N64 emu
NES emu
Sega emu
Mame emu
Urban Terror Portal (just walk your avatar into a door to join a server)
Wow Portal (though I'd like to replace WoW with a FOSS clone ASAP.
GTA San Andreas Portal (this would require a whole new FOSS clone of the original game. Lots of work this bit.)
Civ 2 emu. Something you could play real time with your friends in VOIP conversation still. And a Civ 2 clone because it was more fun than later version.
Real Time Music Collaboration tools. A jack for your guitar/bass/keys/violin/drums to hook up directly and allow your instrument to be heard real time while your avatar moves real time to play exactly as you are playing. This would make rehearsal SO MUCH BETTER for me in both of my bands.
Do all of this, you could beat apple and their iphone, you could beat skype, you could beat windows, you could beat myspace, facebook, and even google.
I'm willing to beta test.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.