On 10/01/14 01:04 AM, grarpamp wrote:
There is slick, and then there is utility. I'm seeing some good utility
in a few of the listings on https://www.prism-break.org/ .
Nice link!
When it comes
getting utility done, it's not to hard to introduce (even firmly) people
into using utilities. Slick helps, but it's not required, and will come in
time. Everyone throws up BS about adoption and thus nothing ever
gets built, or even researched, screw that, I say build it and see.
I also question a few of those listings.
I'm going to make a call here. I reckon that future phone bandwidth and
batterywidth will be sufficient to close the gap, to the point that this
problem goes away.
So, moving away from p2p notions that are popular with the
one-laptop-per-everyone western world would be the wrong strategy.
Although it seems that the phone market is 'different' it is catching up
fast in the things that matter. Right now, the only thing where they are
arguably short is VoIP. Hell, they're happy watching utube on phones...
But that's no problem because in today's world, what dominates is chat &
apps. Lack of good VoIP over phones is just a short term issue.
(It's a prediction, not a claim!)
I agree with this hardware path, especially for the subject of p2p
secure messaging.
I think voip is currently not a user priority on devices with a cell
stack because that
stack is already activated and paid for. With good apps and wider access to free
wifi in particular, encrypted voip should take off. Or we will see
more use of cell
based IP plans. Another twist is going out of voiceband to get the key material
of your peer, then with the more open phones out there, grab the cell
mic/vocoder/modem
on them and stuff your encrypted voice over that if voip doesn't work
at that moment.
But that's way off topic to p2p secure messaging... at least until
that hardware path
allows for p2p secure <everything>.
Tough call, but a good thought. If phones had a p2p viral vpn .. where
would that take us?
...
What I think is clear is that there will for the far to indefinite
forseeable
future be some form of real workstation/laptop in the home and office.
Phones just can't replace that. Maybe we're seeing something in how
you see larger tablet/netbooks/laptops with headsets being carried about
now as if it is natural. And lots of those people will want a highly
secure system to communicate over with their peers in this new
world of disgustingly gratuitous surveillance and databasing.
I would not underestimate the demand for that sort of a comms system.
I see this as rather a rich western world observation. It probably works
for Apple. It doesn't so much work in the non-rich world, where things are
much more widely driven by Android, etc.
I gather Africa does a lot of things with simple text messaging on
simple non-I/Android/MS/Unix phones. What is their path for phone tech
advancement, and when?
Android. 50% market share in 2 years.
Is it reasonable to expect to truly need to develop for more than the
'West' as a userbase? Keep in mind the West now probably includes
China and many other places, so we're looking at more than 1B nodes
anyways. We probably mean 'Western class' of phones. And by the
time a p2p secure messaging platform the subject of this thread is
deployed in a handful of years, that class will be much more widespread.
So perhaps natural convergence of this software and hardware will occur.
Well, I think the world is opening up. Although iPhone dominates the
'west' it doesn't scratch anywhere else because it's priced out. Here,
it's all dumb, feature and android.
I'd also say that China is not 'west' now, or ever. Only maybe 100m of
the 1b are at that point, and even then they'll only be muddling class
but never western. Now, that muddling level is enough to get Apple's
attention apparently but the economy driver is still on the base.
Also, I would say this: be very cautious of stuff you read in the
western press. It's highly filtered, highly ignorant. In order to
understand what is happening in a particular region, you have to go there.
For example: in our startup space here where we do lots of android work
(because we're in the payments capital of the world ;-) ) we get lots
and lots of western investors, NGOs, mba-tourists, etc. (The
mba-tourists are hilarious, they come here to do the "NGO adventure" so
they can get into MBA school, it's an institution.)
Westerners come here and impose their western ideas on the locals and
find that the ideas don't take root. The locals don't have the
experience to tell them why, and they're too polite to tell them to sod
off. But the longer term more worldly experienced types -- those who've
lived in minimum 3 countries for many years -- can see it in a
heartbeat: western ideas only work in the west (c.f., Hernando de Soto)
. Everywhere else, there are totally different assumptions and totally
different working practices.
For further example. There's this famous company that does tech, name
forgootten for now but you can search on it easily enough. They came
here and they discovered that the public transport system is chaos, and
based on cash, and ripe for cleanup. Smell business opportunity!
So they invent a payment system, couple with a bank, and start selling
everyone on these payment tokens and the buses on these payment
accepting devices. Guess what ... it doesn't work! It's not that the
tech doesn't work -- that's fine. It's that *the people* won't let it
work. There is resistance, sabotage, theft, ... the whole kit & kaboodle.
It all comes down to westerners coming here and not leaving their
western ideas at home. Big mistake. They saw the chaos and thought
they could improve; but what they didn't realise is that the public
transport system is perfectly aligned with the local market *and* is one
of the best in the world. It's just that "best" requires completely
leaving behind your western notions, and discovering how the local
market works.
Yes there are West/first vs. second/third disparities, if everyone
waited we wouldn't have what 'western' tools we have today.
There are folks in the west that need them too, even to work on
solving those disparities, so it is not much of an argument to expect
to limit develop only for western class HW.
In the old days, what happened in the west happened later elsewhere.
However, the west rather shot itself in the foot in the 2000s with their
great financial folly. So growth has stalled, and the West has entered
a sort of Japanese lost decades phase: In 1990, when the bubble burst
on the Japanese economic miracle, the authorities refused to clean out
the bad banks, so the economy flatlined ... indeed since then.
Now, what happened after 2007 in the west? They refused to clean out
the banking sector, and for the same reasons that the Japanese refused
to do it.
So, the western economy is still bloated with bad banks ... growth now
flatlines, and we have to wait decades for them to fade away.
But not a lot of this effects the developing/emerging world. So their
growth is unabated. So we are seeing the beginnings of a flip. It's
not so much that you could call the end of western civilisation as you
know it, but it is enough to challenge the old world order:
western->rest is now upset.
See what you can build for intel/amd CPU's.
See what you can fit in ARM, snapdragon, android, etc.
For boxen, there are some mighty fine, mighty cheap full scale servers
coming out. Low power. Full function. Like Mac Minis (fantastic
servers!) but a tenth of the price! Yehaa!
So to answer your implied question: we can no longer assume that the
western ideas drive and others follow.
iang
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