i'm a fairly paranoid person.
One of the things that i kind of find important in this era of open and cloud computing is "Do you trust the could?" This kind of explains why i only use things like Del.icio.us and Flickr for things that i want to push out into the public domain. There can be all sorts of reasons not to trust the cloud. For one, you have no idea how really secure said cloud is. Also, you have no idea when said cloud might go away.
Of course, battling with this endless paranoia of mine is the fact that there are some things i REALLY want to do, like be able to sync info between my desktop and my "portable brain" (my laptop). Naturally, i don't want that info just out "there" somewhere, i want to be able to control it. Thus, the joy that i've discovered, Mozilla Weave.
This is a plugin for FireFox 3 that's still in the early stages, but damn is it useful. The stock version allows you to create a free account on mozilla servers (use an email account and password) along with an "encryption key" that i presume is used in combination with a public key in the code. That makes me happy for some reasons, but the idea of loading my passwords and form data to a random spot on the web isn't really such a compelling idea. Poking at the options, however, i see that i can specify what server i want to use as my backend. Oh-HO! That means that i could run it off of one of my domains!
Digging around a bit more i find out that the only backend server you need is WebDAV. cha-CHING! We have a winner! Being properly paranoid, i quickly construct a WebDAV instance point my copy of Weave at it, log in and Vi-ola! things get written as JSON objects with encrypted data blocks. What's more, installing it on the laptop gets me syncing my bookmarks and other bits! Yay!
Again, weave isn't perfect, and does exactly what you tell it to, so don't be surprised if you wind up with a bunch of duplicate bookmarks littering things up. You can clean them out and resync to solve that. Also, while you control your WebDav directory, you're obviously still subject to the sort of snooping that can occur if you're on a shared host, so be smart about things. The fact that things are encrypted does make me more comfortable about storing things on the default Mozilla servers.
Still, if you're looking for a sync tool, it's DAMN attractive.
(Oh, and PS to Mozilla Developers: Putting "Options" Under Tools in Windows, but "Preferences" under Edit in Linux is nearly as horrible an idea as putting the "Clear Private Data" link directly above "Options…" Standards are Good. Flip a coin and make the decision. )
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