Block chains, i think distributed databases is going to go big.

Do not forget about distributed communication!
(b.a.t.m.a.n)

mngr out.

@irene block chain has potential

Can someone explain the difference between Merkel DAGs and Blockchain?

I just hope decentralised networks take over centralised ones. No more single point of control

@cyclic3 they're not really different, the original implementation of blockchain by Nakamoto uses Merkle trees to represent transactions. Blockchain is a chain of blocks that contain these transactions and [the blocks] are cryptographically linked to each other.

@irene beakerbrowser.com/

But it's still decentralized and u can't mess with the data

@irene not to mention that it'd need to face the internet. How is this beaker going to do that, without asking users to do port forwarding and potentially get their network compromised (by someone hacking the beaker), or making an outbound connection to some server from the beaker network, which would defeat the purpose. Besides, web browsers and clients in general aren't suited for this purpose. It's called client for a reason. Shit can go down, it's running on your personal computer, person closes web browser including this "server" and so on.. there's just so many things wrong with this concept.

@irene Oh no, I don't think that it's impossible - far from it.

Most hardware in homes is consumer-grade and not suitable for any kind of services, except for one - the router. Imagine that every consumer router out there has a DMZ in it, where services can be securely hosted from. There'd be at least one host in this DMZ with a CMS in it, for microblogging in a way similar to Facebook. When someone wants to read your stories, you give them your house's IP address similar to how you'd give them your phone number for texting and calling (or WhatsApp, Signal or similar), or your address for real-life visits. Of course that'd require demand from consumers, investment from router manufacturers to implement this into their firmware, and the abolishment of time-based IP leases from ISP's. It's a utopian dream for sure, but it's far from impossible.

Regarding data.. the approach of a local little blog won't mean that you own all your data - just your posts, or with some additional services, perhaps calendar events, contact list (actually there's SIM cards for this, why aren't we just using those, hmm Google who just uploads contact list to your Gmail account without consent?), and things like that. But for a little blog, the main owned content would be your posts and shared images. Granted, others can still download them and keep them even when you remove yours. But your little blog would be an authoritative source that only you can modify - unlike on Twitter or Facebook or even here on devRant, where you don't truly own the content you post. Someone with the rights to do so (dfox, trogus, someone at Facebook/Twitter) can change it at their own discretion, and nobody would know, not even the person who originally posted the content. That's the issue with "owning your data" I think. Do we really need external companies to do it for us?

The beaker approach however, that isn't the way to go with this.

@irene Exactly, that's why a DMZ is needed. A demilitarized zone - a separate network, logically and/or physically, that's solely used for hosting internet-facing services. Unfortunately that's an infrastructure that in today's industry is very business-oriented, and not really a thing in home environments, unless the resident happens to be a sysadmin or otherwise technical person of course.

Another issue would be that average Joe doesn't even know the existence of a Raspberry Pi. A year or so ago I went to a local tech store called MediaMarkt, big retailer here in Belgium and the Netherlands alike. Asked them whether they've got a tiny 256MB or so SD card for PXE booting my Raspberry Pi cluster. The damn person - someone who's selling fucking tech! - replied (I'm not making this up!): "What's a Raspberry Pi?". If they don't know what a Raspberry Pi is, I really don't expect the average internet user to know whether that's something edible or not.

It's the Dunning-Kruger effect in full swing I guess. What seems obvious for us, isn't for even a "tech store teknishan" :/