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Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address booksUbuntu to store copies of all users' address booksPosted Oct 14, 2009 17:56 UTC (Wed) by raraavis (guest, #7387)Parent article: Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books
Hi! Elliot Murphy here. It seems I was overenthusiastic when sending that email to the couchdb dev list, and left out an important word: 'can' be replicated :)
Ubuntu 9.10 will have an address book in Evolution called "Ubuntu One". Users may choose to store contacts there, and other tools such as Macaco Contacts and Akonadi are integrating with the same data store. I hope this will enable some progress on a cross-desktop unified address book on Linux. Optionally, users may choose to subscribe to the Ubuntu One service, and replicate their files and contacts database to one.ubuntu.com. The service has a free plan with 2GB of storage space, so I consider that as being available to every singe Ubuntu user. It's totally optional though. At some point, we'll also be offering over-the-air syncing of the contacts in the cloud with your mobile phone, and I think round-trip syncing of contacts between your phone, your linux desktop, and the web is something that many people will enjoy.
If people don't want to use the cloud, thats totally understandable. I think some portion of the userbase will always want to avoid cloud services, preferring instead to keep all their data under their own direct control. One of the reasons I'm excited about using CouchDB for this system is that at last we don't have to force people to choose between replicated convenience and maintaining total control over their data. It's also easy for a user to set up peer-to-peer replication of their CouchDB to their own machines without going through Canonical servers at all. There is even a little GUI tool to make this easier in the desktopcouch-tools package.
Sorry to have alarmed people, I hope this explains things a bit better. I'm always interested in hearing feedback about how to make the design better, and I'm very passionate about designing cloud services that provides much more user autonomy than the current common practice, while also providing a lot of user convenience that makes so many cloud services appealing. The ubuntuone-users mailing list is a great place to send feedback, and can be found here: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntuone-users
cheers!
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Thanks! Posted Oct 14, 2009 18:10 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
Thank you for the clarification!
I know how tough it can be to remember that, as cool and exciting as
Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books Posted Oct 14, 2009 18:19 UTC (Wed) by BeS (subscriber, #43108) [Link] >I'm always interested in hearing feedback about how to make the design better, and I'm very passionate about designing cloud services that provides much more user autonomy than the current common practice, while also providing a lot of user convenience that makes so many cloud services appealing. One possibility would be to encrypt the data locally and store them encrypted in the cloud. This would make sure that only the user can read the data. Of course this would add some extra work for the user: Distribute the key on all clients and take care of the key. But I think it would be good to have this possibility at least as an option for people who want real privacy while using the cloud.
Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books Posted Oct 14, 2009 19:14 UTC (Wed) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
Tahoe-LAFS (which also comes with Karmic) automatically encrypts all data stored in it. It has a
novel approach to ease the pain of key-management, which is the critical stumbling block for such ideas. http://allmydata.org
It's not perfect, but I think it is better than any current alternative.
Regards,
Zooko
Yes, encryption option would solve all problems Posted Oct 14, 2009 22:04 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] I'm also interested to hear if this has been discussed.
Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books Posted Oct 15, 2009 9:51 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
One of the planned offerings is mobile synchronisation (via the SyncML found in most handsets capable of synchronisation). I'm not sure how client side encryption would work with that.
But all the client code is free software, so if you didn't care about the mobile sync feature you could implement something like this.
Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books Posted Oct 15, 2009 15:57 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
Hm, actually Tahoe-LAFS might fit into that use case pretty well... But again I'm pushing my own
idea here when this thread is about Canonical's UbuntuOne. If you are interested in exploring privacy-compatible storage and sync and then maybe join the tahoe-dev mailing list. :-)
Regards,
Zooko
Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books Posted Oct 14, 2009 19:51 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Can you explain how the communication between local applications and he local couchdb works?
Is there a daemon running by default that brokers communication between the local applications like evolution and the local couch? Is this communication driven through D-BUS.. or is there a local unix socket or tcp port opened as part of the desktop session?
-jef
Ubuntu to store copies of all users' address books Posted Oct 14, 2009 20:19 UTC (Wed) by james_w (subscriber, #51167) [Link]
"Can you explain how the communication between local applications and he
local couchdb works?"
https://launchpad.net/desktopcouch
"Is there a daemon running by default that brokers communication between
desktopcouch runs a couchdb for each user session. It's started by D-Bus
couchdb is a webservice, so communication is then using HTTP.
Thanks,
James
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