I wonder if it would be possible to integrate this into existing online banking. Being able to use this through an existing bank account could be a good selling point to privacy-aware customers, at least in Germany.
Very interesting. I'm now wondering if Travis CI is collecting any code usage statistics? I'd imagine that they would have a more application-centric view on the rubygems ecosystem. Also, since they are actually executing code, they could potentially collect data on constants and method calls, I believe.
This looks rather clueless, I think. As others have mentioned, the problem isn't so much in the interconnects, but more with the services being used. But there isn't going to come a new Facebook or Google out of Berlin - or anywhere else for that matter.
What would be helpful would be decentralized services that match the user experience of the existing ones. But that kind of innovation isn't what's going to be discussed here, I'm afraid. On the contrary, such eavesdropping-safe technology would be viewed very conspicuously by the non-tech savy politicians in Europe and other places.
"In addition to supporting portable, consumer, industrial, communications and medical applications with commercial and industrial temperature devices, Actel also offers ProASIC3 FPGAs with specialized screening for automotive and military systems."
https://github.com/blambeau/alf is something close, although it does a lot more: "Alf is a commandline tool and Ruby library to manipulate data with all the power of a truly relational algebra approach."