Home Servers – The future of the networked world (opens in new tab)

This is a horrible idea. Why would you take the job of computer security, management and purchase away from a centralized source and leave it up to the everyday laymen to handle. You say this would solve issues of privacy, but in fact would be a much less secure form of network and would likely increase the risk of security and potential data theft.

I'm a System Administrator by trade and would not ever recommend a solution like this. Centralized systems are just easier on the user and much more cost effective.

I'd like this to happen, for all of the privacy, freedom and decentralization reasons. I think the only way it is actually going to happen is if computation speeds/prices significantly outpace network speeds.

Take for example an AI that watches your facial expressions and helps you around the house. It might be cheaper/easier to have the computation happen locally and avoid the cost of streaming all of that data to a centralized location all of the time. Then again, having all of the data in one database may provide the AI with enough benefits that it is worth sending it across the wire - with aggregate data, valuable aggregate patterns can be found. It's hard to say at this point.

I have a really hard time seeing people buying a box to support the next facebook ...

Maybe an intermediate stage, but no, not the future. Humans are lazy of nature, if they can get Facebook to host it for them (for free), why bother to buy such device and plug it in? Even if it didn’t need any setup except setting a password to manage it or so, I don’t see why anyone would do it when there are better alternatives. The internet speed vs LAN speed issue will disappear over time.

I like the idea but it seems like it works better in theory. Unless someone can really streamline the entire process (sharing, security, hardware upgrading etc) it seems ambitious that millions of people would want that kind of responsibility.

People are already working on this:

https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox

my home connection isn't quite comparable to google's; I think this holds for most other americans, too.

Maybe I can't tell whether the author is being ironic, or maybe I'm just old, but this is what we did in the past (10-15 years ago). Turned out to be noisy, unreliable, more expensive than you might think, and generally inconvenient, so hosting companies grew.

You might be interested in SourceForge's RetroShare. Direct encrypted Internet communication of all kinds between computers with no intermediate hosts.

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Serverless, encrypted Chat & Filetransfer

Multiple simultaneous downloads / uploads

Search Friends

Messages

Forums

UPnP / NAT-PMP port forwarding support

GnuPG Authentication

OpenSSL Encryption

Plugins support

Graphical User Interface written with Qt4 toolkit

System tray integration

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http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

Computing expands, then it contracts, then it expands, then it contracts.

For every pro in any solution there's usually a similarly weighted con, both of which need to be balanced against the users technical ability, requirements, "infrastructure", etc.

There's no such thing as a silver bullet, but it's what makes the game fun.

I like how the title mentions 'the future' when what he describes is a thing that happened in the past.