digital person(ae)

regarding decentralised, fair analytics?
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-digital-person-a-symposium-tickets-43050737916

some possible discussion/questions

1. who can proxy for a hub in the home, for great grandfather...the bank, the kids, the bbc, the GP, all of the above...(see 4)...

2. price discrimination v. differentiation - do we need "cloud neutrality"

3. how near to privacy/security/utility tradeoff curve are we in practice in central v. decentralised cloud/analytics?

4. what about identity systems? are we ready for multiple pseudonyms each with a subset of our attributes (am-over-18, or am-a-citizen of country x) instead of centralised id with everything?

5. who will power the infrastructure when its completely decentralised?

we're a long way from microgeneration...

6. in edge ai, what are the distributed analytics _coordination_ challenges

7. in edge ai, what are the distributed analytics _privacy_ (diff?) challenges

8. how do we get assurance (sousveillance/someone-elses-pov dashboard) in the decentralised world?

edge to edge bogus arguments in systems design

since the arrival of blockchain tech, we're seeing a lot of bandwagonning on
edge-computing.

what most the pundits pushing for this is "just-inside-the-edge" computer/storage/services -

i.e. its still owned by network providers or co-lo kit from a good-old-fashioned-cloud service - same-old same-old. it is getting lower latency/higher availability, less backhaul network costs and (possibly) able to localize service behaviour to geographic jurisdiction, which are all ok things to do.

but it isn't p2p.

but it isn't end-to-end.

e2e was/is the liberating architectural feature of the net that lets anyone run a service. that lets value scale super-linearly (between n*ln(n) and n^2 depending who you believe).

p2p was a failed tech predicating on everyone running things e2e in their home, pocket/car. it failed because of three barriers
i) asymmetric capacity in access networks - this is hard to blame on anyone - its a feature of using old copper capacity and how shared medium spectrum works for fixed and wireless broadband. slowly, it is becomine less the case (last time i looked, 10M out of 35M households in the UK had fiber, which doesn't have these constraints.
ii) IPv4 address space depletion leading to being NATted to death, rather than deploying IPv6 (or anything else).
iii) software deficiencies leading to patriarchical firewalling of systems with vulnerabilities, rather than fixing the root cause (poor systems security).
iv) add yours here....

if you don't run the ledger, file service, social network, messenger platform in your home/pcket/car, it isn't end2end. if it isn't p2p, it isn't e2e. if it isn't e2e, its still 0wned by someone else. even if you have a spare set of keys.