[repost, sry was not logged in last time] A few differences tho, (disclaimer I am in the article), MaidSafe have taken no VC funding and worked very hard (possibly harder than the tech at time, certainly took more time) to maintain that stance. VC funding seems incompatible from doing good as a VC will often seek quick profit and mostly in traditional ways (from customers). So the maidsafe design is such that it cannot know its customers. The problems to solve, I feel, become simpler when you do not have a profit seeking motive, but instead set a mechanism where income will be generated from doing a good job and cease when you don't. So for instance to achieve the goal we would fund competitors (the crowd sale was supposed to be 30% to competitors). That is also an anathema to some traditional VCs. Being free of those chains sounds just perfect, but it is extremely hard, the company majority was given away in the early days, 50% to a foundation for education and innovation and 30% to the staff, the remaining 20% to small investors (yes some bug us for quick returns, but most are fine as they see progress). There are other issues when you have less cash but the highest staff costs you can with the budget you have (so speed). It is a different structure to fix the problems of centralisation, privacy erosion and lack of security for people that leads to loss of freedom, so we had to do it differently. So the setup is maidsafe can be replaced/enhanced easily by other entities who wish to take the GPL's software and complete or further upgrade it. It is a new way really, between VC funded fast profit seeking and open source spare time projects. We try to fit the middle, funded full time staff to create marketing, graphic design, UI's etc. all with back end Engineering and research. If it works then great, it is so far, its slower but hopefully fairer to the rest of the people who will benefit.

Yes we need to make continuous improvements for sure. There are many ways and many issues but that is the hacker way, we try them all. We need to get back to the start and do it properly, getting there is, as you say, not easy but if we are to go forward freely then we must do something and face the challanges those changes will bring.

It can be done, the system needs an overhaul, as companies route data in an insecure or unencrypted manner then those companies are at least in a position to snoop. If these companies become excessively profit driven or are obliged to (Plc) then that data is a profit center and no longer private.

Encryption is no where near enough though! If anyone knows where our data is they can corrupt or steal it, or force you to give up passwords to it. It needs much more than pgp email or similar as these are layers on top of a currently brocken system. SMTP etc. will require servers and these can be snooped on and until we move away from servers and allowing others access to our data then it's going to continue as is with loss of privacy and ultimately liberty.

Huge disclaimer I work for this project novinet it's open source (dual license) and aims to provide people with a network that ensures privacy and security in a manner that's invisible to people and this is key. It's very new and like all new ideas will have detractors, but when people dig into the detail it becmoes clear that this or something very like it is required if we want privacy ever again.

If hackers focus on this issue with the above project or other ideas to achieve the same end goals then it will be achieved. My contention, however, is that we need another way of putting our data on this Internet of ours and we need to do so in a manner that allows more options than today with much better user experiences. From experience though this is not a simple job and does require a lot of new thinking and more importantly it requires to be available to everyone, not a % of the code and ideas but 100% available, however that's achieved.

I for one would be interested to understand the grounds of your estimation ? In terms of key exchange you could also estimate quantum entanglement may replace the requirement for intercept-able information exchanges. If the estimate of the latter is greater than the former then I estimate based on that conjecture we will be fine and broadband is dead :-) Oh and long live time travel at the same time!

Delighted with your answer and also delighted with your OSS views, I support OSS but hate the legal mess and vicious debates. I really wish you the best Bruce and please add me to any list of possible help/support, I am limited in time just now, but definitely am interested and as I said I do have some contacts that may prove useful (as well as the foundation I mentioned). My goal is to help others innovate and do so without the current corporate nonsense and stress, so happy to join in in any way I can when time permits.

Hey Bruce (do you mind if I just stick to Bruce :-) ), well done and congrats
I have been a wee bit involved in the fab lab network (born in MIT by Neil Gershenfeld), it's a really cool network of 'labs' which are basically small buildings with some 3d manufacturing equipment, printers and enough 'stuff' to allow people to make anything they can dream of. One of the goals is to spread the designs to other labs around the world.
1: To me it would seem this effort you are now involved in could act as a catalyst to bring this and the (seemingly) many other open hardware initiatives together, do you agree?
2: I also watched a video on TED about open source cancer research (from Boston, still on front page) and note the open publication efforts currently being touted. Do you not think there is an opportunity for a Open X network (X == everything) ?
In essence, do you think there is a possibility of momentum towards a new world here, where research and innovation in all areas take centre stage and move us all along at the pace mankind can move along? (I am thinking of the mass unrest with the way everything is and the apparent move towards a change, I feel we need a catalyst and somebody has to do it. I for instance have donated all my shares in a business I have been building for more than 5 years to a charity for innovation and education and the rest to the staff of the business, I know there is need for change and I constantly look for ways to actually do it, something more than 'rooftop shouting').
Is there a chance here to stimulate a new movement, a slow and focussed movement with real thought behind it ?

Is that not just evolution, mixed in with the philosophy nothing is invented or discovered as it was always there anyway? I believe in evolution of pretty much everything (even stuff that dies out) and I am pretty sure that HAL-2 is just more evolved than HAL.

Think they 'preloaded' it ?

Good idea, keep thinking. One issue I see is that small companies and inventors may actually want some market traction and use patents to allow this. Think if you had a brilliant new spell-checker or email thingie that did something amazing and everyone would want it. If you could not protect your own product at least for a wee while (I think there shoudl be limits of course) then some of the existing incumbents would simply use your product, even pay the small royalty and prevent you from becoming a business.

This may not seem to bad until you consider that perhaps you wanted to actually build a business for the good of everyone, say to give everyone free Internet or something (anythings possible) and large ISP's etc. simply prevented it by altering their model slightly to keep them in jam and keep mad fekers like you from destroying their stranglehold on the customers.

So I like your idea it's closer to workable than now but perhaps this is something that requires consideration, it was one of the reasons for patents in the first place and it's abused to death now (I admit).

Perhaps there could be rules as to the size of the entity doing patents, i.e. anything above SME cannot prevent straight use and pay (small feasible) royalty but anything SME or smaller can. Just another idea.

Again though consider the guy who creates a pill to cure cancer and buggers about trying to create a company to exploit it, delaying the intro of the new tech. Not easy!

As far as I am aware even if the Higgs Boson does in fact exist is would be so infrequently shown (even at 7TeV) that it will in fact be considered as an extremely low probability of it showing up. I for one do not believe in Higgs but I also do not believe it would ruin the standard model if it did not exist.

Theres many more explanations to sub atomic particle mass than the Higgs Boson, some have been though of and theorized, of that I am sure and likely the correct theory has likely not been discovered yet, but it may well be soon, who knows? Apart from that the discovery of new particles will be a further amazement to quantum physicists, even more conformation of quarks and the color charge would make a lot of people very happy, me for one or two or both!

SAH512 is roughly 1.2 X 10^154, atoms in visible universe is on the order of 10^80, job done :-)

I am interested in how you can make blocking code in a single thread appear as though it was in multi threads and non blocking, aside from multi core threads reacting like a single thread or using a reactor type (thread) with async programming. I am not being facetious but just what process do you use here to give this appearance.

I am always amazed by folks who profess to say a callback can appear multi threaded, I am not sure if this is what you mean but it would appear to me to be not possible, although I am genuinely interested.

Yea that would be like the madness of giving us free search, no way would they do this !

This is an interesting issue, the OS may be OSS but if Google does not open source it's apps then the platform as delivered cannot be considered an OSS solution outside normal marketing doublethink.

I imagine Google could easily Open Source most of it's apps though as there only access to the Google back end therefor not giving away any bigtable, map reduce, pagerank secrets etc.

I am interested in how it can be made malware and virus free unless it's a read only OS and therefor either storing all your cache, data either in RAM and loosing it, or on Google servers or similar ? That could be a privacy nighmare for them but I would assume Google are way smarter than that and can employ some cool technologies in this privacy area to. Meanwhile has anyone an idea how they can be malware, virus free ? (you can get memory resident viruses per session even on a read only OS and ... (add your own and also ... here)

True cloud computing surely has to be true peer to peer, no DNS, no web, simply the Internet and p2p software. There are loads of examples of open sourced p2p applications (torrent clients) and some even with DHT's.

This in my mind is true cloud computing and not going back to central servers or even DNS which itself is reliant on centralisations and human authoritative controls. True cloud and true p2p must be brought together. We have released a library which allows for a NAT traversing (UDP hole punching) and extensible kademlia networking (DHT). This was due to the fact that although many libraries state they can achieve this in c, c++, java or python etc. we have never actually found a good base to create our main application from.

So it seems that open source has been a little slow in providing solid networking libraries to allow open source cloud computing which can easily challenge the giants head on and they should. Our library is at google code for anyone who is interested (BSD license).

I think that with a solid base then single developers, small groups a well as any other type of innovators can easily create an application to make proper use of p2p and therefor cloud computing, because simply using the Internet as a big cable to some servers which may or may not be centralised is not cloud computing, that to me is merely borrowing somebody else's computer when required and paying them for it. If it were a true cloud then this would all be happening in real time and not known to the users of the system. In my opinion real cloud computing is a mindshift along with a shift in how computers are used at a more fundemental level than connected VM's over long pieces fo virtual cable.

I am sure there will be differing opinions though :-)