Technical Evolutions

Always-on connections

From the DSL or fibre box at home to the 5G phone in one’s pocket with coverage (almost) everywhere, our devices are connected all the time. Yet those connections are largely underused: most of the time nothing flows through them.

That permanence is required if devices are to act as servers — a role that means being available to one’s “peers”. The hard part will be to build a system that is stable while remaining highly tolerant of devices going offline.

Client-side data processing

Devices are more and more powerful, and client-side processing has become the norm, both on the Web and in mobile “apps”. A web page or an “app” does a large amount of data processing; servers are increasingly limited to shared storage.

This shift makes it realistic that only the user’s device processes their data, so only that device needs access to it in clear form. Data is encrypted as soon as it leaves the device and cannot be decrypted elsewhere.