Personal Server

With the proliferation of smart phones and netbooks, it's become more obvious that everybody needs his or her own personal server, serving two general purposes. The first purpose is to work around the limited capacity and power of the small mobile devices, for example, to hold your photo collection. Your netbook is often turned off, or out of network reception, so the second purpose is to maintain an online "presence" when you yourself are not actually online.

The oldest example is in fact e-mail, where it is desirable for someone to be able to send e-mail to you even if you are not online. Thus, your personal server acts as the recipient, holding the received message until you return online.

The lack of personal servers has resulted in privacy disasters such as Gmail and Facebook, which pay their bills by selling users' personal information to the highest bidder.

I believe that with technology and economies of scale, the price of these personal servers may be brought down to say $10.

There are many ways to build a personal server, ranging from an actual physical box that sits in your house to a virtual machine rented at a colo data center.

For a physical box, I'd recommend two things: offsite encrypted backups and two-port ethernet, one port to your modem, the other to your household router. It may be combined with the router, maybe wireless. This way, your personal router is directly accessible from the internet.

The key difference between a virtual machine in a colo and Gmail is in the former, you own and control your information, while in the latter, your private information is in the hands of someone else whom you don't know if you can trust to act in your best interests.

In these various implementations, most of the technology already exists, though it would be nice for prices to come down. One development I would still like to see is better process isolation in operating systems. Your personal server will have many daemons running. We need that if one daemon misbehaves, due to security compromise, or to resource contention, it will not affect other daemons or access unauthorized data on the server.

A large network of servers helps Tor. It is also necessary for some of the distributed applications I've proposed in this blog.

Game consoles are a good "entry point" for personal servers. Your personal server may do double duty as a game console.