Michiel de Jong

Founder & Lead Developer, Unhosted.org

http://www.unhosted.org

Biography

Michiel de Jong studied Computer Science at Leiden University before working as a researcher and web technology engineer in several European countries. Last year he took a three month sabbatical on tropical island Bali, to work on a hobby project. The result became known as the Unhosted project and quickly  gained a lot of momentum in the free software community. This way, what started as a programming holiday, turned into a full-time occupation for him.

Presentation: Sysadmin dilemma: Hosted software, or installed software? FOSS solution: Unhosted software.

Web-based applications are useful, but giving up control over the data you put into these third-party hosted applications is often scary. This creates a tension between 'going cloud' and 'keeping control'. We propose to separate web-based applications from the data they operate on. That way, your data doesn't get locked into any one application, but can move around separately. The way we do this is quite simple. Instead of writing web-based applications in server-side languages like java, php and ruby, write them in html5, css and javascript. Server-side code made sense three years ago. But since then, with browsers multiplying their performance, javascript has become what java was intended to be: a viable cross-platform execution environment. It's also an ideal platform for reaching post-PC devices such as smartphones and tablets.
The big advantage of javascript is that it runs client-side, under the user's control, and not remotely on some third party's server. Since about one year, we can do effective caching and cross-origin storage from within the browser, thanks to new w3c standards. This means that the javascript running in the browser can make its own connections to other hosts, and store encrypted data blobs there. Storing data on a cross-origin host, is what we call unhosted storage. Stanford crypto lab is also doing the first experiments with in-browser payload encryption, which would increase the control you keep over your data even further, while still allowing you to 'go cloud-based'.
The unhosted web is a Dutch invention, and will be launched first as a proof-of-concept by SURFNET, to benefit the one million staff and students of Dutch higher education institutes. At the time of writing we are also a candidate for receiving generous funding from NLNET. All these technologies are open source, attributed to the public domain, and produced in a non-profit context.

The presentation can be viewed on http://unhosted.org/slides/govcert.html