[HacktionLab] Unhosted project

[Mick Fuzz]

Alan just put this on indy.im - I reckon they do a good job of 
explaining some of the problems of big networked applications. This 
might be useful to put in the tech tools leaflet.

--
full info here -
http://unhosted.org/flyer.html


    Introduction

A little over a year ago the Unhosted <http://www.unhosted.org> project 
was started. The goal of the Unhosted <http://www.unhosted.org> project 
is to give users back the control over the data that is stored in their 
favorite web applications. In popular web applications like Google Docs, 
Facebook and Flickr the data is stored on the server together with the 
application. Web applications have a number of benefits compared to 
applications running on the desktop like for instance Microsoft Office:

  * You can access the application everywhere around the world, e.g. on
    holidays while using your smart phone;
  * The application provider may take care of creating backups of your data;
  * No maintenance of the application on the client required, always the
    latest version through the web.

Unfortunately it also has a number of drawbacks for both the users and 
application developers:

  * The application provider has unlimited access to your, possibly
    corporate or research, data;
  * The user is locked into the application, i.e.: there usually is not
    a way to extract all your data from the application and use it with
    a different application;
  * The application provider may revoke access to your account depending
    on their Terms of Service without giving you back your data
  * It can be very expensive to operate a popular application on the
    web, i.e: lots of servers, bandwidth and maintenance of
    infrastructure may be required;
  * There is no way for anyone to make sure the program does (only) what
    is advertized.

The Unhosted <http://www.unhosted.org> project aims at resolving these 
drawbacks using open web standards while maintaining the benefits of web 
applications.
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