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Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian)
The Guardian reports on Richard Stallman's warning about cloud computing and ChromeOS in particular. "I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute. The US government may try to encourage people to place their data where the US government can seize it without showing them a search warrant, rather than in their own property. However, as long as enough of us continue keeping our data under our own control, we can still do so. And we had better do so, or the option may disappear."
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Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 14, 2010 14:22 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]
I'm glad this is starting to be said by influential people.
It seems to me that the FOSS movement needs to focus on building "uncloud" software for letting people own their own data & servers, but get some of the benefits of cloudiness, in terms of replication, sharing, trivial administration, etc.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 14, 2010 14:34 UTC (Tue) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]
The fact is that right now there's a tradeoff; you can spend all kinds of time doing your own IT work to set up apps and manage updates to them and backup data and so on. Or, you can use web apps or smartphone apps where you don't have to do a bunch of IT work.
Most people have no ability to do IT work. Stallman is identifying a problem with no currently-known solution. There is not a practical way for anyone nontechnical, and even most of us who are technical, to follow his advice. Other than go off the grid Unabomber-style.
People hand-wave about federation and replication and so forth but there are essentially zero examples of apps with that working well (for nontechnical users), and millions of examples of the web app approach working well. It's tough to take seriously that there's an alternative to the web app model, until someone shows such an alternative working well in practice for those without IT skills.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 14, 2010 15:03 UTC (Tue) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
Well said, hp.
Right now, all we can do is educate people so that they vote with their feet and store their data in places that let them take it back, later, if they want to.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 14, 2010 15:05 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]
"Stallman is identifying a problem with no currently-known solution"
I think you're right. However, solving this problem may be the next existential battle for FOSS.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 14, 2010 18:03 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
It really involves just making superior software. Stuff that is self-manageable and is wrote by trusted individuals.
For example my poor Grandma's PC is so full of holes and crap that it's ridiculous. Between what she has now and what she could get with ChromeOS... I trust Google a lot more then I trust the malware authors or even Microsoft.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 14, 2010 19:01 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
The pieces are all there. They need to be packaged nicely. Take a Linux home server and use that is the site for running your "cloud" apps.... All the pieces are there; they need to be put together by someone (Canonical? Red Hat? Litl?) so that it's *easy*.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 15, 2010 0:17 UTC (Wed) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link]
The problem with running a server at your house is most ISPs do not provide sufficient uplink speeds. I have run music servers from my house and when I stream music to my phone no one can use the Internet from my house.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 14, 2010 16:12 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
Yeah. I keep my own mail/calendars/photos/videos/files, because I don't want to entrust everything to a Cloud company, but it seems like it's getting increasingly difficult to continue to do so. It used to be that you could get equivalently good (or better) functionality by running things yourself, but that seems much less true now.
Mail is pretty much the same as it's been for 10 years, for better or worse. As a webui, it seems like squirrelmail basically hasn't changed at all in 10 years, and gmail is still hugely better. For IMAP, running your own is still a reasonably fine solution -- Dovecot is a good server, and Courier worked before it. Spam filtering via SpamAssassin works okay, but not as good as gmail. And there's no easy integration between a IMAP client "mark as spam" button and the spamassasin training database.
For running my own fileserver, I'm starting to lose out due to integrationitis: there is so much stuff (devices and software) out there that can only upload to/download from various of: Flickr, Youtube, dotMAC, DropBox, Facebook, Photobucket, etc. So, while I can certainly run my own server, I can't conveniently get files onto/off of it from standard consumer devices/software. (They still support USB connections of course.)
Then, I have no equivalent to something like Google Docs -- I can't edit documents in a web-browser when they're stored on my own server. I need to store them at Google.
And, Calendars are rather a pain too. I've heard good things about DAViCal, but haven't gotten around to setting it up yet. And I'm thinking of getting an Android phone...and it won't work there. Android only supports Exchange or Google Calendar. Not CalDAV.
Anyways...I'm not sure exactly where I was going with this, but, sigh.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 14, 2010 16:35 UTC (Tue) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]
I published some tools for dovecot to integrate spam training, and running crm114 underneath I have a really good spam filter. I have no idea if it beats gmail since I don't use it, but I haven't had a false classification in quite a while, not even false positives. But it does have an "unsure" state where you'll have to train it.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 15, 2010 3:47 UTC (Wed) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804) [Link] There's two reasonable webmail packages available these days, RoundCube and SOGo - the latter has a CalDAV server and web client too. Android not supporting CalDAV is pretty shocking.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 25, 2010 22:07 UTC (Sat) by janfrode (subscriber, #244) [Link]
Wow, thanks for pointing me at SOGo! Can't believe I've missed it (might be the word "groupware" that's scared med off), but it seems like the perfect open source webmail platform to me. With the SOGoSync plugin (ActiveSync), I guess it should work fine for Androids as well.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 15, 2010 13:09 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
As for webmail, you may want to have a look at CiderWebmail http://ciderwebmail.org
For feeding back manually marked spam to spamassassin, I just wrote a couple of lines shell script running as a daily cronjob, that simply takes everything in my Spam folder, feeds it to sa-learn and removes it from my mailbox.
Another thing... Posted Dec 14, 2010 14:33 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] If ChromeOS or ChromeOS-like systems become popular, who will suddenly have lots of power? (No, not Google.) The carriers. Imagine the power of a Telco or cable company. You won't be able to do anything without an Internet connection; large ISPs will be able to gouge you even more than they do already. "Nice data you have in that cloud. It'd be a pity if you couldn't access it."
Another thing... Posted Dec 14, 2010 14:46 UTC (Tue) by rgoates (guest, #3280) [Link]
That would imply an effective monopoly on access to the internet. That could happen, but it's far from the situation now. I think the entities hosting/controlling the data would be more likely to gain any power to extort.
Another thing... Posted Dec 14, 2010 16:02 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] That would imply an effective monopoly on access to the internet.Well, I can use internet access over cable TV or over ADSL, but both are from the same company. Theoretically I could by "ADSL internet" from an other ISP, but I'd still use the wire from the company that built it to my place. I could also use 3G, but that's really slow and expensive, so not a real alternative. So there's already an effective monopoly on access to the internet.
Another thing... Posted Dec 14, 2010 16:09 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] In most places there are only a few (as in, low single-digit number) carrier companies that offer mobile Internet connectivity, and they're basically free to screw you over any way they like. Yes, you can get a »flat rate« UMTS-based data plan for €20/month, but you need to look at the small print to find out that »flat rate« means 200 megabytes of data at UMTS speed before you will be throttled down to the equivalent of ISDN for the rest of the month, or that anything over that cap will be charged at 50 cents per kilobyte. Since all the carriers are doing the same thing one way or the other, good luck finding one that is noticeably cheaper or better than the rest if you're not happy with your current one. Which of course does in no way detract from the observation that we'll also be at the mercy of the people hosting the data.
Another thing... Posted Dec 14, 2010 18:51 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Heh. Maybe you should change your country?
I live in Ukraine. We have like eight 3G Internet providers and 2 WiMax providers, with 3G coverage for about 90% of the country (even including Chernobyl). Unlimited data can be had for about $1 per day, without contracts or any other commitment.
So it's not like data transmission is insurmountable obstacle.
Another thing... Posted Dec 14, 2010 18:58 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]
What are housing costs like, and how hard is it to get a work visa? :)
Another thing... Posted Dec 16, 2010 21:19 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
My info's a bit out of date, and Ukraine is in Europe so it's probably gone up somewhat since then, but a bit over ten years ago a graduate starting salary would probably have been about US$100/month.
But Ukraine won't have had the eflux that occurred in the new EU countries, so it won't have had the "downward pressure starting on a low base" that they've had.
Cheers,
Another thing... Posted Dec 14, 2010 16:17 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] That would imply an effective monopoly on access to the internet. Welcome to Canada. We have a duopoly. You can get cable access from your local cable company (of which there is exactly one in most areas.) Or you can get DSL access from a number of providers, all of whom lease access from the local phone company (of which there is exactly one in most areas.)
Another thing... Posted Dec 14, 2010 18:19 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
That is the way it is in most places in the USA, too.
The local governments gave out monopolies to companies in order to ensure that there was significant enough financial benefit for these corporations to come in and create the networks. Also most places helped with dealing with legal costs, and even used taxes in the form of subsidies to help finance laying fiber and maintaining lines.
The two networks that ended up getting created are telephone lines and cable lines. Telephone service and the cable was originally only used to get service out to rural areas and suburbs were television radio broadcast was spotty. It blew up from there.
Of course the FCC only gives out wireless access to the largest bidder, which is almost always going to be the biggest existing companies. And they suck because they are in a protected position and are artificially isolated from competition due to all the regulation.
So it makes it virtually impossible for anybody but the established companies to compete. Which they barely do.
Prior to all the effort to get 'broadband' out to everybody's house anybody could be a ISP and there were usually dozens to choose from in any town. The telephone system was already pretty much established government-sanctioned local monopolies, but anybody could use the telephone system to send data. They ended up 'solving' this problem by capping data speeds over modems to the 56k standards and set it up so that the telephone company was only legally required to maintain 28.8 baud speeds, which made it impossible for customers to complain and get slow data connections fixed. This was done, of course, to help the telephone and cable companies to get enough profits to get people on 'broadband'.
There are a few different ways were we can go about and solve these problems.
Communities paying for municipal data-only fiber networks that is open to any ISP to use on behalf of the community members is my favorite one. Then we end up in a similar situation that anybody who can connect to a major internet network can be a ISP. But there are other possibilities.
Another thing... Posted Dec 15, 2010 4:24 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
Do the telcos provide wholesale local loop access to other ISPs to let them provide DSL service?
In Australia, Telstra holds a monopoly on the local loop telephone connection but pretty much every ISP offers ADSL plans that make use of Telstra's wiring between the exchange and your home.
Things aren't perfect though, since Telstra offers retail DSL products and hasn't always charged itself the same amount for wholesale network access that it does to third parties. That has mainly been a problem with bad regulation, and should be reduced when management of the wholesale network business moves to NBN Co.
Another thing... Posted Dec 16, 2010 21:27 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
In the UK BT is legally obliged to provide such access. Indeed, (and this causes problems), it is legally obliged to sell the "right to use" of the line to another telco upon customer request. The result is a mess.
My ISP is Demon. They run their ADSL over BT lines, like everyone else. What *should* happen aiui is that when I connect to ADSL, BT is supposed to automatically route my call to Demon's DSLAM wherever. But sometimes, when they service the line, they accidentally route it to their own DSLAM. Which, of course, rejects my login leaving me without internet!
Then there's a big blame-game between Demon and BT until someone realises the system has been mis-configured :-( And because I've got a router not a modem, I don't see BT's DSLAM login page, which would be a big clue ...
I'd just like to see the physical infrastructure sold to the users in local co-ops. They could then buy service over that infrastructure from whoever ...
Cheers,
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 14, 2010 15:17 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
The trend of cloud computing is similar to bank consolidation. As a big bank sounds safe due to its size and presumable professionalism so is the cloud computing attractiveness of delegating all the IT work to somebody big and professional. And it will indeed save money and time as the professional can do the job better.
The problem is a mistake of somebody big and professional would also be big and can affect you in such a way that all the time and money saving from delegated IT would be wiped after one cannot access the data for few days. This is similar to money loss during last financial crises when many investors lost all the money earned during last, say 10, years in a matter of days.
So doing some IT on your own and managing the data locally is a form of insurance against an unexpected whether that unexpected event comes from a government innervation or a stupid mistake by a cloud provider.
Keep your own tame cloud Posted Dec 14, 2010 17:38 UTC (Tue) by ayeomans (subscriber, #1848) [Link] Devices such as Pogoplug make it simple for users to keep control of their own data. Eucalyptus lets you run your own private cloud.RMS's warning is a timely reminder to the risks of the clouds - but Free / Open Source software already lets you keep control of your data. I would expect ChromeOS would work just as well with your own private cloud.
Keep your own tame cloud Posted Dec 14, 2010 21:51 UTC (Tue) by rillian (subscriber, #11344) [Link]
Well, a customized version would. At least as long as the device lets you install your own firmware, and your ISP doesn't filter the traffic too much. Google is very close to the line on those, while still trying to do something new. We should all watch the freedom of ChromeOS devices closely.
Eucalyptus is indeed an excellent example of open source software supporting cloud freedom. I hadn't heard of Pogoplug before, but it looks like an arm linux fileserver with a proprietary web service for nat and firewall traversal. A neat product, but it seems to offer less data freedom than Chrome OS, where at least the client is open source.
I've been hearing a lot of "curated computing is bad for freedom" lately. I don't think that's a useful way to think about the problem. We all rely on upstream feeds for software and the hardware it runs on. A "curated" collection of software intended to work together, and to update itself with fixes and new features is exactly what the traditional GNU/Linux distributions offer. It's not practical to select, build, and integrate everything oneself; ultimately you have to trust other people's work. The great value of open source is in making this process transparent and reconfigurable.
What's bad about some cloud services is lack of choice and vendor lock-in, just like it was with earlier software eras. What is important for freedom is that we be able to choose between alternatives, and make our own decisions on whose services and update feeds to follow, and what we want to do for ourselves and others.
Keep your own tame cloud Posted Dec 14, 2010 22:03 UTC (Tue) by davide.del.vento (guest, #59196) [Link]
As said by others, even if these products are great (I haven't heard about them before), I'll bet they are not easy to manage.
What we do need is "something" which would be a breeze to install (say, like Ubuntu) and would be able out-of-the-box to keep a local copy of your data from Google (or other cloud-based providers). it must work with any (or at least most) hw/sw/network configuration, e.g. any cable modem/router/carrier. I think Google would be happy to support this, given that they have the data liberation project. Optionally, that box should be able to let me do same things that Google services does (I'm sure Google would *not* be happy about this part - maybe the "private" way could be a very crippled user experience to keep them happier?) including sharing with other Google users.
For a single users, or even a family or small community, what Google offers is not out of reach of a single server: 8GB of email? 1GB of pictures? Upgrade all Google Storage to 200 GB for $50.00 USD per year? What about the $62 1.5TB hard disk that I just bought? Even if it dies every year it would be cheaper (but there must be a backup). I wouldn't bother about flooding, hurricanes, and the likes, relying on Google itself for those.
The problem would be maintaining such a box, including connectivity: my gmail email address was down only twice, for just tens of minutes, in its 5 years life (and one was right after the terrorist attack in London - while I was in Europe). My company email server is down at least 48 hours per year and my own machine is down much more than that, so I'd like to have this box as a data liberation backup, but not really in production (what if it crashes while I'm in a business trip oversea?) But it should provide production options for people wanting to do so.
Maybe Google (ehm, I mean Apache) Wave would be the technology that'll make this possible?
Yep Posted Dec 14, 2010 20:30 UTC (Tue) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]
Generally I think RMS is an obnoxious crank... but he is on the money with this one. The cloud [or this type of cloud] is a threat to everything "Open" and "personal". The google love among the Open Source crowd is baffling - lets trade in Microsoft (where at least I ran the software) for another even more onerous hegemonic company.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 15, 2010 2:56 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
The FreedomBox project spawned by Debian developers after Eben Moglen's talk at DebConf10 in NYC could probably use some help:
http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
That is the kind of cloud computing I want.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 15, 2010 5:58 UTC (Wed) by forlwn (guest, #63934) [Link]
Of course Richard is right, when we think about a pc without hard drive and - as far as I know - any connectivity other than a modem.
With "normal" computers, privacy is a matter of each one's common sense. There's no lack of tools: exterior HD, flash drives, optical drives, bluetooth. Even emails can be backed up and deleted from the cloud. Lacking any plug for external data storage devices will only help Google's ChromeOS to be a failure.
Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman (Guardian) Posted Dec 15, 2010 16:23 UTC (Wed) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]
Client-side encryption, cloud multi-vendor storage. zooko's least-authority file system (LAFS) is a good example. The proprietary backup company SpiderOak at least has the client-side sane, although an entity could block access to your data.
With a free web client that can be audited for problems, we're not *too* much worse off than when our home server is cut off from the world and we're not at home. If the "cloud" storage is a mirror of home storage, than you have a pretty solid setup. My "cloud" bits are all public, but I might trust some private information to such a setup.
This definitely is a concern to be addressed in system design.
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