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A comment on Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?. Parent comment

Re:Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsof... by dasil003 on Thursday April 22, 2010 @12:19PM (#1285503)
That's a nice utopian vision from someone aware of our eroding privacy, but the only way the average consumer would care enough about privacy for that to be viable in the market would be for Facebook's data to grow a couple orders of magnitude more comprehensive then it is now over the next decade. Then if the US government were replaced by east-german style totalitarian regime to the point that violent revolution was eventually necessary, then, at that point people would be ready for their own private hosted service appliances.
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Re:Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsof... by loup-vaillant on Friday April 23, 2010 @04:51AM (#1287615)
Do you have any Idea of the current comprehensiveness of the data they have? Do I have to remind you how they use it? Facebook is already spying it's users (for censoring and commercial purposes), and Google do semantic analysis of your e-mail (to send you ads).

So I don't think we need a totalitarian regime for people to realize they might want a personal server. It just takes a little teaching. Personally, as soon as I have a provider which let me send mail on my own, I will buy one.

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Re:Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsof... by dasil003 on Saturday April 24, 2010 @02:04AM (#1290453)
Do you have any Idea of the current comprehensiveness of the data they have?

Yes.

It just takes a little teaching

Sadly, no.

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Re:Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsof... by loup-vaillant on Saturday April 24, 2010 @04:58PM (#1291555)
Well, I don't expect the "little teaching" to take less than 10 years. Yet what I think of is still relatively little: crude definitions of a computer, a program, a network, a browser and a web site, a search engine, a mail client and a mail server; and then a little feel about what computers can remember, with an emphasis on catastrophic scenarios, like with the browser history. I think it can be done in 10, maybe 20 hours per persons, assuming a competent teacher.

So: am I asking too much? Do we need even more than that (except a 30 buck, very easy to use, low power server)?

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