Open Source Cloud Computing?

A contribution from Sepp Hasslberger:

It appears that the term “cloud computing” has been hijacked by corporate giants who wish to introduce server farms to hold a great amount of corporate data, as well as web based applications to access and elaborate them.

I prefer to think of a cloud as a huge number of linked personal computers, all belonging to end users, perhaps some to companies, and I have suggested that we might use such a cloud to great advantage to back up data and to connect everyone more directly.

This idea has been posted as “Backing up the internet in a P2P ‘cloud‘” and a recent comment by Sean Larner points to broolz.com for a coming application that will allow us, he says, to form our own cloud, keeping control over what data we put out there.

More recently still, a message by Jordan MacLeod, forwarded by Michel Bauwens, details the concept of Multi Homed Protection (MHP) to keep data in the open cloud secure and always available by storing it in multiple places in the cloud.

Jordan MacLeod wrote:

“MHP works by breaking apart files before they leave your computer and spreading these files fragments over many servers. In this way, these fragments can be stored in the Cloud and/or transmitted to others with an exponentially greater degree of security and assured privacy. While the Cloud has staggering potential, it is precisely these current security and privacy concerns that prevent individuals and organizations from offloading their sensitive information onto servers that are vulnerable to hacking and privacy breaches. With MHP, no server would ever again hold a whole file that could be stolen or even read by an unintended party. The Cloud as a whole would be composed of millions of servers that each stored meaningless fragments that only had value when a user used MHP to retrieve the fragmented files and recombine them after each part is received. It is remarkably simple, yet powerfully effective in overcoming the primary barrier to cloud adoption. It simultaneously introduces a paradigm to confront the severe cyber terrorism risks of our day.”

MHP is open source and we believe is relevant to billions of humans — as a process clearly superior to the current state of the art, our goal is to attain universal adoption through free licensing to individual users and high-impact solutions to commercial, govermental and not for profit organizations.”

Our website is: www.elevatorcorp.com

1 Comment Open Source Cloud Computing?

  1. AvatarDave Paine

    I agree entirely with the “cloud computing” hijack comment. To my mind, most corporates’ view of cloud computing is, in fact, nothing more than client server with a fancy new coat. The broolz software that you refer to is now available in beta form via http://www.broolz.com and will provide the ability to create your own clouds (currently within a LAN, though work is in progress to extend that to WAN clouds).

    Just thought you might like to know.
    Dave

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