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binbasti

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I use my RS accounts for exactly this, in combination with Huginn for example. It's super simple, because you just PUT or GET, with the bearer token for one segment (called "category" in RS) in the Authorization header. And you can also PUT things in the special /public category, so they're world-readable. Example: when I check in on Swarm, Huginn uploads the entire check-in data to my RS for archiving, as well as updates a public RS document with my current location, which my website then shows publicly: https://sebastian.kip.pe

Actually, this has been pretty much a non-issue for us in production over the last 5 years. As the reference JS client library works offline first, it'll just sync data whenever the remote becomes available again. In fact, that's a nice bonus for offline-first web apps in general, not just with remoteStorage.

Tent's goals sound similar on the frontpage, but are actually very different. It's more of a communication protocol than a a data storage one. This page is slightly more informative, albeit not much: https://tent.io/about

Tent is built around posts. Each Tent server stores a single user’s posts and sends copies to the user’s subscribers.

That's why you can choose a storage provider to do it for you. But as with email, you're not locked in to a single provider, and small ones will probably not scan your personal data using AI/ML algorithms, like e.g. Google does.

Edit: the library in question also supports using Dropbox and Google Drive, so your users don't even have to know about RS in order to sync your PWA's data to their own account with those.

This is roughly how the library works. It will compare the directory listings with the cached items and only download new and updated ones, as well as remove deleted ones.

Yes, it is a key/value store as base technology. The important thing is that you can build anything you want on top, which includes for example indexes and such. The idea is that this can/will be implemented on top of a simple base protocol, which is easy to implement, and to use data modules (and shared utility modules) to add more complex functionality.

However, having used RS apps for years now, I think it's worth mentioning that most people considerably over-estimate the amount and size of the personal data they use daily, and in the case of notes, I never had performance issues with Litewrite pulling all my notes whenever/wherever I connect my storage: https://litewrite.net/

That's not just because this is actually pretty fast with multiplexing on HTTP/2, but also because you usually don't connect and disconnect all the time on all your devices. So you will usually have your existing data cached and available on app startup (including when you're offline), and only sync remote changes when you get online. This is also what similar proprietary apps like e.g. Google Keep do.

I hope WebDAV dies 11 years ago

Of course, no server is actually that dumb - even a file listing with file sizes can get you part of the way there. But if you've got 10000 files in a file store, that list can still get pretty heavy.

Exactly. remoteStorage has ETAGs in folder listings for that. The point is that you can implement a folder structure that enables you to update say just the last week of events plus upcoming ones, which is usually nowhere near 10000. Except with CalDAV you can't (according to the article, I haven't actually looked into it myself).

I hope WebDAV dies 11 years ago

I didn't notice that JMAP includes calendars and contacts. Looks good!

Personally, I'd prefer a dumb storage with a generic API over yet another custom protocol/API just for these data formats alone. Worked great on people's local drives before the Web, and I think it should work similar on the Web.

I hope WebDAV dies 11 years ago

Yes, and then you have another optional version of WebDAV, adding to the existing mess, while you don't actually have the benefit of interop that you say would be the reason for using WebDAV in the first place.

The way I read it, that's basically the point of the article.

I hope WebDAV dies 11 years ago

(Co-founder of 5apps and RS core contributor here.)

remoteStorage has as far as I know only one production instance running at 5apps

That's not true. 5apps is running the only public service for end users at the moment, but there are certainly more production instances running.

The benefits of using the RS protocol are mostly due to the CORS headers (which could be implemented easily for WebDAV) and the use of OAuth/Bearer, for which a PR exists for SabreDAV [3].

As both of these would be optional additions to WebDAV servers, all of WebDAV's benefits parish with most servers not supporting these new extensions. That's the very critique in the article as far as I understand. WebDAV alone is not good enough, and optional additions lead to a world of incompatibility and pain.

One thing missing from WebDAV is the (implicit) mapping of OAuth scopes to ACLs, which should not be too difficult to implement

And another addition.

I'd prefer something like OAuth authorization server discovery

And another one. Counting 4 now. :)

but it just doesn't bring (in my opinion) many benefits and loses interop with existing WebDAV clients for no good reason

You just mentioned that to get to feature parity with remoteStorage, a WebDAV server needs 4 optional additions, for only one of which an unmerged PR to a single server implementation exists. Maybe I miss something, but it doesn't sound like interop is WebDAV's benefit in this scenario.

We need to own our blogs, our social networks, our email (raise your hand if you're not using Google Mail – see?); at some point even our infrastructure

Shouldn't that include comments on Schnitzelpress blogs, too?

Actually OS X is pretty consistent with keyboard shortcuts compared to other OSes. It's even one of my favorite things about it.

That said, the checking mails example is a bad one, and moreover it used to be the usual cmd-shift-R and they only introduced the odd new one in Lion.

Edit: sorry, misread your comment. But mine is still valid. Because of the many keyboard shortcuts for the OS UI, it's only natural that you need more modifier keys in the apps sometimes.

For elections to be considered democratic, they must not only be fair and anonymous, but also comprehensible to all. As any electronic voting system (even an insecure one) is only comprehensible to some, electronic voting is by definition not democratic and should therefore be forbidden in any country that claims itself to be that.

Actually, in Germany the highest court declared electronic voting to be unconstitutional on the grounds of deficient comprehensibility in 2009. Maybe we can use this argument in other countries, too.

I found some numbers, albeit a little old:

Exemplar: Bulgaria

The participation rate for women in these fields is slightly higher than for men: 7.8 percent of the female college-age cohort obtained an NS&E degree in Bulgaria in 1992; 7.2 percent of males in this age group obtained such a degree in that same year.

In 1992, women obtained 57 percent of all university degrees. In addition, they obtained half of the engineering degrees, 70 percent of the natural science degrees, and 73 percent of the mathematics and computer science degrees. These percentages have not changed since 1975 (Stretenova, 1994).

http://anitaborg.org/files/womenhightechworld.pdf

Last year I attended a panel about women in tech on the fairly new CCC congress "SIGINT" in Cologne, which focusses more on society and politics. The panel itself was rather boring and not really insightful, but during the Q&A a young woman from Eastern Europe pointed out something interesting: she stated that in her country there's a 1:1 male/female ratio in all science fields at the universities, including computer science. I haven't checked the facts, but even if that is not entirely true, the difference to Western countries is astounding. She went on to say that the problem is entirely with culture, and all aspects of it, and that the numbers were just reflecting that.

The women on the panel, who were all Westerners, couldn't even comment on that. They were just plain speechless, and rightly so, because most of their arguments involving bullying boys, mother nature, and other standard points were pretty much refuted by the simple fact that there already exist places in the world where this topic is not even an issue. And it's not the ones you would usually relate to human progress.