I must admit I’ve been somewhat disappointed with how sparse the clues have been this season on the show’s central mysteries. Several episodes in, and we don’t know a great deal more than the little we learned in the first episode. However, something shown in the “scenes from next week” bodes for more interesting times.

If you don’t watch that preview, you might want to hold on this post until Friday.  read more »

I’ve been ranting of late about the dangers inherent in “Data Portability” which I would like to rename as BEPSI to avoid the motherhood word “portability” for something that really has a strong dark side as well as its light side.

But it’s also important to come up with an alternative. I think the best alternative may lie in what I would call “data hosting.” It’s a layered system, with a data layer and an application layer on top. Instead of copying the data to the applications, bring the applications to the data.

A data hosting approach has your personal data stored on a server chosen by you. That server’s duty is not to exploit your data, but rather to protect it. That’s what you’re paying for.

Your data host’s job is to perform actions on your data. Rather than giving copies of your data out to a thousand companies (the Facebook and Data Portability approach) you host the data and perform actions on it, programmed by those companies who are developing useful social applications.

As such, you don’t join a site like Facebook or LinkedIn. Rather, companies like those build applications and application containters which can run on your data. They don’t get the data, rather they write code that works with the data and runs in a protected sandbox on your data host.  read more »