[ Thanks to Rudd-O
DragonFear for this link. ]
“Today, I was reading my favorite sites… and I found a
disturbing news post on Slashdot, called Pervasive Computing:
Microsoft, MIT and the future. Why did I find it disturbing? Well,
you see, there was a link to an article that left me with a bad
taste about the future of computing. And it seems aimed right
between the Windows users’ eyebrows, promised as the panacea, the
cure for all evil, the solution for all computing problems. Well,
this is the kind of article that dispels this myth before it
becomes true. Here, you won’t find an analysis of .NET’s
advantages. I’d rather be openly biased than to deceive my
readers.”
“Well, to make a long story short, this is how the strategy
develops: Our information is supposed to reside everywhere and
anywhere, on service provider networks. We are supposed to rent
what we had for free yesterday or for a one-time fee. I thought we
users were going to have more control, more power than before. More
control over their information. More power over what they could do.
Turns out this “pervasive computing” phenomenon is exactly the
opposite of what I wanted. Now, our information won’t reside under
our control. It’s empowerment favoring corporations, not
consumers/users.”
“If you’d seen what I had recently, you wouldn’t be that quiet.
Go find a program called hunt. Load Google, search for hunt,
download it, compile it and install on a linux computer that acts
as a router. Voilà, network connection capture and seize.
Trust me, after seeing that, I won’t ever telnet again. How can
I be compelled to send my personal information in XML form around
the network? And what makes you think they won’t be interested in
the contents of the files stored on their computers? I, for
one, am not going to trust my collection of 4000 songs and tons of
personal documents to anybody else besides myself.”