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Comment by chegra | Hacker News Reader

Just have one question: Who is going to pay for the nodes?

I'll put up for at least one, but I want them to get to the point where I believe they'll actually complete this.

For now they're kids with good intentions that have landed a 'live one', let's see if they can run with it and have the stamina required for something like this.

10 years ago I would have been much quicker to jump in but I've learned the hard way to be a bit more wary.

I wish a few more people would start something so I could rest my weight against something.

I would happy run a node that supports 10,000 people (that's approximately all the people I know, and all the people they know).

Schools, companies, ISPs, etc. Probably whoever runs email servers today, it's the same idea (imagine if email were all controlled by Zuckerberg).

They said they'd have a turnkey paid service. I guess that exists in email as well.

I'd like to see such software living on a moderately priced beefed up router. Call it an "information appliance"... It would function both as, a gateway to the internet when you're at home, and persistent store accessible from anywhere. Having it live on top of your firewall would make it easier for low-tech users to make use of such a device.

This has the same problem as existing personal data storage appliances and such...data redundancy and reliability is a really hard problem to solve by non-technical users.

An appliance, to be really reliable, needs to automatically store it's data somewhere else...like, say, a central backup service run by the company that sold the device. Oh, but now a central company has all your private data. Oops.

What about allowing you to "link" with other peoples "appliances". i.e. family and friends. This way they can back up your information too (encrypted of course, so they can't actually read it). And you only link to people you trust, which should mitigate some of the risk.

It becomes a case of who do you trust more, your family and friends - or a company somewhere. Besides, your mostly only storing information you want shared with family and friends anyway - otherwise why are you putting your info on this device in the first place?

edit: if I wasn't clear, the backup would be an automated thing. Only backing up information on peoples devices who are allowed to see it anyway.

This is ameliorated by commodity nature of os software: Backup to your pc, or to a provider like mozy, or to a friend's node as the other response mentions. Encrypt your backups while you're at it. This system gives you the availability of saas combined with the "this is my f%^king data" feeling you get when you carry everything around a thumbdrive.

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