Federated and Free | Distributed and Decentralized Application Architectures

One thing that the cloud has taught me

is to plan for failure

Is your social network provider too big to fail?

"What's the worst that could happen?"

Welcome to Cloud City

Who owns your data?

Hint: Read the TOS, it may not be you

Can your data be exported in an open format?

Terms of Service

No negotiation

Subject to change at any moment

You may be banned without warning

change of terms

What happens in Cloud City, stays in Cloud City

Who brokers your identity?

your email provider?
your phone company?
credit agencies?
your SSN?
google, apple (have you rooted)
facebook
linkedin
twitter
github

Nymrights

http://nymrights.org

Focused on:

stopping discrimination
preserving your right to privacy

German Telemedia Act

What about laws in the US?

As we move our lives online, we often lose the ability to negotiate with the businesses we deal with on a daily basis

No democratic process to work with

Only free market supply and demand to rely on

Establishing an Open Protocol for decentralized identity on the web

identity standards

open protocols, but currently access control is still generally centralized

BrowserID / Persona

based on the VerifiedEmailProtocol
focus on privacy
browser integration
provides identity bridging to support existing client auth schemes (OpenID, OAuth)

what happens when we get locked out?

Or, better yet: "what is our switching cost?"

In a way, the tech industry has recently been strugling with the same question in regard to hardware / infrastucture (IaaS)

Who is the customer? Do I have any control?

I have two words to describe this condition:

Stockholm Syndrome

As a consumer, I seek out utilities that specialize in serving my interests

Cell phone contracts (why I buy my own cell phone hardware)
Does your ISP prioritize their own video streaming solution over other data sharing the same wire?
"I like being able to fire people"
I like businesses that develop and adopt standards, enabling communities, ecosystems

Who does your online presence broker recognize as their customers?

Most are advertising or info focused

App.net - the open version of twitter?

you are the customer!
an incentive for profit that is well aligned with the interests of their consumers (sustainable $)?
is adertising a valid form of monetization? (opt-in, personalized?)
can I host my own? is there lock in?
is it a walled garden? will it ever reach crititcal mass? if it does, will it become too big to fail?
platform and product are still tightly coupled

Identity managers have incredible control over their platforms

Identity and platform must be decoupled
We need a platform as a service!
We want open systems all the way down

Starting over from scratch

With an Open Cloud

The solution will need to be:

open, secure
properly monetized, good incentives
no lock in, minimal switching cost

Reality check:

uptime is critical
decouple platform and product. pay for serice uptime
interop, portability is critical

But who wants to do all of this work anyway?

Thats why we have OpenShift Online

don't like RedHat? Try GetUpCloud.com

I have a feeling that you may see some major IaaS providers offering their own OpenShift managed hosting service soon

Open Source the Cloud

OS - liberated!
Infrastructure - liberated! (OpenStack, RDO)
Platform - liberated! (OpenShift)
Integrate with OpenStack or other open systems to use your existing identity, authentication, authorization services.
Host your own OpenID, OAuth, etc..

The cloud is a free market for services. We're seeing a lot of specialization in storage, compute, caching, hosting, monitoring - all being handled by different open and pluggable vendor solutions.

Predictions?

Domain registries that support OAuth-style provisioning

Meanwhile, back in cloud city…

Diaspora

decentralized social
multi-home pub/sub style arch
Diaspora Foundation
http://JoinDiaspora.com
Focus on privacy, freedom, users owning their own data
Interoperability

Establishing a protocol, or not:

decouple identity and data / activity
interact with folks across social hubs (federation)
OpenSocial (old, now proprietary?)
tent.io (developing a protocol, asking great questions)
pump.io (activitystreams)
OwnCloud (Dropbox and more?)
Tahoe-LAFS (Least-Authority FS)

Figure A:

Figure B:

Open Data formats, standards, projects to keep an eye on:

RSS 3.0
Activity Streams 3.0
GNU Social

The solution will need to be…

Are we there yet?

open, secure, reliable
standards based
properly monetized, good alignment of incentives
distributed, decentralized, and scalable
no lock in, minimal switching cost

Walls of cryptography

Types of crypto:

Disk encryption
File encryption
Network i/o encryption

Who controls the lines of transmission?

ISPs, telcos, NSA (prism, xkeyscore)?

Tahoe-LAFS: provider-independent security

"The service provider never has the ability to read or modify your data in the first place: never"

"Not only is it easy and inexpensive for the service provider to maintain the security of your data, but in fact they couldn't violate its security if they tried"

from the Tahoe-LAFS public trac