Even though the Internet and many of its early services come from a peer-to- peer based design, many of today's popular Internet services are built in a centralized fashion. Emerging technologies such as Cloud Computing make it easier to scale web-based applications up to millions of users. So not only new services, but also traditional applications are moving into the "cloud" and their software can only be used "as a service". This talk will illustrate the trend towards centralised services and explain the reasons for this trend. More importantly, it will show how power is accumulated by service providers and what problems arise from this for users. It will conclude with some solutions and strategies that can help users to remain in control of their computing and their data.

1. Centralised Internet Services
and
Problems of Power
Torsten Grote
<Torsten.Grote@fsfe.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe
2010-11-06
grote @ identi.ca blogs.fsfe.org/torsten.grote

2. Programs + Applications
↓
Services

4. Software as a Service (SaaS)

10. Why?

11. Omnipresence

12. Easy to Use

13. Deployment

14. Sounds great,!
doesn’t it?

15. Sounds great,!
doesn’t it?

17. Control
Data
Failure
Exclusion

18. Control
Data
Failure
Exclusion

19. Control
Data
Failure
Exclusion

20. Control
Data
Failure
Exclusion

24. use
study
share
improve

28. Freedom Boxes

32. Distributed Software (Design)
↓
Distributed Power

33. own installations with free software
full data exportability at any time
+
distributed design
open standards

34. own installations with free software
full data exportability at any time
+
distributed design
open standards

35. Think!

36. Divide and Re-Conquer
Building Socially Responsible Social Networks
Sat, 14:15 - 15:00, Room 2
Web Search By The People, For The People
Sun, 16:15 - 17:00, Room 2
GNU social and GNU FM
Sun, 17:15 - 18:00, Room 2
Infrastructure
Distributed email system
Sun, 11:30 - 12:00, Room 2

37. Act!

38. https://wiki.fsfe.org/CloudComputing
Thank You!
Questions?

39. https://wiki.fsfe.org/CloudComputing
Thank You!
Questions?

40. https://wiki.fsfe.org/CloudComputing
Thank You!
Questions?

42. Wem geh¨ort mein soziales Netzwerk?
DIASPORA*
http://www.joindiaspora.com
Appleseed
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
GNU Social
http://www.gnu.org/software/social/
OneSocialWeb
http://onesocialweb.org
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project
http://www.foaf-project.org
Peerscape
http://www.peerscape.org

43. Micro-Blogging
StatusNet (Identi.ca)
http://status.net
Sofortnachrichten
XMPP (Jabber)
http://xmpp.org
Verteilte Speichermedien
GNUnet
http://gnunet.org
BitTorrent (DHT)
http://www.bittorrent.org
ownCloud
http://owncloud.org