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Ask Slashdot: Where Are the Complete Hosting Providers?
Kludge writes "In 2000 there were thousands of email/web hosting businesses. In 2013 not much has changed. To get my email/web/webmail/domain/VOIP/public-key/XMPP/VPN hosting I have to deal with five different service providers. Where are the complete hosting providers? The absence of competition in this area drives many to Google, making data siphoning easy for the NSA. Why has hosting not advanced in the last 10 years? Where are the hosting providers that make end-to-end encrypted email/web/VOIP/XMPP easy and automatic for all my clients?"
In other words.... Where can I purchase a car with all the amenities of the high end Rolls-Royce, for the price of a Civic?
You steal the Rolls-Royce. Hundreds of millions of computers right now are part of one kind of botnet or another because botnets offer everything the poster is looking for. There are websites out there where you can purchase the resources of the botnet for cheap; Just gotta know where to look. As a bonus, they also offer a degree of anonymity and resistance to the kind of tracking the author is apparently worried about. If you want to be resistant to a search and seizure by a government, I can think of few things better than a massively decentralized, worldwide network with millions of potential servers to shift your data around within.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Yep. When I was a kid nobody* had a computer. Then for a while people had computers but little or no connectivity. Then everybody had a computer and fast connectivity.
During the sneakernet era you had computing ability, but if they wanted your data they'd have to get a warrant or ransack your office illegally.
If keeping things away from the NSA is that important, go all 1980s on your selves. It really wasn't such a bad time for most of us. Swapping floppies in person was actually kind of fun. There were no government agents at swap meets.... that I know of, LOL.
*The term "nobody" means no ordinary middle class household or small business. Yes, I know NASA and big companies had computers when I was a kid. "Nobody" is being used in the loose, colloquial sense here. The standard disclaimer about not inferring the ridiculous also applies. This includes casting a loose net over the definition of computer so as to include devices such as the abacus, or employees with "computer" as their job title and mocking me for implying that I'm older than written history. The standard disclaimer also applies to the text of the standard disclaimer.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
During the sneakernet era you had computing ability, but if they wanted your data they'd have to get a warrant or ransack your office illegally.
Neither of which you'd necessarily be informed of. There's two ways to approach security; tamper-evident, and tamper-resistant. Everyone is focusing on tamper-resistant right now to deal with the NSA; "How do we stop them?" ... Have you noticed nobody is asking the question; How do we detect them? Sneakernet also had the benefit of being tamper-evident... if they broke down your door, you'd come home to a broken door. It'd be pretty obvious that something was up. Legal or illegal, when you physically search a property, you leave evidence behind that you did so. However, much of the technology the NSA is using doesn't leave any proverbial fingerprints behind.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Do you guys honestly think, for one second, that you can hide from these guys if they really want you? Any of you?
The qualifier is "if they really want you".
You can't hide from the NSA unless you're a government entity yourself. If I were to head the Iran nuclear program, I'd give it a try.
However, you can hide from the NSA dragnet, because it's not targetting you specifically.
So if you use any of the big e-mail providers, you can be 100% certain that a backup copy of all your e-mails exists somewhere in an NSA database. But if you run your own mailserver, the mails that you exchange over encrypted channels with someone else who also does that have a chance of not being caught by the net, not because they couldn't, but because the world is huge and even the vast NSA resources are limited.
The problem with the submitters concept is that as long as you roll your own, you can slip through the net (but never count on it, it's a probability like all things in IT security). But as soon as someone sets up a "secure hosting provider", he'll become a target. And the bigger it gets, the higher the chance that the NSA will expand some resources to penetrate it.
So it's not a viable business concept, and thus it doesn't exist. Of course, someone will make the claims, because scam is always a viable business concept.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I agree TFA has it wrong - there is a lot of competition going on all the time and the large amount of services that exists are good for most of us.
Plenty of competition in marginal profit realms leads to a string of failed startups. How do you know the provider you choose is going to last?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
What actually is a complete hosting provider?
A close example is Google. Google provides email, web, webmail, domain, XMPP, VOIP, all available from a single gmail login and manageable from a web interface.
No, I do not want to just rent a server from someone else, and set up and manage all this stuff myself. I want to pay for it, but I would like some competition, I do not like to send everyone to Google.
I realize that not every client will need or want all these services when I first set them up. Some clients will only use half the services ever. But having them easily accessible to the customer from a single provider if/when they need them has real value.