Debating digital existence
My buddy Robert W Martin (not the guy in the picture) wants to live his life online. But he wants to do it without owning any of his own hardware. To readers in Fiji, this may sound like a yaqona induced fantasy, but Rob lives in a large city in Canada. For about CDN$40 (FJ$60) per month, he gets a connection at home at a speed of about 512kb/s, up and down, with no practical usage limit. At work, his connection may be as fast as 1Mb/s and similarly fast connections are available at numerous Internet cafes for anywhere from free to CDN$5 (FJ$7.50) per hour, not to mention various mobile networking options with various speeds and prices.
With affordable and fast connectivity like this, all he needs to do is get a free webmail account, an online office application service like Google Docs, a file vault, maybe a photo hosting site, and then a bunch of IM and P2P accounts and he's set, right? But here's the problem, like most security professionals, he's paranoid.
He calls his quest the search for digital existence:
This means not having a computer of my own. No desktop, no laptop, not even a wifi-connected smartphone. I want to exist online and experience the richness of the web without having to own any hardware. My access will be through public access terminals and Internet cafes, and by borrowing bandwidth from work, friends and family.[Digital existence revisited, The life and times of Robert W Martin]Rob has invited me to hammer through some of the difficult questions with him in a blog2blog conversation.
Rob, you suggested that we address these questions:
Good ideas, but first I want to know why. Why do you want to live on the net without your own hardware? Why do you want digital existence?
- Can you really trust webmail?
- Do you really want your files hosted online?
- How much encryption do you need?
- Do you need your own access device (keyboard, computer, PDA, etc.) or can you trust public computers?
Photo by: Cayusa
