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Comment by mchahn | Hacker News Reader

I love it. We had servers, then we had clouds, and now we have personal clouds. Uh, isn't that a server?

Exactly, I believe there's a clear cycle going on (mainframes - pc - clouds - personal clouds).

Fueled by:

- moores law (massive compute power and storage at cheap prices) - bandwidths growing - new tools and devices that create constant streams of data (smartphones, collaborative & filesharing tools etc.) - commoditization of our most-used online tools (see dropbox) - a desire to have one integrated point of access/control

and a raising awareness of how important it is to own/control our data (caused in part by constant news coming out on hacks, data breaches and how basically data companies are the new oil companies)

Yes, it's a server :)

ps. I'm one of the founders

The article refers to 'private cloud', and you refer to 'personal clouds'. From reading the rest of the article, though, it appears this is a single on-premise server.

'Cloud' usually refers to some abstraction above the physical hardware layer, that allows you to not worry about the fate of a single physical computer. This seems to be the opposite of that.

What do you mean by 'cloud'?

Not quite, it's still someone else that takes care of the physical aspect and the hardware fail-over for you. Even so the distinction is becoming more and more blurry.

The long term point of convergence is that the whole concept of a 'machine' will go away as far as the cloud is concerned. It will still involve machines but you won't know (or care) about how many of them and where they are located.

Something along the lines of Heroku, only then a bit more generic. Computing-by-the-yard, if you wish.

But if you care about privacy or security, you do care where they are located.

If they're located on your property, then they're protected by 200+ years of case law (in many countries). If not, then you have no protection save the company's privacy policy and willingness to enforce it in the face of government pressure or commercial temptation to sell your data.

Awesome point.

With all of the talking about anonymity, crypto, etc, which are all ephemeral things, one of the strongest things that you have going for you as a US resident is an object inside the perimeter of your home.

I'd trust strong crypto more than the law. I don't leave piles of cash in my house despite the law against taking it.

Generally speaking, the law wins.

That's true. But good crypto can also protect you in the outlier cases. If someone is taking your stuff they either disregard the law or they are the law. Crypto protects you at least a bit in both cases.

The US, UK, and most nations friendly to the US are not those countries.

There have been too many cases of police and/or security services rolling up at private addresses or small offices, bundling all the hardware they find into a van, and forcing innocent people to spend huge sums on lawyers to have any hope of getting it back.

A box on your desk is not the right answer to this problem.

Some kind of massively redundant disintermediated public data network might be, but we don't really have one of those yet.

To be fair this is not new, a truck pulling up and movers taking all the filing cabinets (or slapping government seals on them) is the way it used to be done.

If your local server filesystems are encrypted, then it's actually safer from that sort of thing than the file cabinets used to be.

>now we have personal clouds. Uh, isn't that a server?

I expect the next generation will be the mobile personal cloud.

What do you call a disruption that re-rupts something previously disrupted?

no because it sits on your desk.

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