In a lab at the University of California at Berkeley, computer scientist John Kubiatowicz is designing a networking scheme that, in ten years, just might take over your life.

The idea, dubbed OceanStore, is an architecture for the next next-generation Internet. It is aimed at solving one of the Net's looming big problems:how to reliably and securely retrieve data from anywhere in the world, on any computing device. In 2004, 45 million smart handheld devices will ship, nearly quadrupling from last year, research firm IDC predicts. "There has to be a place for your persistent data to reside, independent of location. The notion is lots of replications of the data," says Jean Scholtz, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the federal arm that incubated the Internet. Darpa, fittingly, contributed to the $500,000 in seed funding for the OceanStore project, which now amounts to just a few computers, a few grad students and a couple of published academic papers. Other backers include IBM, EMC Corp. and the National Science Foundation. A small, working prototype is due by summer, although Kubiatowicz cautions the system is easily ten years away from widespread use. OceanStore inverts today's Internet. Today a set of data typically is stored on only one particular server, which is vigilantly safeguarded by a security firewall. OceanStore spreads copies of the data on random servers worldwide and focuses on safeguarding the file itself, using strong encryption. It's a bit like Napster, except on a much larger scale. Owners need not know or care where their files are, so long as they can access them on their own screens. With continuously updated versions existing ubiquitously, a fire, earthquake or hacker attack would be far less destructive.OceanStore would require vast amounts of disk space, but in ten years abundant storage is expected to be all but free. The cost per megabyte has fallen 52% per year for five years, with no slowing in sight. Kubiatowicz envisions groups of Internet service providers owning vast server farms and cooperating to sell access to a shared OceanStore network.