And, the ‘new series’ to compliment the new category ‘Question the Magic (QTM)’ is ‘STM’ (stuff that matters).
There is a flurry of stuff, especially in tech, flying at us. Most of that is white noise, but all of it matters because I’ve learned from people (like my ghost writer) that you are either travelling down the slippery slope to bondage under corporations and government, or freedom and civil rights. You are on a path right now.
Today this article really caught my attention. I already have Owncloud running in my home to make sure I have a convenient way to access my personal data. I know this system is amazing and ‘somewhat open source’ base on my limited review of the licensing and companies behind it. It’s by far the ‘most free’ and ‘most cool’ one out there. I also used to use Pogoplug, but became quite concerned that although the machine was physically in my home, you had to log into the machine through the pogoplug servers…. that seemed to me at the time like the wrong path to travel. I even hacked it and made it work with a different OS but it never worked awesome.
So what does it all do? It’s having your own ‘cloud’ but having it safely in your house, instead of the possibly corrupt households of others like google, apple, and the like. Right now most people are syncing their personal lives, usually unknowingly, onto computers of other people. Everything they have said and done for the last few years is sitting on someone else’s computer. Not good.
This new ‘team’ of a well-funded corporation like Western Digital has a lot of potential – depending on the ethics of WD. I honestly don’t know anything about them. The ‘corporation-meets-free-software’ relationship works very well for the free Ubuntu project with Canonical as one of it’s funding machines to make sure a good thing doesn’t fade into ‘just another good idea’ category.
If WD really gets behind owncloud, and I were the corporation of Alphabet soup, I’d be very, very concerned.
And this will tie into another ‘STM’ article that I will publish either tomorrow or the next day depending on availability of coffee.