

Security in 2020 - CrazedGeek
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/12/security_in_202.html

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pierrefar
I think we need a better name for his _decentralization_ concept because what
he's describing is actually centralization: you're storing your data elsewhere
which makes it accessible everywhere (the nearest screen as he calls it). That
elsewhere is a central place.

We will have specialized services for this centralization(e.g GMail for email,
picassa for photos) and also services that span multiple types of data.
Thinking in these terms makes Facebook look a lot more interesting: it is a
central place that hosts multiple types of your data in one place, and they
are working on making it available to more screens - some of which are not
yours!

He makes the argument that we (the consumers) are the product that Google and
Bing sell, and argument already made for TV watchers. By the same token, a
Facebook user is much more valuable than a search engine user because FB knows
so much more about them.

~~~
swombat
You're right that the word is slightly misleading, because it could be seen
both ways, but it is also clearly decentralisation.

In the previous model, all your data, email, media, etc is on your computer,
your hard drive, a single point that you are in control of. In the new model,
your photos are on Facebook, your emails are on Gmail, your tweets are on
Twitter, your bookmarks are on Delicious, your data is on Dropbox, your music
is on Spotify, your movies are on Netflix, etc... It's not centralised to one
location, it's split up from one location (your computer) into potentially
hundreds of locations owned by a variety of paymasters with different agendas.
So, it is decentralised.

From the point of view of the collective, it's centralisation (data goes from
many entities into a single entity) but from the point of view of the
individual, it's decentralisation (data goes from a single entity to many
entities).

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swombat
Wow. Excellent article. Visionary, even.

So, clearly, about 90% of the population of this message board _will_ be
parasites by this new definition.

This suggests one thing to me: if we're disorganised parasites, we will get
squashed.

~~~
Mongoose
Funny that the same demographic will likely be the ones implementing the tech
that necessitates such parasitic behavior.

~~~
cstross
Do not underestimate the ability of human beings to act individually against
their collective best interest. Or to act in accordance with whatever
authority _tells_ them is their best interest, without pausing for analysis.

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yogsototh
It was a really nice article.

Coincidence? Today I've switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo
instead of Google. I'll give it a one week try.

I am a coFounder for an electric smart grid company. A major long term problem
for us is to find a way to provide our customer the complete propriety of
their data.

How could we manage data without knowing much about it? Is there any simple
way of encrypting some data and be able to make some transformation to them?

Something like:

    
    
        F(enc(x)) = enc(F(x)) ?
    

We are managing mostly consumption values, it would be nice to provide
functions like the mean, max, FFT? I don't know.

Thanks for any idea.

~~~
jerf
You're looking for this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption#Fully_ho...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption#Fully_homomorphic_encryption)

Practicality right now is minimal. My intuition says it is going to stay that
way, but who knows.

~~~
Xk
It's not totally impractical. Paillier, for example, has nice applications in
electronic voting (since you can sum votes without reading who those votes
were for).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paillier_cryptosystem>

But yeah, anything more than that is currently not all that practical.

------
jerf
I'm still not really convinced a huge ecosystem can be built solely on
advertising. Under this view of the future, the problem is advertising supply
shoots through the roof, and even _before_ we consider advertising-specific
issues like saturation, we're already looking at a quickly-dropping price.
Consider the fact that someone getting constantly beamed advertising isn't
really getting anything out of it and the prices drop even further. You can't
count on making money that way. Even today it's already not a panacea and you
can tell from HN comments that it's generally considered a weak business plan
today to count on advertising to fund your startup. There's still a "step 2"
missing here for me before you can really build a long-term platform out of it
pervasively.

~~~
harshpotatoes
I think it's important to note that huge ecosystems have already been built
solely on advertising. Forget google and go back 50 years to look at radio and
broadcast television. I think those are the huge ecosystems you are looking
for, not a startup.

~~~
jerf
Not in the sense I mean. Notice how I talked about _supply and demand_. In a
mass media world, supply of advertising is actually very sharply constrained;
a 30-second spot on the Superbowl is in short supply. Banner ads are not in
short supply, and the idea that I can use ad-supported hardware to access ad-
supported internet to use an ad-supported service like YouTube in which ads
will be embedded into the video, and that all of these ads will somehow be
profitable and something you can build your business on, is quite different
from a world in which there's ten minutes of ad time an hour on three major
networks to buy, and a finite amount of newspaper space, etc.

~~~
harshpotatoes
I think you're forgetting that not all websites/youtube videos are equal.
Having a banner ad on some random webcomic is not the same as having one on
penny arcade, just as having an ad on some youtube video is not the same as
having one on smosh's video, just as having an ad on channel 738 is not the
same as having one on basic cable. Furthermore, doesn't a website have these
same constraints? I only look at each page for a finite amount of time, each
youtube video is only a finite amount of length, each website only gets a
certain amount of viewers.

I think the web in general still has the same constraints as more traditional
media, they just aren't as obvious. A website getting x unique visitors could
show x unique ads, a different ad for every visitor. But maybe that isn't very
effective, so the website reduces the number of ads they show in order to have
each ad by seen by more visitors, thus reducing the supply of available ad
slots. These constraints aren't as obvious as they are for television or
radio, but I think they still exist.

I think you're right that J. Startup can't depend on banner advertisements as
a form of revenue, but J. Startup is probably using google as the middleman.
However, in this situation, J. wouldn't be building an advertising ecosystem,
but depending on google's already huge ecosystem. I don't think it will be
farfetched in the future to see free hardware given away in order to earn
advertising dollars. I bet if televisions were cheaper, broadcasting companies
would have given away free hardware, and perhaps in the future hulu will give
wifi devices to get people to watch hulu whenever they have a free moment.

------
SimonPStevens
So adblock users are parasites?

~~~
route66
Google for "webmasters complain ad-blocker" or "fighting ad-blockers" to
gather some opinions out there ...

~~~
gloob
The weird part is that clicking an ad you have no interest in is frowned upon
("click fraud"), but downloading (not necessarily even rendering!) an ad you
have no interest in is considered by some to be something bordering on a moral
imperative.

~~~
gyardley
Nothing weird here. It's the advertisers who don't want you to click an ad
without interest. It's the publishers who want you to generate ad revenue for
their site.

Two different parties, two different motivations, two different stances.

------
skybrian
The key is being nice to your users without trusting them at all (since they
could be bad guys). A neat trick if you can manage it. The airports are doing
spectacularly badly at it.

------
kznewman
I think there are some visionary things here but he misses the 'consent' part.
By using free services we do give consent and if we don't like the privacy
policies of Facebook et al then nobody forces us to use them. Yes providers
should be honest about their policies and some do play dirty tricks. We learn
which ones are not really honest so if we keep using them, we can’t really
claim surprise or lack of consent.

Free stuff costs. Not money but there are costs. In the future world he is
imagining there will be some who want to pay for their own machines and
control the software that runs on them.

Being a parasite means riding a host and giving up some critical decisions
about where and how the host lives.

[Edit for grammer]

~~~
loup-vaillant
By "consent", he meant " _informed_ consent". That requires reading the terms
of service and understand their implications. Few people actually do that. The
rest of us merely click our way to something that "just works".

For instance few Gmail users are actually aware that Google is routinely doing
semantic analysis of their e-mail. When I tell them, they're invariably mildly
shocked. (I insist on "semantic" even if their methods are statistical,
because Markov chains are highly correlated to meaning.)

