WhyASAP

Let's produce mobile decentralized apps

Most applications follow the client-server paradigm. That's amazing since we know since the 1960th that servers are a single point of failure and a good place to start espionage. Internet protocol and TCP were invented and became the foundation of a world-wide decentralized information system. It is a sad irony that the World-Wide-Web made the Internet technology popular in the 1990th. WWW is a client-server system par excellence including all its drawbacks.

The well-known issues from the time of the cold war are back in another context and with other lables: Distributed Denial of Service attacs (DDoS), exploiting private information, blocking web-sites, blocking or spying on communication networks just to name a few. History repeats itself. Very sad.

It is an even sadder irony that a lot of users talk about Internet applications but actually mean client-server-based WWW apps on a mobile phone or their laptops and are the opposite of the decentralized nature of IP.

Decentralized systems are still a good alternative. Internet was and is a brillant idea. Surveillance capitalism would not work with decentralized apps. Decentralization is a requirement for Internet of Things apps which collect a vast amount of information.

People do not have access to Internet anytime any anywhere. Local IT infrastructure can be broken, overloaded, too expensive, too risky to be used (spying), no company could envision enough revenue for their shareholders to set up an appropriate infrastructure etc. pp.

Decentralization - your app / your communication

Let's think apps decentralized. There are just a few apps which really require a server. Social networks do not - that's for sure. For what reason do we need a log of our very private conversations on a server somewhere in the world? To exchange messages? Really? Internet (IP) is decentralized. The infrastructure is out there - up and running for the better part of a century.

We (IT folks) should start thinking about decentralized systems instead of working on pattern recognization stuff that squeezes out the last piece of information from communications which are meant to be private and which should be handled like this. We should think about systems which really work anywhere and not only in an area with perfect (wireless) Internet availability. We should think of systems which do not have to consider any law regarding privacy because they do not collect private data in the first place.

We should write real Internet apps - decentralized. Users and not only a few experts should be crystal clear about where their data are and over what networks they are transmitted. Transparency can and should be the goal of the 21st century.

That is what ASAP is for: A protocol and programmers framework that allows building decentralized systems using Internet but also ad-hoc networks.