Slowly but surely the internet is shedding the big data node. Massive storage will still exist as it has to but all the active components of the net can be part of this dynamic storage system and it does naturally create a new currency as they have noted. Better yet we are automatically rewarded for our hard drive usage and this helps fund app purchases as well.
This should succeed although it will take time to become universal. But then so did Google and Facebook. what is best though is that it promises to attract all possible storage devices and accordingly all processors associated with them. This allows us to produce apps that need crowd processing such as my simulation needs or SETI for that matter.
I can even envisage setting up a program that can expand a simulation through donation in real time.
The Server Needs To Die To Save The Internet
Posted Jul 23, 2014 by Natasha Lomas (@riptari)
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/23/maidsafe/
Do we have the Internet we deserve? There’s an argument to say that yes, we absolutely do. Given web users’ general reluctance to pay for content. We are of course, paying. Just not with cold hard cash, but with our privacy — as digital business models rely on gathering and selling intel on their users to make the money to pay (the investors who paid) for the free service.
Users are also increasingly paying with time and attention, as more ad content — and more adverts masquerading as, infiltrating and degrading content — thrusts its way in front of our eyeballs in ever more insidious ways. Whether it’s repurposing our friends’ photos and endorsements to socially engineer selling us stuff, or resorting to other background tracking and targeting tricks to divert our attention from whatever it was we were actually trying to do online.
The commercialization of the web is the ugly reality of the hidden cost of all the datacenters and servers required to power the Internet. And that commercialization is compounded by the power of the big digital platforms that dominate the web we have today: Google, Facebook, Amazon. Increasingly we’re forced to play by their rules if we want to participate in the digital space where most of our friends are.
But perhaps there is another, far better way — that benefits individual web users and startup developers alike.
A UK startup called MaidSafe, based in the small town of Troon in Scotland, reckons the myriad problems with today’s Internet can be linked to a design quirk of its underlying architecture. And that the answer to solving the web’s most perennial issues, such as finding sustainable digital business models for content, safeguarding user data and privacy, and thwarting hacking, malware and overreaching surveillance, is to begin again — with a whole new re-architected Internet.
No one said this was a small problem with an easy fix. MaidSafe has actually been working on its new network since 2006, finally coming out of stealth earlier this year to begin detailing its grand plan. It’s now rolling out the first of three test networks, to test the underlying network without any apps on it as yet, ahead of a full beta launch in Q4. The initial test network comprises 180 nodes, located in Singapore, San Francisco, Amsterdam and New York.
So what exactly is this startup building? MaidSafe’s Nick Lambert summarizes the product as “a fully cross-platform, fully decentralized autonomous data and communications network”. What that means in practice is a network that does away with an intermediary layer of servers and datacenters — replacing that with peer-to-peer infrastructure. (No surprise then that MaidSafe counts Michael Jackson, the former COO of P2P pioneer Skype, as an advisor.)
Basically, the users of the network are also acting as the network infrastructure by donating a portion of their spare hard drive capacity — with built in incentives for them to do so in the form of a network specific cryptocurrency (called SafeCoin).
There are no other networks that combine being autonomous and serverless
—
So, in a similar way to Bitcoin mining being incentivized by the creation and distribution of new Bitcoins, users of the MaidSafe network will be compensated for the computing resource they contribute by earning SafeCoin. (Currently one SafeCoin is worth around 2 US cents but there was also a time when Bitcoin was worth as little — and MaidSafe obviously expects the value of SafeCoin to scale up as usage of the network scales.) It calls this resource donation process farming.
“What we’re building is software that connects together all the computers on the network to form — think of it as one giant computer, or effectively one giant cyber brain. So it really connects together all the nodes on the network and allows them to effectively become a very large datacenter, without of course the datacenter,” explains Lambert. “It’s a network infrastructure that will replace datacenters — and hopefully large technology companies.”
That’s right. This startup wants to reconfigure the current Internet hierarchy too — pulling the power and centre of gravity away from the owners of the biggest datacenters and platforms, and putting it back in the hands of individual users.
And individual developers too. Development costs for building an app on the MaidSafe network would be lower than via today’s hosted model — being as a startup wouldn’t need to pay for any hosting costs. AWS, Rackspace — not required! There’s also no upfront fee required for the privilege of developing on this network (it’s no Apple App Store). And the MaidSafe API is free.
Users of MaidSafe’s network contribute unused hard drive space, becoming the network’s nodes. It’s that pooling — or, hey, crowdsourcing — of many users’ spare computing resource that yields a connected storage layer that doesn’t need to centralize around dedicated datacenters. And so doesn’t need any middlemen serving data. The user directly accesses the network, and the network directly accesses the users’ computers. And that’s it.
“This is, we believe, to be the world’s first operating autonomous and serverless network that enables self authentication,” says Lambert. “It’s self managing and self healing… If data is lost through nodes going offline it recreates them. It’s able to be resistant to viruses as well… It’s utterly serverless. There are no other networks that combine being autonomous and serverless.
“There are other peer to peer networks that you could argue don’t require servers but if you want to join some of these programs at the end of the day you have to create an account to a lot of these services. And in order to create these accounts you have to go to a server and someone has to authenticate you onto the network… With this network self authentication is enabling the user to authenticate themselves onto the network.”
So, instead of paying for digital services with privacy, users on MaidSafe’s network pay with hard drive capacity they’re not even using. Which — frankly — sounds like a far fairer, more egalitarian ‘client/server’ relationship than the one we have now.
The only way they can actually stop the Safe network in a country is to shut off the whole Internet. It just can’t be shut down
—
Meanwhile, data being transmitted over MaidSafe’s network is encrypted locally then broken into fragments by its software and distributed randomly across the nodes so it’s stored in a massively decentralized way, thus — so the claim goes — thwarting hacking and snooping.
The problem with centralising data storage and transmission by using servers and datacenters is that data becomes inherently vulnerable, argues Lambert. Vulnerable to theft by hackers or other prying eyes — whether that’s corporates tracking us or governments snooping on us. Or regimes trying to control what we have access to. Ergo, all the more reason to throw the middleman away.
“MaidSafe doesn’t use DNS. Everything goes through routers in a thing called encrypted RUDP packets, so basically the packets go through the router but nothing can tell what’s inside it. And it doesn’t use DNS so they don’t know that it’s traffic for the MaidSafe network. So countries can’t shut MaidSafe down. So China couldn’t shut off the Safe network the way they could now, or Turkey couldn’t shut it off the way they shut off Twitter. So the only way they can actually stop the Safe network in a country is to shut off the whole Internet. It just can’t be shut down,” he says.
“The other interesting thing is the NSA could train all their resources on one router and they still wouldn’t be able to stop and detect MaidSafe network traffic.”
Lambert adds that the Internet we have today was also never designed to support so many users — making another argument for overhauling the underlying structure, on network resilience grounds.
“As it was originally designed the Internet was never meant to have 2.5 billion people on it. And that’s why it creaks at the seams sometimes. So I think what we’re doing is a kind of evolution — decentralization is a much more efficient way of doing this. And I think whether it’s MaidSafe or somebody else… someone will do it. I think it’s just an evolutionary step.”
“A lot of these large [digital technology] incumbents will not be overly happy with us but I think what we’re doing is natural evolution,” he adds.
How does MaidSafe ensure resilience with such a massively distributed infrastructure that it has no direct control over? “We keep a minimum of four copies of every chunk of data at all times. And the reason we do that is obviously people will turn their computers off and on, and people will have hard drive failures so what the network needs to know fairly quickly is does that piece of data still exist?” notes Lambert, likening the technology MaidSafe has built for this portion of the network to systems used by file-sharing sites like eMule — except, he says, it’s far, far faster. Because it has to be to make a viable network.
“Our network knows within 20 milliseconds if the status of a piece of data or a node has changed. It has to happen that fast because if you turn your computer off the network has to recreate that chunk on another node on the network to maintain four copies at all time.”
“We’re often maybe confused with a decentralized Dropbox,” he adds. “And that is maybe one very good use for our network… [because] it’s completely private, we don’t know who our users are, we don’t hold your cryptographic keys so we can’t access your data… But effectively MaidSafe is a data and communications network so you could put any service that you get on the Internet today onto the network — absolutely anything, YouTube, Facebook, Dropbox, basically everything.”
MaidSafe calls its network the Safe network — aka Secure Access For Everyone. (The MaidSafe name itself is short for ‘Massive Array Of Internet Disks — Safe Access For Everyone’. It’s also, according to Lambert, a play on RaidSafe — and indeed ‘Made Safe’.)
Lambert says the network needs an absolute minimum of 60 nodes to be viable, and likely a couple of thousand to “make it much more established”. “Which I don’t think is really too much when you consider there is 2.5 billion regular Internet users,” he adds.
So how is MaidSafe going to incentivize developers to build apps for the Safe network? That’s also built in to the design, via the SafeCoin cryptocurrency. Developers will be able to hardcode their SafeCoin wallet address into their applications — setting their own usage price (which can also be free if they like) — and then the network will pay them based on their app’s usage.
“There’s a built in revenue stream for them already. They don’t have to go down the advertizing route, or the support route if they don’t want to,” says Lambert.
MaidSafe has already had more than 650 developers registering their interest in the network — and it isn’t even beta launched yet.
Posted Jul 23, 2014 by Natasha Lomas (@riptari)
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/23/maidsafe/
Do we have the Internet we deserve? There’s an argument to say that yes, we absolutely do. Given web users’ general reluctance to pay for content. We are of course, paying. Just not with cold hard cash, but with our privacy — as digital business models rely on gathering and selling intel on their users to make the money to pay (the investors who paid) for the free service.
Users are also increasingly paying with time and attention, as more ad content — and more adverts masquerading as, infiltrating and degrading content — thrusts its way in front of our eyeballs in ever more insidious ways. Whether it’s repurposing our friends’ photos and endorsements to socially engineer selling us stuff, or resorting to other background tracking and targeting tricks to divert our attention from whatever it was we were actually trying to do online.
The commercialization of the web is the ugly reality of the hidden cost of all the datacenters and servers required to power the Internet. And that commercialization is compounded by the power of the big digital platforms that dominate the web we have today: Google, Facebook, Amazon. Increasingly we’re forced to play by their rules if we want to participate in the digital space where most of our friends are.
But perhaps there is another, far better way — that benefits individual web users and startup developers alike.
A UK startup called MaidSafe, based in the small town of Troon in Scotland, reckons the myriad problems with today’s Internet can be linked to a design quirk of its underlying architecture. And that the answer to solving the web’s most perennial issues, such as finding sustainable digital business models for content, safeguarding user data and privacy, and thwarting hacking, malware and overreaching surveillance, is to begin again — with a whole new re-architected Internet.
No one said this was a small problem with an easy fix. MaidSafe has actually been working on its new network since 2006, finally coming out of stealth earlier this year to begin detailing its grand plan. It’s now rolling out the first of three test networks, to test the underlying network without any apps on it as yet, ahead of a full beta launch in Q4. The initial test network comprises 180 nodes, located in Singapore, San Francisco, Amsterdam and New York.
So what exactly is this startup building? MaidSafe’s Nick Lambert summarizes the product as “a fully cross-platform, fully decentralized autonomous data and communications network”. What that means in practice is a network that does away with an intermediary layer of servers and datacenters — replacing that with peer-to-peer infrastructure. (No surprise then that MaidSafe counts Michael Jackson, the former COO of P2P pioneer Skype, as an advisor.)
Basically, the users of the network are also acting as the network infrastructure by donating a portion of their spare hard drive capacity — with built in incentives for them to do so in the form of a network specific cryptocurrency (called SafeCoin).
There are no other networks that combine being autonomous and serverless
—
So, in a similar way to Bitcoin mining being incentivized by the creation and distribution of new Bitcoins, users of the MaidSafe network will be compensated for the computing resource they contribute by earning SafeCoin. (Currently one SafeCoin is worth around 2 US cents but there was also a time when Bitcoin was worth as little — and MaidSafe obviously expects the value of SafeCoin to scale up as usage of the network scales.) It calls this resource donation process farming.
“What we’re building is software that connects together all the computers on the network to form — think of it as one giant computer, or effectively one giant cyber brain. So it really connects together all the nodes on the network and allows them to effectively become a very large datacenter, without of course the datacenter,” explains Lambert. “It’s a network infrastructure that will replace datacenters — and hopefully large technology companies.”
That’s right. This startup wants to reconfigure the current Internet hierarchy too — pulling the power and centre of gravity away from the owners of the biggest datacenters and platforms, and putting it back in the hands of individual users.
And individual developers too. Development costs for building an app on the MaidSafe network would be lower than via today’s hosted model — being as a startup wouldn’t need to pay for any hosting costs. AWS, Rackspace — not required! There’s also no upfront fee required for the privilege of developing on this network (it’s no Apple App Store). And the MaidSafe API is free.
Users of MaidSafe’s network contribute unused hard drive space, becoming the network’s nodes. It’s that pooling — or, hey, crowdsourcing — of many users’ spare computing resource that yields a connected storage layer that doesn’t need to centralize around dedicated datacenters. And so doesn’t need any middlemen serving data. The user directly accesses the network, and the network directly accesses the users’ computers. And that’s it.
“This is, we believe, to be the world’s first operating autonomous and serverless network that enables self authentication,” says Lambert. “It’s self managing and self healing… If data is lost through nodes going offline it recreates them. It’s able to be resistant to viruses as well… It’s utterly serverless. There are no other networks that combine being autonomous and serverless.
“There are other peer to peer networks that you could argue don’t require servers but if you want to join some of these programs at the end of the day you have to create an account to a lot of these services. And in order to create these accounts you have to go to a server and someone has to authenticate you onto the network… With this network self authentication is enabling the user to authenticate themselves onto the network.”
So, instead of paying for digital services with privacy, users on MaidSafe’s network pay with hard drive capacity they’re not even using. Which — frankly — sounds like a far fairer, more egalitarian ‘client/server’ relationship than the one we have now.
The only way they can actually stop the Safe network in a country is to shut off the whole Internet. It just can’t be shut down
—
Meanwhile, data being transmitted over MaidSafe’s network is encrypted locally then broken into fragments by its software and distributed randomly across the nodes so it’s stored in a massively decentralized way, thus — so the claim goes — thwarting hacking and snooping.
The problem with centralising data storage and transmission by using servers and datacenters is that data becomes inherently vulnerable, argues Lambert. Vulnerable to theft by hackers or other prying eyes — whether that’s corporates tracking us or governments snooping on us. Or regimes trying to control what we have access to. Ergo, all the more reason to throw the middleman away.
“MaidSafe doesn’t use DNS. Everything goes through routers in a thing called encrypted RUDP packets, so basically the packets go through the router but nothing can tell what’s inside it. And it doesn’t use DNS so they don’t know that it’s traffic for the MaidSafe network. So countries can’t shut MaidSafe down. So China couldn’t shut off the Safe network the way they could now, or Turkey couldn’t shut it off the way they shut off Twitter. So the only way they can actually stop the Safe network in a country is to shut off the whole Internet. It just can’t be shut down,” he says.
“The other interesting thing is the NSA could train all their resources on one router and they still wouldn’t be able to stop and detect MaidSafe network traffic.”
Lambert adds that the Internet we have today was also never designed to support so many users — making another argument for overhauling the underlying structure, on network resilience grounds.
“As it was originally designed the Internet was never meant to have 2.5 billion people on it. And that’s why it creaks at the seams sometimes. So I think what we’re doing is a kind of evolution — decentralization is a much more efficient way of doing this. And I think whether it’s MaidSafe or somebody else… someone will do it. I think it’s just an evolutionary step.”
“A lot of these large [digital technology] incumbents will not be overly happy with us but I think what we’re doing is natural evolution,” he adds.
How does MaidSafe ensure resilience with such a massively distributed infrastructure that it has no direct control over? “We keep a minimum of four copies of every chunk of data at all times. And the reason we do that is obviously people will turn their computers off and on, and people will have hard drive failures so what the network needs to know fairly quickly is does that piece of data still exist?” notes Lambert, likening the technology MaidSafe has built for this portion of the network to systems used by file-sharing sites like eMule — except, he says, it’s far, far faster. Because it has to be to make a viable network.
“Our network knows within 20 milliseconds if the status of a piece of data or a node has changed. It has to happen that fast because if you turn your computer off the network has to recreate that chunk on another node on the network to maintain four copies at all time.”
“We’re often maybe confused with a decentralized Dropbox,” he adds. “And that is maybe one very good use for our network… [because] it’s completely private, we don’t know who our users are, we don’t hold your cryptographic keys so we can’t access your data… But effectively MaidSafe is a data and communications network so you could put any service that you get on the Internet today onto the network — absolutely anything, YouTube, Facebook, Dropbox, basically everything.”
MaidSafe calls its network the Safe network — aka Secure Access For Everyone. (The MaidSafe name itself is short for ‘Massive Array Of Internet Disks — Safe Access For Everyone’. It’s also, according to Lambert, a play on RaidSafe — and indeed ‘Made Safe’.)
Lambert says the network needs an absolute minimum of 60 nodes to be viable, and likely a couple of thousand to “make it much more established”. “Which I don’t think is really too much when you consider there is 2.5 billion regular Internet users,” he adds.
So how is MaidSafe going to incentivize developers to build apps for the Safe network? That’s also built in to the design, via the SafeCoin cryptocurrency. Developers will be able to hardcode their SafeCoin wallet address into their applications — setting their own usage price (which can also be free if they like) — and then the network will pay them based on their app’s usage.
“There’s a built in revenue stream for them already. They don’t have to go down the advertizing route, or the support route if they don’t want to,” says Lambert.
MaidSafe has already had more than 650 developers registering their interest in the network — and it isn’t even beta launched yet.
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