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What is a Portal in a technical sense?
The basis of each and every Portal is an individual virtual private server - a cloud computer. For most purposes, this is equivalent to an independent computer like your notebook or desktop PC. So when you own a Portal, you own a slice of some real hardware that is set aside for you.
On top of that, we deploy the Portal software stack. You can think of it like an operating system on top of the operating system. It allows you to interact with your Portal over the internet, through your browser and also takes care of your paired physical devices, lets you install apps and just manages all aspects of your Portal.
And that is basically it. Your Portal is conceptually simple and elegant.Where is Portal hosted?
The actual hardware on which Portal runs is hosted on Microsoft Azure. This gives us advantages that we need right now in the early phase like easy provisioning, on-demand scaling, great safety and security.
In the future, we plan to diversify hosting providers and let the customer choose where their Portal should live. At some point, we even plan to let people bring their own hardware and host their Portal there.Do I need technical skills to use a Portal?
Not at all! In fact, simplicity is one of our primary goals. We strive towards making the Portal user experience as obvious as humanly possible.
You could even say that you need fewer technical skills for Portal than for other ways of organizing your digital life because Portal does not require passwords, does not need to sync anything between devices, does not need you to think about backups (soon), and in general just stays out of your way as much as possible.What can I do with Portal?
Since Portal is a personal cloud computer, you can (soon) use it for anything you can use your other computers for. It is universal in that way. Like with other platforms, the key is the app store where developers can place apps for all kinds of purposes.
Portal itself takes care of the basics like storing the data or providing the computing environment for the apps to run in. But also things like staying on and online basically 24/7 or managing access control.
So in short, you can do everything for which there is a Portal app.Why is Portal not free?
Many services these days are free. However, what seems like a convenience is a danger is disguise. Someone once said: “if you are not paying, you are not the customer - you are the product”. And thankfully, more and more people realize the problems with this kind of business model.
A business needs some kind of revenue and if it does not come from the users, it must come from somewhere else, usually by selling the users’ attention and the ability to shape it. With increasing sophistication, this is also becoming increasingly dangerous.
We do not want that. In fact, one of the founding principles and reason for Portal to exist is the wish to prevent that. But a business needs some kind of revenue, so we chose a subscription model. This is also in line with our aim of simplicity, since it is the most simple kind of value exchange. And it allows us to keep Portal advertising-free and manipulation-free forever.How secure is my data on Portal?
Short answer: more secure than on other cloud apps, perhaps a little less secure than on your own hardware, but here it is getting complicated.
For the long answer we must ask: secure against what or who?How secure is my data on Portal against outside attackers?
Hackers that are trying to get at the data saved on your Portal will have a hard time. As mentioned, each Portal is a cloud computer hosted on Microsoft Azure and they work really hard and invest a lot of money to keep their systems secure. See here for more details.
That leaves the Portal software stack as a possible attack surface. And while we do not have Microsoft’s money to throw at security, we have some methods of securing Portal.
Firstly, we minimize the attack surface: you interact with your Portal Core through a single API which makes it easy to secure it. And access to your apps is separated through individual networks on the Portal itself. Secondly, for the heavy lifting we use no home-made security, only proven and off-the-shelf components (Docker, Traefik, Let’s Encrypt).
So again, we rely on projects that have much more resources than us to ensure security.How secure is Portal against unwanted access by Microsoft?
Since all Portals run on Hardware that is located inside Microsoft’s facilities, it is technically not possible to shut them out completely. However, this is nothing more than a technicality since legal obligations prevent them from doing so except in the most extreme cases.
Keep in mind that many companies run their mission-critical systems on Azure, so they really have a reputation to lose. Here is their own statement.How secure is Portal against unwanted access by yourself?
Right now, we could - in principle - access every Portal and look inside or even take control of it. Technically, it is not possible for us to shut us out completely. (In the future, when we enable the bring-your-own-hardware feature, it will be.)
However, we are bound by similar legal obligations like Microsoft to leave your data alone except on your specific request (e.g. to provide support) or in other extreme cases like requests by law enforcement. Keep in mind that individual sovereignty is the backbone of Portal’s mission and that we have a working business model through subscription. So we have neither the need nor the want to access your Portal.What is the difference to a remote desktop?
A technical difference is that a remote desktop works by transmitting the entire screen of the remote computer, which requires more bandwidth and can be ill-adapted to different screen sizes. In contrast, Portal utilizes web technology, allowing for a smaller bandwidth and a more responsive experience.
But the differences go beyond just their technical aspects. Portal is not just a PC with added remote access, but rather a platform that is uniquely designed to take advantage of its capabilities. Built-in features like peering (soon), seamless backups (soon) and device pairing are specifically tailored to the experience of using Portal and allow for a more seamless and efficient user experience.Why has nobody done that before?
Short answer: At the dawn of the internet, technology was not ready. Now, technology is ready but people and systems are misadapted and stuck.
For the long answer, we can think of several reasons that fall broadly in three categories.
Technical impediments: Portal runs on cloud infrastructure which just did not exist during the dawn of the internet and only matured during the last decade or so. In addition, it relies on a near constant internet connection of physical devices. This is just now slowly becoming a reality.
Business Models: Many of the big players in the technology industry rely heavily on ad revenue to sustain their business models. They basically sell their users’ attention. However, Portal’s design specifically maximizes owners’ sovereignty which works against this ad model.
Technological Inertia: As technologies emerge, people become more comfortable with them, and it's easy to get stuck in a particular way of thinking. This can make it challenging to imagine something that departs significantly from known systems. Also, existing systems benefit from decades of people understanding them, integrating them into their lives, and building tooling. Any new approach will have to go through these growing pains again.Why do I have to create accounts for some of my apps?
These apps are not yet fully adapted to Portal. They are meant to run on self-hosted hardware that is shared between multiple users. For this reason, they assume the need for user management. When properly adapted, this will change: you will automatically use the single default account without having to login.
Feel free to contact the developers and ask them to implement proxy authentication as described hereWhy is your software not open source?
Portal is in an early phase where we develop different ideas and make experiments. The management overhead that would come with an open source approach would likely slow us down.
We also want to prevent people forking Portal and building similar but incompatible offerings. This would lead to something like federation and how that endangers the ability to move a project forward is best described by the founder of Signal, Moxie Marlinspike here
That said, we do plan to open up the Portal source code in the future. We cannot talk about customer sovereignty and not do that. However, the when and how are still open questions right now.
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