Your thirteen-year-old sister's "node" will live exactly where her email lives: on some ISP/hosting co.
Instead of "on some ISP/hosting co.", you mean to say "Google".
If Diaspora ever takes off -- and the odds are stacked against it -- then it's a very safe bet that Google will simply host nodes for free. Which means Google will have access to all the info they already have on you, plus all the info Facebook would've had.
This does not lead to the Glorious Distributed People's Republic of Privacy.
The usability problems of running your own node can be dealt with: just ship an already configured Sheeva plug.
The real problems are hardware price, asymmetric bandwidth, and the filtering of some ports, like SMTP. These problems will be tackled when we collectively acknowledge the importance of privacy.
It will take time (just see the success of web based mail), but I think it will eventually happen. The recent Facebook scandals are a little spark that may lit a fire. And I bet there will be many such sparks in the future.
In short, the Glorious Distributed People's Republic of Privacy won't happen tomorrow, nor next year. But 20 years from now doesn't seems unrealistic.
In your scenario the people who care about privacy can run their own nodes and the people who don't care can use Google, and everyone can still communicate. That's better than today's world, where basically everyone has to use Facebook.
Comments
Your thirteen-year-old sister's "node" will live exactly where her email lives: on some ISP/hosting co.
Instead of "on some ISP/hosting co.", you mean to say "Google".
If Diaspora ever takes off -- and the odds are stacked against it -- then it's a very safe bet that Google will simply host nodes for free. Which means Google will have access to all the info they already have on you, plus all the info Facebook would've had.
This does not lead to the Glorious Distributed People's Republic of Privacy.
The usability problems of running your own node can be dealt with: just ship an already configured Sheeva plug.
The real problems are hardware price, asymmetric bandwidth, and the filtering of some ports, like SMTP. These problems will be tackled when we collectively acknowledge the importance of privacy.
It will take time (just see the success of web based mail), but I think it will eventually happen. The recent Facebook scandals are a little spark that may lit a fire. And I bet there will be many such sparks in the future.
In short, the Glorious Distributed People's Republic of Privacy won't happen tomorrow, nor next year. But 20 years from now doesn't seems unrealistic.
In your scenario the people who care about privacy can run their own nodes and the people who don't care can use Google, and everyone can still communicate. That's better than today's world, where basically everyone has to use Facebook.