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Comment by mahrain | Hacker News Reader

Near the end the author asks a very pertinent question indeed: how should the free software community respond to the cloud?

Stallman's response seems to be just not to use it, to keep your own data locally and manage everything yourself, lest you forfeit control. Yet, Ubuntu created their own version of cloud services branded Ubuntu One.

I feel that one vision might be to provide a very low power, high storage always-on home server solution to users with all kinds of integration and synced as a personal cloud. I'm opposed to keeping my computer running 24/7 due to the huge waste of energy (I'm in Europe, energy is expensive), but I would happily use a couple of watts for a personal cloud device (or internet-enabled NAS).

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The always-on home server solution is what FSF's Eben Moglen is promoting via the Freedom Box project:

http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox

How about p2p cloud ? Where volunteers run p2p client on their desktop, which contributes space to p2p cloud and users can store data on p2p cloud.

My startup is working on that. Sign-up at http://degoo.com and we'll let you know when we have a beta ready. /Shameless plug.

I can e-mail you my Master's Thesis, which covers some of the theory behind it (although, it's in Swedish).

Might be worth writing a 2-5 pager in english summarizing some security features.. I'd sign up if I read something that made me feel safe putting my data on it.

AFAIU, http://tahoe-lafs.org/ offers the most advanced security features currently available.

Thanks for the input! Yeah, information about the security-features are very important. Right now we are focusing on actually making it secure. Once we have a client ready we will most probably improve the information.

FYI: I saw a post about KDE's ownCloud.org effort yesterday that apparently has been going on for just over a year. It sounds like they're thinking in the correct direction. I've been wearing Gnome-blinders for the last few years so it was news to me.

amusingly, I've used KDE on my desktop for more than the last year and this is the first I'd heard of it. It's certainly not featured well with the software.

Tonido plug or similar device might be a good option? I'm considering getting one - mostly because (a) it's cool and (b) I have an at times irrational distrust of the cloud.

I investigated that option before building my own NAS, but decided against it. Plug computers offer no way to build RAID'ed systems, apart from maybe software raid over multiple external usb harddisks (I haven't tried it but I couldn't find anyone who did it, and I'm skeptical of performance of such a system). In the end I settled on a micro-atx board, a high performance power supply and lower energy use harddisks. I suspect (but have no data to prove it) that this uses less power than separate power supplies for each of the usb harddisks if one were to build a plug with those.

I'd concur. Especially since you can get actual barebones micro-atx servers for the cost of a nicer hard drive.

That's exactly what I've been thinking about (I noodled on the idea earlier this week: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/6277876911/the-personal-cloud )!

I mean, with services like FIOS that offer upstream parity, I think this is a pretty appealing idea. There are some interesting points in the comments on that link, too.

One major hazard is consumer-grade Internet service that has onerous terms that prohibit running servers from a home connection, for any number of reasons. (Some would see this as cultural complicitness with “client/server as technosocial class division”, but the effect is similar regardless of how it's spun.) A related technical problem is the use of carrier NAT, which gets very tricky to traverse.

So actually getting devices to call home to the “personal cloud” seems like it would be harder to make happen, and more importantly, harder to make reliable, because you can't use economic power to force at least one side to act in a convenient manner. This would drain the life out of any attempt at “you don't have to think about it very much”.

That's a really interesting consideration that's more technical than I could talk about intelligently. It seems like something for which there would be a market solution, though, like a service tier between current consumer grades and commercial grades. I guess there's something of a chicken and egg problem there, though.

I've just ordered a beagleboard-xm, and though I was initially looking for an ARM computer purely for the sake of owning one, it now seems like the perfect device for use as a personal 24/7 internet server. Should only draw 10-15 watts when operational, hope it works okay!

http://www.amahi.org/ is trying to get into this space now. It's a Linux distribution that from what I understand started off as something like a home convergence device. It runs on plug computers, too.

I'm not sure I would want to store my files on other peoples private computers.

How about something like Cassandra? You can stuff data into it, then access it both locally and off the cloud.

As long as you pick a good data model, syncing should be simple (famous last words).

Cassandra requires multiple good engineers to admin effectively, and 3x replication is a bit overkill for home storage.. RAID 5 would be good enough I'd think. Also, you really don't want to internet-expose an unauthenticated thrift server.

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