Comments on: video from “living on the edge”, opentech 2008

By: Robot Monkeys :: Reverse FriendFeed

Robot Monkeys :: Reverse FriendFeed — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:43:44 +0000

[...] Danny O’Brien’s Living on the Edge [slides] [more] [even more] [...]

By: Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka » Blog Archive » digging tahoe; wattage update; @fontface!

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:46:26 +0000

[...] I mention more than one thing, for the love of the metadata. But these are really throwaway items: we discussed how much power a home server draws, and I pulled figures from beyond my arse, but I’ve just run Kill-A-Watt on my old MacMini [...]

By: hughstimson.org » Blog Archive » You Put Your Data in Their Cloud

hughstimson.org » Blog Archive » You Put Your Data in Their Cloud — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 03:42:17 +0000

[...] Here’s a video of Danny O’Brien convincing you not to put your data in cloud computing services, like 3rd party email, web document editors, photo hosting sites, social networking sites, and the like. He argues a) why would you give your own data, including your most personal data, to an anonymous corporate mediator to store in any case and b) we can probably get the same always-on effortless sharing and still store our data on our own boxes through the magic of technology. The video is terrible. But the idea seems awfully good. [...]

By: bitsenbloc » Blog Archive » Recuperant la llibertat, l’autonomia i la intimitat

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:27:57 +0000

[...] Aquestes no són, ni de bon troç, idees noves. L’entorn dels Exploradors Electrònics les ha estat escrivint als seus blogs des de fa molt de temps. De totes maneres, Danny O’Bryan, les presenta força bé en aquesta conferència: [...]

By: mustakl » Blog Archive » Living on the edge…

mustakl » Blog Archive » Living on the edge… — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 11:44:36 +0000

[...] a very shaky video or an audio feed to choose [...]

By: poindexter, who? » Pulling data back

poindexter, who? » Pulling data back — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:06:10 +0000

[...] Danny O’Brien has a good talk about this at OpenTech. [...]

By: laclasse

laclasse — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:38:43 +0000

Was present at ukuug for this opentech talk, brillant presentation, lots of humour on controversial subjects. Let us know if a complete and possibly better quality video becomes available. 10/10, you made the day. Cheers.

By: dannyobrien

dannyobrien — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:33:55 +0000

Yep, there’s a few versions of distributed fs there: http://autonomo.us/wiki/Wish_list is where I keep a list of the free software implementations. As Vanessa says, the challenge if you want to do a closed source version is what happens if the money runs out for whoever is running that. It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of your use — people are still using WASTE after all. But I’m not sure you’d want to build other services on top of it. OTOH if it’s just exposed as a filesystem, you don’t need to worry about the implementation…

By: Rob Wissmann

Rob Wissmann — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:34:41 +0000

What about wua.la?

http://wua.la/en/home.html

It’s an online distributed file system that provides sharing and storage. You could, if you were so inclined, build a twitter/flickr/gmail/whatever on top of it since once it’s on it’s accessible like a regular drive.

By: Vanessa Williams

Vanessa Williams — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:58:00 +0000

@dannyobrien
Thanks for your kind words. The problem is that we took it as far as we could without further funding. We had to run some managed infrastructure and hardware isn’t free. We needed people to help me administer the boxen and write code. We’d been working on it for 3 years solid, but there’s a limit to how much we could do all by ourselves and without any hope of getting paid. We all had to eat and just couldn’t go on without some more investment. As for open sourcing it… well, that still might happen. But even if it does, it will require people to be willing to run and manage infrastructure for the good of other people. Maybe that will happen too. I guess it isn’t over ’till it’s over.

@Liz
I guess the same comments apply. It may get open sourced. But we took money from friends and family and we need to take a shot at getting them back at least some of their money if we can. That’s why we’re selling it. Even if it does get open sourced, that won’t solve all the problems. Managed infrastructure is required, and people willing to provide it and administer it for the good of others. We’ll see…

Peace,

Vanessa