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Comment by ilovecomputers | Hacker News Reader

So far the "real name" policy is the only major, undemocratic, incident that I've seen from a centralized online service. Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers?

Nonetheless, I agree with him that we need to make decentralized computing practical. The best example I've seen of this is Opera Unite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivshJ-qyg5w

There is also Freenet, but so far (from reading their mailing lists) they are discussing about changing their load management. I've tried Freenet and it slows down my machine (not very practical), but it is the only software project I've seen that distributes the hosting of digital content among peers instead of a centralized server: http://freenetproject.org/

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Easy access for law enforcement, easy access for the NSA, CIA, FBI, everyone else. The attack on Gmail by Chinese hackers used the interface that Google provides to law enforcement to use. There's also the commercial access part. Some companies sell their centralized databases to 3rd parties.

About freenet; it encrypts all network traffic so that no one else knows what is being transferred. That causes quite a bit of a slowdown. Also, it's Java and on some machines it can use up a lot of RAM, especially on older machines.

The alternative is encrypting your emails and letting GMail store that. The problem with that is that they still know when you sent an email, and who you sent it to. Just the fact that your email is encrypted can be taken as sign of guilt by law enforcement. But it's still an option.

> The alternative is encrypting your emails and letting GMail store that. The problem with that is that they still know when you sent an email, and who you sent it to. Just the fact that your email is encrypted can be taken as sign of guilt by law enforcement.

Does this actually have precedent?

Not sure but thinking back to those Chinese hackers they might be interested in knowing who's talking to who.

It's also useful for anyone who wants to smear someone else. "Oh politician so-and-so is talking to such a person in secret, I wonder what they're saying".

Diaspora was/is a hint of the future for distributed social networks, but too bad it was/is a bit poorly executed.

To be honest, I had hopes that Google+ would be part of an open platform with federation, considering Google Talk already uses XMMP and Google Buzz used OStatus partially (just for broadcasting, not for receiving, though). I even commented about that, right here on HN.

The real-names policy changes all that, I lost my hope on Google leading a social network decentralization, so it's all a bit sour for me.

The Amazon centralized deletion of books from Kindles could be put in this category.

> Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers?

Yes. Many of these are undemocratic, but others are merely unintentional problems of reliability induced by a single point of failure.

http://www.delicious.com/kragen/decentralization-stories has a few dozen items up through 2008.

http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395310.html livejournal users want more control of livejournal. decentralization-stories

omg decentralization-stories: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/when-google-owns-you/ http://www.chrisbrogan.com/google-gets-back-to-nick/

http://valleywag.com/5053704/kentucky-judge-moves-to-seize-g... more decentralization-stories: caribbeangold.com, etc., censored

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341378 more decentralization-stories: legal intimidation takes a site offline

http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28 decentralization-stories: the TWiki Takeover

http://norayounis.com/2008/11/04/308 The impressive flickr account of blogger and friend Hossam el-Hamalawy is facing censorship by flickr themselves! First they disabled pro-palestine photos he had taken in Ireland, then they started searching their old drawers for reasons to un-list his account from public search. decentralization-stories

http://arabist.net/arabawy/2008/11/04/flick-censors-my-accou... more details. ugly. decentralization-stories

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/11/05/support-the-arabist... global voices picks it up.

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009100.html The most credible voice in the Ossetian war, he tells us, was a Georgian blogger who’d fled Abkhazia for Russia. His LiveJournal account was highly critical both of Moscow and of Sakashvili, and was widely read in the Russian blogosphere. But a flurry of denial of service attacks, launched by a set of zombie computers likely controlled by Russian hackers, disabled LiveJournal for an hour, and forced the owners of LiveJournal to ask the blogger to leave the service so that future attacks wouldn’t take down the platform. He moved to Wordpress, but had the same experience. If governments are able to unleash attacks that can disable whole platforms, it’s likely that they’ll successfully silence many online voices. decentralization-stories

http://elphabawest.blogspot.com/2008/12/microsoft-live-has-n... Microsoft Live blogging used to support anonymous commenting, but they were tracking the commenters’ identity --- and when they turned off anonymous commenting, all the previously-anonymous comments became non-anonymous. decentralization-stories

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1617 Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse (AOL deleted a lot of people's web pages with scant 4 weeks' warning) decentralization-stories

http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-blocks-all-pirate-bay-links... decentralization-stories about one social site blocking all links to another.

http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/ more decentralization-stories: resig is moving public discussion of jQuery off Google Groups

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/02/cory-doctor... anti. decentralization-stories.

http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/198 The Lower Merion School District used laptops with webcams to spy on children in their homes. decentralization-stories

http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/1/25/lets-welcome-our-n... decentralization-stories about cloud computing

http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-c... decentralization-stories about how Adobe doesn’t want to do anything for the iPhone

http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/538652366/info-roundup-mcafee... decentralization-stories about virus scanning and “bad code” identification http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282791 discussion thereof

http://my.opera.com/unite/blog/2009/07/14/fixing-proxy-probl... decentralization-stories: Opera Unite was down for days because it depended on centralized proxies

http://www.itwriting.com/blog/2647-itunes-user-has-account-h... decentralization-stories: a guy’s account got closed after someone broke into it, and he lost all of his previous six years of iTunes purchases.

http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/26/facebook-account-disable... decentralization-stories http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2010/03/26/facebook-account-d... decentralization-stories

http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2010/09/scribd... decentralization-stories: scribd changes its terms

http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110228/t-mobile-killing-of... decentralization-stories: the hiptop/sidekick will be bricked.

http://e1ven.com/2011/04/14/why-no-company-that-values-their... decentralization-stories. in this case google just broke some things, that’s all.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/googles-lack-transpera... Earlier this month, Google removed Grooveshark’s popular app from the Android Market for violation of the Android terms of service, later informing Grooveshark that the removal was related to a “complaint from the RIAA" but nevertheless refusing to provide an actual legal or policy basis for the takedown.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-fa... Why Facebook and Google's Concept of 'Real Names' Is Revolutionary - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic A bit of a #decentralization-stories item, maybe.

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