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What is Wrong with Centralized Social Networking Services?

Centralized Social Networking services defined Examples of centralized Social Networking services are twitter, facebook, myspace, AIM. Basically, it is any service that is controlled by a single company on servers they manage.

Federated Networking Services Defined Examples include DNS, email, web/http, IRC, and Jabber-based IM. Basically, it is any service that is run by thousands or millions of companies on servers that they manage without centralized control.

Why is centralized undesirable? There are a number of reasons.

1. Single point of failure, whether it is equipment, networking, design, or human. For example, when twitter is unavailable for a few hours, EVERYONE on twitter is down. That is millions of people. Alternatively, when an email server goes down, which happens all the time, only the users of THAT specific server are impacted. It could still be millions of users, like gmail has caused from time to time, but the other hundreds of millions of users are really not impacted at all.
2. Single control point. If the company providing the service decides to stop, they can shut it down without telling anyone in advance. BAM, the service is gone and there is little that users can do to bring it back or get their data out. Email companies fail every day, but it doesn’t impact the vast majority of users at all.
3. Single place for government intervention. I like privacy more than most, but being on a social network means you are offering to give up some of that privacy by choice, which is fine. I especially don’t want my or any government to gain access to this data easily. When it is spread out, widely, across many, many different companies, servers, individuals, then gaining access to the data for everyone becomes prohibitively difficult for any entity, governments included. A government can gain access to a single or a few providers fairly easily, but not to 100% of the data. Further, when the data is federated, it can be placed in different countries so different governments have an even more difficult time getting access beyond what is public.
4. Single place for hackers to infiltrate to gain access to client data. Federated solutions mean well documented network interfaces. That means that different programmers can implement the interface while still building different client and server software. When there are multiple implementations of a service and clients, then it is likely that each will have different issues and features and strengths. That means a hack that works for 1 implementation probably will not work on another, so the entire federated solution will still work.
5. But it is easier! Using the same server, clients and how-to guides as everyone else is easier. That is true. Someone else will be able to show you the ropes. Sadly, when network services are used, there are always security concerns. The more people who use a single service, then that service must be dumbed down, which usually means security concerns are not a priority. That is usually the cost of being easier even when it doesn’t need to be.

Mom was Right!

• Mom said – Don’t put all your eggs in 1 basket. If all of us use a single service, we are effectively putting all our eggs into 1 basket.
• Mom said – Don’t spend all your money in one place. If you do need to use a social network service like facebook then
  1. Take responsibility to use it responsibly by not placing any private data in the system.
  2. Take responsibility for your data protection by performing backups.
  3. Be prepared should that service disappear.
  4. Be prepared should the service have a breach and all your information, even internal information you do not have access or control over, be leaked.

Some Centralized Software Services ARE a Good Idea

As with many things, the terms always and never don’t apply. Sometimes a centralized solution is the best answer for a specific purpose. Inside a single company, having multiple service solutions isn’t usually a good idea. When dealing with sensitive data, having a centralized service run by experts is a really good idea. That includes your broker, your banks, your credit cards and similar services. The other thing to note is that none of these systems are used by everyone in the USA, so you still have some federation. For your personal services, if they screw up, you can take your stuff and go somewhere else. Inside your company, you’ll probably have centralized services like DNS, LDAP, authentication, document management, CRM, and other industry specific services. Your company probably pays a few external services for systems tool – perhaps the retirement plan administrator, HR, health care, and even some business partners.

Even some of the largest, most centralized systems are federated with competition. Look at the NYSE and NADAQ. They compete with each other and we all win because of it.

FSF Sponsored Software

When the FSF sponsors software, we all win. They will produce a reference implementation, provide the source code for others to extend (following the GNU license, of course), and bring production quality software to all of us. There is a catch, there is always a catch. Companies that take the GNU licenses software and use it are required to make any changes public if the software is used outside their company or placed into any device. That means when any company leverages GNU software, then the company is required to allow end users the ability to update that software later.

What is the FSF and why should you support them?

The Free Software Foundation is the backbone of FLOSS / FOSS software that has been running the internet for the last 35+ years. If you’ve heard of GNU software or GNU/Linux, then you should know that the FSF sponsors them. It is not possible for your to use the internet and not use GNU software. It is everywhere and used daily by computer professionals.

FSF is good for all of us. Consider making a donation to help them out for everything they do. They do things to protect our privacy and many other things.

I and our clients use FSF sponsored / GNU software. For our unix-like servers, including production servers, we use rdiff-backup for incremental and full backups. There are MS-Windows ports for many GNU tools too.