Richard M. Stallman is an incredible man. I had the chance to see him today for a conference about (as usual) free software, GNU/Linux, the danger of software patents and emacs.

Great moment !

• My blog is on wordpress.com
• My videos are on youtube and dailymotion
• My photos on picasa
• My mails are at google’s
• My personal information on facebook
• Finally, some last files are stored in zshare

On the Internet, my computer is nothing more than a tiny terminal which connects to some huge servers, starting from a search engine.

I don’t have my own identity on the Internet. My blogs, mails, videos… everything should be in my computer, in my home, not in those servers.

The current Internet architecture is really bad, everyone should be able to host themselves easily on the Internet.

Why we don’t? Well, It takes time and the quality of service would be much worse if we host ourselves. So we just put our freedom away, just to win some more confort…

If Gmail wants to delete all my data, or to parse my emails in order to give me some advertisement (they would never dare…), they can.

We need to do this, and people should start creating a small OS/distribution (for PCs but especially for ISPs’ boxes) which could save everyone’s privacy.

For French guys, there is a video which explains clearly why everyone should host themselves and compares the current situation of the Internet with the ‘minitel’ (an old and awful French videotext online service)… Yes our Internet finally looks the same.

I will conclude with a quote from Bruno Lussato (teacher at ENSAM)  about our French ‘minitel’:

“People tell us the whole world envy our ‘Minitel’, I don’t know if they envy us, but what I can tell you for certain is that they don’t buy it”

It seems that the moment as come, thanks to this article which made me change my mind (and therefore also my passwords).

What I didn’t know is that we don’t need a ‘difficult to remember‘ password to have a secure one,  some passwords can be both great and secured, like ‘fluffy is puffy’.