If BTsync ever goes open source or SyncThing ever achieves the quality and functionality of BTSync, then achieving autonomy over our data will be easy.<p>I use BitTorrent Sync with my FreeNas box. It's absolutely amazing. I am able to completely subvert the cloud and have all my data synced across devices. The mobile app is a user-friendly delight. I was able to share 15 GBs of vacation videos with 10 of my non-techie friends by sending them a read only key to a shared folder. All of them got it right away with no technical questions or issues.<p>Most importantly, I have all my photos and videos synced as I take them. This means I don't lose precious photos from a trip if my phone accidentally falls in the ocean. My phone, laptop, NAS, iPad, all have my photos backed up providing good data redundancy. No cloud services involved, no risk accidental publishing something private, no risk of an account hack, and no expensive data storage plans.<p>The only problem is I have to trust BitTorrent's proprietary software to do the heavy lifting for me. This is why I want the SyncThing project to catch up.
Trust is indeed a huge issue that seems to be misunderstood and misapplied in the software community. Stallman's views on trust may seem radical, but he's pretty much right. Over and over I see the things he warns about come true and I trust companies and other entities less and less. It's kind of disheartening to see the huge potential of cloud infrastructure, amongst other technologies, going to waste.
It was my first time meeting Stallman at the Indie Tech Summit (where I also met the CloudFleet guys). He's a little eccentric, but he's one of the reasons I'm now on a Linux machine instead of a Mac!
Really cool project! As CloudFleet was one of the first backers of Mailpile (disclaimer, I co-founded it), I've always loved their concept and am stoked it's coming to light :)
Anyone find it funny that the video is on a non-Stallman CC-ND License?<p>> Q6: Can you comment on the Creative Commons licence?<p>Richard Stallman: The thing is, it's meaningless to talk about Creative Commons licence. The bad thing about Creative Commons is that it has produced a broad series of licences that have nothing in common. In fact, if you look at these licences and determine what is the freedom that is common to all these licences, the answer is: nothing.<p>EDIT: Reference <a href="https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/transcripts/rms-fs-2006-03-09.en.html#q6" rel="nofollow">https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/transcripts/rms-fs-2006-03-09....</a>
Yep. Add to that all kind of attempts to erode the ownership of digital goods by all kind of stores which pretend they sell you something, while really they only rent it (for no good reason). DRM and its kin come along with that. Support DRM-free stores and boycott DRMed ones to vote with your wallet.
Stallman just has a way of putting things that makes you feel doing otherwise is wrong. I never thought of data autonomy this way and I've been fine with using popular cloud services till now
Do you have an agenda or you just can't think on your own?<p>By your own description you should up your game a little before writing off some argument as "laughable".
In the video stallman states that nonfree software is in the control of the developer who owns it, which is true, but isnt a developer of free software equally in control of their software? I dont look into the source of every program on my OS, even though if i was to use 100% free software, I could. This means I am equally depending on the developer of the free software not to be malicious as I am the nonfree software.
I'm sorry, but this is profoundly naive. If the name "Richard Stallman" weren't attached to it, you wouldn't have watched this video.<p>The world doesn't have time for everyone to deploy their own server. I mean, honestly, ask <i>yourself</i> if <i>you</i> even have time to do this, or if it's just yet another project that's going to get piled on top of the Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black you have sitting in your projects box. Plus, everyone operating their own server is an indescribably large security catastrophe waiting to happen. IoT is a perfect example of this. Those exact same massive companies opaquely hosting your data struggle with security issues on a daily basis and even they can't always get it right.<p><i>The answer to data autonomy is end-to-end encryption.</i> Full stop. We need a protocol that gives exact, one-to-any (one-to-none, one-to-one, one-to-many) control over sharing. That can be enforced cryptographically. It would be nice if that same protocol also had a consensus algorithm for data deletion, so we could avoid this whole "right to be forgotten" vs "free speech" debate.<p>There is at least one example of such a protocol. I know, because I'm the one developing it [1], and I've been incredibly frustrated at how difficult it's been to build awareness, because my name isn't, for example, Richard Stallman.<p>[1a] <a href="https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse</a><p>[1b] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3wFU4VIhww" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3wFU4VIhww</a><p>[1c] <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ethyr-modern-encrypted-email" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ethyr-modern-encrypted-em...</a>