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A comment on Yahoo Files Suit Demanding Greater Accountability from the U.S. Government. Parent comment

Re:Yahoo Files Suit Demanding Greater Accountability from th... by mindslight on Monday September 09, 2013 @01:44PM (#6354903)
The problem is that this kind of technology is incompatible with creating a lucrative business. Investment seeks out prospects of creating a new middlemen for high-margin success. But if users don't have to trust the server, that means they can easily switch to a different one. So you're left in a highly competitive market of selling commodity storage and bandwidth instead of the scalable home run that VCs seek.

I do think this is where our technologies have needed to head for at least the past ten years. But real progress occurs slowly, and most of the tech community's attention is captured by the VC-fueled marketing circus.

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Re:Yahoo Files Suit Demanding Greater Accountability from th... by Zigurd on Monday September 09, 2013 @03:45PM (#6355673)
You don't think loss of confidence will have an impact?
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Re:Yahoo Files Suit Demanding Greater Accountability from th... by mindslight on Monday September 09, 2013 @07:39PM (#6357063)
Well sure, and hopefully progress will even speed up as people are forced to think about the fundamental insecurities of web toys and realize their hipster "disruptive" day job is actually just the status quo. But that doesn't mean things are suddenly going to change overnight, and the noise over these revelations will have long died down by the time privacy systems become popular.

The direct point I am making is that privacy preserving tools necessarily run on a user's computer completely under their control and need to be open source to be trustable. Which means they're incompatible with business unless you want to fall back on support and custom development. So they won't be promoted or purposely developed by established companies such as Yahoo, or VC-funded startups looking for a big exit.

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Re:Yahoo Files Suit Demanding Greater Accountability from th... by Zigurd on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @09:40AM (#6359929)
Carbonite IPO'ed as a pure subscription based and (if you generate your own keys) zero-knowledge service.
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