Stenico
April 24th, 2008, 07:17 PM
Microsoft have announced a new product, 'Mesh' (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7362144.stm) that will allow you to automagically keep all your devices in sync and have access to your data from anywhere.
This solves a very real problem (seamless, hassle-free access to your data from all of your devices) but in a very flawed way. It is not wise to give any one company access to all of your data.
Better, I suggest, would be an "OSSO-MESH": an Open Source, Self-Organising Mesh. This would comprise of simple cross-platform software that you can run on any device to keep it in sync with other devices, together with an optional web back end.
It would be self-organising because each member of the SO-Mesh would carry a map of the Mesh (that gets updated every time a device is added or removed). The only requirement would be that all of your devices can talk to each other across the internet (i.e. they have IP address). When you change something on one device, it automatically replicates it to all the other devices in your Mesh.
Now it would be prefereable to have your mesh data on a server on the internet, to ensure your devices are always in sync. For that purpose, an open-source, open-standards web backend can be designed. The backend can be run by you on your own webserver or by anyone e.g. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc so you can choose where the web copy of your mesh lives. (Also the data on the web backend could be encrypted so it is not readable by anyone but you i.e. you have a private key.)
Anyway thought I would share the idea in case Google isn't already working on it ;-).
This solves a very real problem (seamless, hassle-free access to your data from all of your devices) but in a very flawed way. It is not wise to give any one company access to all of your data.
Better, I suggest, would be an "OSSO-MESH": an Open Source, Self-Organising Mesh. This would comprise of simple cross-platform software that you can run on any device to keep it in sync with other devices, together with an optional web back end.
It would be self-organising because each member of the SO-Mesh would carry a map of the Mesh (that gets updated every time a device is added or removed). The only requirement would be that all of your devices can talk to each other across the internet (i.e. they have IP address). When you change something on one device, it automatically replicates it to all the other devices in your Mesh.
Now it would be prefereable to have your mesh data on a server on the internet, to ensure your devices are always in sync. For that purpose, an open-source, open-standards web backend can be designed. The backend can be run by you on your own webserver or by anyone e.g. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc so you can choose where the web copy of your mesh lives. (Also the data on the web backend could be encrypted so it is not readable by anyone but you i.e. you have a private key.)
Anyway thought I would share the idea in case Google isn't already working on it ;-).