
Personal bulletin boards won't return without a good reason - protomyth
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/12/03/bbs/
======
ivan_ah
I disagree.

Methinks the general public is capable of running their own server. Also, I
predict a backlash against the hosted-at-X paradigm. Open source doesn't know
it, but the battle for freedom "in the cloud" is just about to begin.

Option 1: Use fb, dbox, and gmail for all your shit.

Option 2: Start the "blog", "sshd" and "mail" daeemon-apps on your own server,
which in turn could be hosted anywhere.

The big selling(freeing?) point of an FOSS and self-administered facebook is
privacy. Right now, people don’t seem to care about privacy all that much, and
I can't blame them. Every time the privacy debate comes up in relation to
google or facebook the conversation is steered towards the following
assumptions:

    
    
      - The attacker is another member of the website or an anonymous web user.
      - The platform (gmail or facebook) is a trusted third party.
    

This is not the debate I want to be having. I don't agree with the second
assumption. Any “privacy policy” I can fill out for my data will not prevent
the company from accessing my data. They own the database and the file servers
and even have authority over my login credentials for that website.

What about the privacy in the following paradigm:

    
    
       - The attacker can be any person or company on the internet.
       - Your server is a VM in a distributed platform of hosts.
       - You have a special credential (id-rsa), which is used to change settings on the VM.  
       - Host can be trusted most of the time, but sometimes (prob=0.2) they are malicious.
    
    

If we ensure there is a big ecosystem of hosting companies with a compatible
API, then individual users could constantly migrate their hosting plans and
change companies every month, or even every week. Thus in the worst case, a
"cloud host" could eavesdrop on you just for one week. If you constantly
change hosts, you will get a guaranteed 80% privacy, which is much better than
0% privacy.

Anyone who has lots of servers on their hands and wants to start a hosting
company -- I say you get the whole "my home in the cloud" app hosting business
started: <http://ivan.unixdaemons.com/blog/?p=513>

Eben Moglen talks to the troops: <http://isoc-ny.org/?p=1338>

~~~
gte910h
Almost all VPS hosts have login keys to your machines.

All colos have physical access and could gain physical access to your
machines.

Once the server is out of your possession, trust starts to become an issue.

~~~
ivan_ah
> Almost all VPS hosts have login keys to your machines. > All colos have
> physical access and could > gain physical access to your machines.

That is true.

> Once the server is out of your possession, > trust starts to become an
> issue.

What I had in mind is that you could host with people you trust -- friends,
family and hosting companies that are advocate privacy.

------
desireco42
I used to run a BBS and there is no more community building like in those
days. I used RemoteAccess and Maximus later. Has a lot of fun with it and with
much of the people from that time I am still friends.

I think there might be use case, but it would really need a push to make it
popular. I would really enjoy to recreate at least some of the community from
that time.

------
xenonite
Anybody here who actually used Opera Unite?

~~~
StavrosK
That's exactly what this post reminded me of, Unite is precisely the sort of
thing this refers to. Sadly, nobody seems to have used it much, and I'm a
hardcore Opera user, so I'd have heard _something_.

~~~
rachelbythebay
What actually got me thinking about this topic originally was this comic:
<http://xkcd.com/949/>

It brought me back to my BBS days when I could send a file directly to a
friend's system with no intermediaries. I didn't even need them to be there
when I uploaded it to their machine! Even if they didn't run their own, I
could post it somewhere on my own system and let them grab it at their
convenience.

It was easy, it was direct, it was as fast as you could get at the time, and
it was private. There were no intermediate computers or networks which had to
bless your traffic. Like the xkcd suggests, there are size limits, filters,
and all sorts of other crazy things once you start relying on those systems.

------
gscott
This is now groupware software. No real need to run it on your home computer
you can download phpgroupware and get a $5 web host.

