<nettime> "peer cloud" and "p2p 2.0" - .another internet is possible! forget about fb...

["Orton AKINCI aka .-_-." <ortonak@yahoo.com>]

turkey banned a pool of google IPs, including googledocs... this is a
part of a more complicated story about the youtube censor in turkey.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=turkey-censors-google-for-ata
turk-2010-06-04

but this particular case that affects googledocs along with           
many other google services should make us rethink the freedom         
in the so called "cloud". i would love to give the link to the        
youtube video of eben moglen's speech at the internet society         
meeting on "freedom in the cloud" but i cannot access this "web       
2.0" content right now because of the same youtube censor case        
in turkey. however richard stallman's text about what he calls        
"software as a service", the so called cloud computing, is here       
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html  

but there is more to the problem with SaaS-the cloud computing- than
stallman and moglen's concerns about software freedom. besides the
freedoms highlighted by fsf about the software, you don't even "have"
anything to talk about freedom anymore, if you live in turkey and used
to use googledocs. it is simply not accessible. this proves that you
don't have control over anything in the cloud, if the structure of the
cloud "is just not right". if it is not "free, anonymous, distributed
and p2p"... "your" documents "stored" and "edited" on google servers
are subject to censor and many other threats. you may trust google
for many reasons (which possibly need to be questioned also) about
the safety and access of your data. but how about other services and
infrastructures that you need to use to reach google etc... this
case about googledocs is a crises for you if your "business" relies
on gooledocs, just because you trust google because of its scale...
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=7a2864f7a
4fedf97&hl=en

.another internet is possible!_ as i have written here on this list
before... also another cloud.... but all the replies and comments
on my post titled ".another internet is possible_" was stuck on the
little part about "facebook" in that text. this also reveals another
problem about facebook. when we start talking about fb, we forget/skip
the rest of the internet... internet is not the fb and fb is not the
internet. we cannot reduce the critic and politics of internet to
facebook. i just realized that what i wanted to write in this e-mail
about the cloud problem referencing the turkey googledocs case, was
all about my concerns in my previous e-mail titled .another internet
is possible!_, which has been sacrificed to fb discussions... so
instead of continuing this e-mail with the googledocs case in turkey
which would repeat the same approach based on the concepts of freedom,
anonimity and p2p, my apologies for pasting a part of my previous text
here again (skipping fb part)...



.another internet is possible!_ 

"not 
only possible but also necessary".

....

free distributed p2p architectures are important for internet
applications, where we can also be anonymous ,if we want to. if we
want to be free... "freenet"s model (http://freenetproject.org/) is a
great opportunity for the possible (but also necessary) future of the
internet. the "freesites" on freenet are not hosted on servers that
are subject to control but on peer's computers in a distributed and
encyrpted way. all the activities on freenet are also anonymous. each
peer shares a part of their disc space for freenet but they cannot
reach it directly since the information is encrypted and only a small
part of that information is stored on their own single computer. i
think this must be the way another internet is possible.

cloud computing, what richard stallman
calls SaaS (software as a service
-http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
), gives the control of the software to the private companies.
online storage applications (like that of dropbox) also give the
control of your information to the companies giving that service.
in the beginning of the 2000s, i used to advocate that storing the
personal information on remote servers would totally dematerialize
the information which is metarialized on the harddisk of a particular
computer. so we need "that computer to reach the information. but if
it was on "the internet", not "on the harddisk", then what we would
need was "any" computer not "that" computer. when a computer is
connected to the internet through a (lan) cable, it also materializes
the access to information by rendering us dependent on the location of
"the" cable and "the" computer. when the internet connection is free
public wireless connection and when the personal informationcan be
reached form any computer, then a hardware,"the" hardware,which also
raised the problem of digital divide, would be alterable. a public
hardware or a "100 dollar laptop" (of negraponte), even a "zero dollar
laptop" (of which furtherfieled.org is doing workshops inspired by
the manifesto of of James Wallbank,) will be enough to access and
interpret information, if the the software demanding high computing
power also runs on the "cloud". essentially not the software in the
cloud as described as SaaS by richard stallman but software in what
i dare say "peer cloud". software running on an architecture like
that of freenet. not on private servers like that of google's (as
in googleDocs). AFAIK it is not technically possible yet but if we
encourage the work on distributed p2p architectures, it may be one
day.

web 2.0 was a great opportunity to democratize the way information is
created and shared. bu it is not a great opportunity to access it.
youtube is banned in turkey for very long. blogger was also banned for
a time. web is subject to censorship and control. p2p is the way to be
without intermediation of any parties. the problem with p2p was that
it is widely being used for sharing files not for running systems. but
"freesites" of freenet shows that running system-like applications on
p2p can be possible. wouldn't it be great if it was "p2p 2.0" instead
of "web 2.0".

so the idea of the "cloud" is not evil if it is not dependent of
private servers and "services". it even has the potential of fully
dematerializing the information rendering the access to it independent
of any particular "hard"ware. i totally agree with what felix has
written about "the return of DRM". the way to escape from control
and property on internet lies on free anonymous distributed p2p
architectures like that of the freenet.

another internet is possible! it is not late find the way to the
"beach". it is not totally covered with the "pavement" yet like that
of the world. another internet is possbile, first of all to influence
the possibility of another world. http://another.httpdot.net/

http://mail.kein.org/pipermail/nettime-l/2010-May/002158.html



.-_-.

http://httpdot.net/.-_-./



      


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