I remember in my freshman year of college when students discovered the library sharing feature in iTunes. Word spread pretty quickly, and soon most folks were using their laptops to do what the Zune tried to popularize: sampling the music of peers for free over the network in order to connect over musical taste and find new bands. I think what the author points out is that other programs have similar features (such as iPhoto being able to share a folder of images to the network), but they are limited to local networks and can't be reached from everywhere. Why not institute a system that allows that same "share my photos" check box to make them available on the web? Then I, and many of my friends who have faced the same problem, won't have to create a facebook account just to be able to see a friend's wedding pictures...
The current problems are security, upload bandwidth, and NAT traversal. As well as that your computer has to be on whenever your friends are accessing your stuff.
If (when) ipv6 becomes widespread, we will be able to cut out the NAT. If lots of people start doing it, then the upload bandwidth that ISPs give you will probably increase. And security should be solvable for most consumer purposes when the quality of software (both server and OS level) goes up -- it needs to ensure that your firewall is properly configured, etc.
So we're left with leaving your computer on. And that's an expensive problem, because it's not very power-efficient to leave a desktop computer running all the time to serve a website that gets two hits a day. That actually seems to be a strong argument against everybody running their own webserver. But maybe it doesn't really matter, because a lot of people run a computer all the time anyway. I'm not sure.
I also want to use it for things like storing scanned images and possibly home automation/monitoring.
In short there might be a market niche for a low-power headless server to solve this kind of situation
Really, what would happen if content providers will be held liable for uploaded content? The megasites like Youtube couldn't legally exist. And the author argues that this is maybe not a bad thing, which is quite a fresh view of the issue.
Let's use this analogy. Imagine someone was able to build automated mega pub, where anyone could come and buy beer from robot innkeeper. But the pub would be such huge, that it won't be humanly possible to check if everyone was legally allowed to drink alcohol. So the owner would say: We have so much customers that it is not within our means to check if everyone is of 18+ age. So let's anyone go in and drink beer, and if we are notified that someone is underage, we will promptly kick him off. But we are not liable, since there should be a freedom to drink beer. So what do you think - would such a pub be allowed to exists in a real world? So then, why Youtube is allowed to exist, when anyone can do illegal things anonymously there? (Of course that was just a reasoning exercise, I am not advocating Youtube ban here. ;-)) But overall, I tend to agree with the author, good article.
Youtube is not a pub selling beer. They are a virtual location that allows any artist to hang their work. They benefit by selling space for advertisements around the booths. When notified of an artist showing an illegal or otherwise unacceptable piece, they remove it. I see this as a perfectly reasonable situation.
The metaphor used in interacting with websites is that of a place. I think the metaphor is a good one.
Hosting a space for other people to use should not make one de facto guilty if others abuse it. One could argue for negligence if they had no reporting system or ignored it. But so far as I have read, this is not the case.
On Amazon, your content is at http://example.com/ . Your domain. Your site.
This is not about content. If YouTube allowed any content, that wouldn't change anything. If Amazon would only allow videos (but let you have your domain name), that wouldn't change anything either.
If it weren't for Alan Kay we'd be all using DOS prompts on our iPhones (oh wait… :) and that was in the early 70s.
By all means, let us all become publishers, hosts, etc. etc. Maybe an enterprising someone can make that easier and more attractive than the current regime. :-)
Censoring YouTube is a blow against free speech. Generally we should prefer YouTube to the government here. However the interests of free speech and YouTube are not identical either. They may resist government censorship, but they also censor content for their own purposes.
The ideal of free speech, in his view, is not that we have giant private sharing infrastructures (or even competition among them). In his ideal world, there would be common sharing / hosting / backup infrastructure, so distributed and fine grained that it would be simply everywhere.
Also craigslist would obviously fall under a the youtube designtion -- and other such services that require scale.
In the case of EC2, Amazon owns the building, and lets a space to you, to do with more or less what you will. If that happens to be running a bar that serves underage drinkers, how is that their responsibility?
Edited to add: Except, of course, in the case where they've been notified that you are, in fact, serving underage customers. Most leases have verbiage that allows the lessor to break the agreement and boot your ass if you're using the space to break the law. That's how they qualify for safe harbor.
The only difference between YouTube and Amazon EC2 is flexibility of purpose. You can do many different things with an EC2 account because it was designed to let you do those things. You can upload videos to a YouTube account and not much more because YT was designed to do one thing well.
What they have in common is that they are both hosting services and apps platforms. They both host your data and applications. The fact that the "window" into EC2 from the outside is whatever the account holder wants it to be, whereas the window into YT is just YT's interface... is totally irrelevant.
The bottom line is that both Amazon and YouTube are hosting your data on their servers, and allowing you to present that data to the public at large. If one of them is responsible for legality of your content, then both of them must be.
So profit = bad? Do you think that Amazon runs EC2 as a pro-bono effort?
Amazon YouTube
------ -------
Rents Generic Space Rents specific space (videos-only)
Charges Rental Fees Free rent
Provides a minimal API Provides a nice web front-end tailor to specific space
Profits from rental fees Profits from adverts in/around the videos
[Note: I've never used EC2 so I don't know what they provide other than a low-level (and maybe a high-level) API into their space]
{edit} Some more points:
* If you don't like that fact that YouTube does not rent generic space and rents space specifically for videos, then how do you rectify more to-the-metal type services that rent space specifically for video, or music distribution, but still profit from rental fees (instead of ads)? Do they qualify the same as YouTube because they are not providing 'generic space?'
* Do you not like that Google possibly profits more from popular videos than from unpopular videos (i.e. you don't like that they profit more or less based on the content of the video)? If this is the case, how is it any different than Amazon EC2 profiting more from someone that serves large files that such up copious amounts of bandwidth if they get to be popular/highly downloaded? {/edit}
I need an emoticon indicating total bafflement.
The author did mention an appliance that backs things up to 'the cloud.' The author believes that hosting services (e.g. Amazon EC2) do deserve safe-harbor provisions.
> There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.
But is it easier for the average user? There's also the issue of branding/marketing. There are probably a lot of users that have never heard of Vimeo, but they have heard of YouTube.
This is wrong. I think the internet would be a better place if it were easier for people to run their own servers, but that doesn't mean we should make it more difficult for hosted services to operate.
Take Facebook for example, why couldn't we just have a number of providers of social networking services with an agreed-upon protocol to communication/authentication between them? Then I could run my own server for my profile/albums/etc while someone less tech-savvy could sign up with a ready-to-go service that pays for itself with ads.
I feel there is a disconnect with the 'landlord' analogy here. The author feels that the 'landlord' is the hardware/internet connection provider/host, while the grandparent poster feels that the YouTube also qualifies as a 'landlord' that is renting out space for people to display their videos (where the 'rent' is the ability to display adverts).
The question, then, should be what do we do in the mean time? Would shutting down the YouTubes of the world actually hasten the advent of server appliances? I'm skeptical.
I also have trouble imagining how new social networking-type applications spread in a world where we have personal servers. The next YouTube/Facebook/Whatever will now have to write their software for a variety of different home servers (and there almost certainly will be a moderate-to-large number of incompatible devices), then convince people to install and correctly configure these apps, update them somewhat regularly to fix security holes, etc. Given the non-zero fraction of people who have trouble simply logging into Facebook, I think we're still a long ways off, and stand to benefit from the rich communities provided by simple, corporate-run networks.
First, on a practical level, no one wants to deal with hosting anything, let alone "civilians", so billions of web servers on the edge of the network is simply a no-go unless and until doing so becomes appliance-esque (which will necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.).
Second, 99% of users and cumulative usage time is spent consuming, not producing stuff.
Third, this is just crazy:
"""The online content farms profit based on the fact that it's hard to share your own content, yourself, via a means of production that you control. This is the central fact free-speech activists should be upset about."""
There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.