[bsimpson]

Interesting pendulum going on here:

A big reason we moved to Dropbox and the cloud was to avoid the single-point-of-failure and security problems associated with self-hosting. Most home users aren't going to take the time to make sure their arkOS is constantly up-to-date and configured securely, and anything hosted from one particular location is liable to data loss from all sorts of physical issues (hardware failure, theft, natural disaster, etc.).

I have a Dropbox Pro account because I'd rather pay someone a small amount of money to take care of these things for me than risk my data being destroyed by a fluke. The ability to access files from across devices is a big benefit too, but a big part of the cloud push is to move critical data off of individual devices, and I don't see arkOS handling that in its current pitch.

[jcook818]

Thanks for your input bsimpson. I definitely agree that self-hosting does present a whole new set of issues when it comes to reliability, security and accessibility. That is why the project has put a focus on developing tools like VPS architecture compatibility, dynamic DNS and port proxying relays, encrypted and automatic backup services, and more. Hosting your data on the Raspberry Pi is just the tip of the iceberg for the project - we want to make it as safe as possible while still keeping the control and privacy that is increasingly important these days.

[wmf]

IMO security is solved by sandboxing and Chrome-style auto updates and reliability is solved by data centers and mandatory backups, but I guess the plug/RPi people disagree.

[jcook818]

arkOS will provide three of those four things. (Obviously not the data centers part). The privacy implications counter the need for data centers for interested users, but of course everyone will need to evaluate their own individual pros and cons.