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I was sad the FreedomBox never took off.

Check out FreedomBox, an open source hardware & software solution under development

https://www.freedomboxfoundati...

A mass mesh network is one of the few methods society can ensure the tyranny of centralization does not continue.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...

A solution to congestion is forming nodes with polygonal faces, each face mounted with it's own independent antenna, thus enabling more broad point to point communications as opposed to radial transmittance.

My link was bad or stripped.

Supporting FREEDOMBOX is a great start!

Learn About the FreedomBox!

Eben Moglen explained the FreedomBox in a short interview with the CBS Evening News. We also have a one page flyer that explains the box quickly and easily to lay people. Print and distribute it at your next conference!
What is FreedomBox?

Email and telecommunications that protects privacy and resists eavesdropping

A publishing platform that resists oppression and censorship.

An organizing tool for democratic activists in hostile regimes.

An emergency communication network in times of crisis.

FreedomBox will put in people's own hands and under their own control encrypted voice and text communication, anonymous publishing, social networking, media sharing, and (micro)blogging.

Much of the software already exists: onion routing, encryption, virtual private networks, etc. There are tiny, low-watt computers known as "plug servers" to run this software. The hard parts is integrating that technology, distributing it, and making it easy to use without expertise. The harder part is to decentralize it so users have no need to rely on and trust centralized infrastructure.

That's what FreedomBox is: we integrate privacy protection on a cheap plug server so everybody can have privacy. Data stays in your home and can't be mined by governments, billionaires, thugs or even gossipy neighbors.

With FreedomBoxes in their homes, anybody, regardless of technical skill, can easily enjoy secure, private, even anonymous communication!
Why FreedomBox?

FreedomBox integrates privacy protection on a cheap plug server so everybody can have privacy. Data stays in your home and can't be mined by governments, billionaires, thugs or even gossipy neighbors. Other practical examples where FreedomBox is useful:

FreedomBoxes are encrypted web proxies. Boxes in uncensored countries can bounce signals for users stuck behind censorship walls---each one is a tiny crack in the Great Firewall. Chinese users could surf the entire net free from government censorship.

The US government famously sought information about internal WikiLeaks communications from Twitter and other social websites. By moving our communication from centralized monoliths to decentralized servers in our homes, we protect our data from government prying.

Many whistleblowers and dissidents need to anonymously talk to media and the public. With the FreedomBox, we can use VOIP to encrypt telephone calls and can create anonymous web servers over TOR to publish documents. Anonymous instant messaging or microblogging are also possible.

Egyptian Democracy activists had trouble talking to demonstrators in the streets because the Mubarak regime shutdown parts of the internet as well as many cellular networks. If our internet plug is pulled, the box will use mesh routing to talk to other boxes like it. If any of them can get a packet across the border, they all can.

FreedomBoxes are useful on a daily personal level too. That same proxy technology can scrub web sites of ads and tracking technology as you use them, thus protecting your privacy. FreedomBoxes help you encrypt your email. They also know who your friends are and can back up your data in encrypted form to their FreedomBoxes. You can get your data back even if you don't know your password. Even absent a crisis, privacy matters.

FreedomBox is free software, which means you can freely inspect it, audit it, study it and improve it.

For a list of specific FreedomBox capabilities, check out our Goals page.
Who is FreedomBox?

FreedomBox is a collaborative project of programmers around the world who believe in Free Software, Fre

people who have no interest in running a server

Are they just unaware of what advantages running a home server can offer? Or have the benefits of a server been explained to them after which they still decline?

p2p wireless mesh based on %100 open source software and hardware

Check this out

http://www.freedomboxfoundatio...

I don't trust my data with any cloud storage company, because none of them can be trusted.

Most of my data gets backed up to encrypted disks that can be stored off-site.

Data that I need to access remotely, like my phone's calendar and contacts, live on my home server. It runs only the software that it needs, sits behind a firewall, and is updated with security patches regularly. It has a much smaller attack surface than any cloud storage company's data center, and is a much less interesting/valuable target for attackers.

Of course, running a personal server has long been the domain of people who have lots of computer admin knowledge, but that is starting to change. Projects like ownCloud, arkOS, and FreedomBox are working toward making it easy. Low-power server hardware is getting dirt cheap. It might not be long before anyone capable of using a smartphone or game console can set up their own file / calendar / contacts / mail / whatever server for under $100 (including storage).

My main point is not to argue for more copyright; it is to say that, like Rodney Dangerfield, API designers "no respect". :-)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R...

Granted, so many APIs suck for all the reasons the Google engineer said they were hard to make that it's understandable why people don't respect them. It's like how general tankers in World of Tank have so little respect for Artillery (another hard job). :-)
http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/i...
"Arty seems like the best choice to blame at for some idiot players who have no idea where to go in battle and cock up the whole battle. Arty is not air strike, it takes time to aim and reload, most importantly, i cant shoot at target that i cant even see on my map. For those noobs who always blame at other player in order to feel good abt their own IQ, stop pissing ppl off and learn how to play."

I get the feeling you perhaps have not designed any complex software more than one, especially software libraries intended to be supported for years? Otherwise you might not so easily dismiss the creative challenge of creating good APIs. Sure, implementations may require hard work up front, but a sucky API generally creates massive amounts of hard work for everyone else for years to come. A bad API in that sense is much, much worse than a bad implementation, which as Linux shows, can be fairly easily replaced eventually. While it may look trivial, creating a good API demands immense amounts of understanding of the problem space, the limits of computers, the user community, and so on, including imagining future needs. And choosing the right simplification can be the hardest, most creative act of all -- which is just as true for programmers as it is for painters, novelists, architects, screenwriters, illustrators, actors, and so on.

Actually, it is more and more rare that someone can get anyone to pay something for what want to get paid for in the USA. See for example, from the 1990s by the then Vice Provost of Caltech
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ..."

Sure, you can always point to funding successes, but as a successful percentage of aspirants, the odds get longer and longer with more qualified people and less global-scale opportunities as big winners dominate the landscape.

BTW, people did get funding for creating triple stores and similar thing, just not me (not that I ever tried to raise funding for the Pointrel System, in part because I wanted it to be free and open source).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Besides, in a world of so much potential plenty, why make people justify what they want to do based on the possibility that "investors" who are already financially obese can monopolize it for a profit? Also, in a supposed democracy, why should a system like "Freedombox" get the left-overs while phones and tablets full of essentially spyware get vast amounts of money poured into them?
http://freedomboxfoundation.or...

But regardless of funding issues, this whole case shows how valuable the Java API had become, given Google took such pains to use it exactly... Part of the value of that API was the immense amounts of marketing put into Java by IBM and Sun for a decade (given Java sucked at the start, and is not that great even now although it has become OK-ish after vast investments). For good or bad, Oracle bought that Java asset, including communit

Eggcyte reminds me of the work of the FreedomBox Foundation. Both talk about being in control of your data and both are aimed at very small servers. FreedomBox appears to be more privacy oriented than Eggcyte, but both are responding to the same need of being in control of your internet life.

I know it's a pipe dream. But a fella can dream, can't he?

A fella can do more than dream. A fella can contribute to the FreedomBox project. Money, code, trying it out on your mother-in-law, every little bit helps.

(Fine print: FreedomBox Foundation takes no responsibility for disturbances in your domestic tranquility due to software experimentation on your mother-in-law.)

That's an interesting idea. However, AFAICT that's all it is. In truth, there are many other things we can do:

1. Contact your municipal government about making the "last mile" a public utility serviced by multiple providers.
2. Contact the FCC and let them know that they need to address the issue of content providers owning ISPs and the "last mile."
3. Contact your municipal, state and federal representatives and let them know "You're mad as hell and you're not going to take it anymore!" [With apologies to Paddy Chayefsky]
4. Contact your ISP and demand they change their liberty restricting, abusive contracts to allow server traffic from your site.
5. For those who are technically inclined, get involved in technical efforts to design NG "last mile" protocols that have synchronous bandwith, rather than the asynchronous mechanisms of DOCSIS and ADSL.
6. Convince your friends, relatives and neighbors to do 1-5 as well.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Not that the "FreedomBox" is a bad idea, it's a great idea! It can allow those who are being directly censored and oppressed to get the word out.

For the vast majority who are being covertly surveilled and their expression limited by the hegemony of content providers restricting our access to each other, having reasonable upload speeds and no restrictions on traffic will do more to promote freedom than any enryption/anonymization device.

I know it's a pipe dream. But a fella can dream, can't he?

A fella can do more than dream. A fella can contribute to the FreedomBox project. Money, code, trying it out on your mother-in-law, every little bit helps.

(Fine print: FreedomBox Foundation takes no responsibility for disturbances in your domestic tranquility due to software experimentation on your mother-in-law.)

We have that; it's called XMPP. ... open standards ...

XMPP is almost as centralized as Twitter. You still communicate through a server that can be shut down. The only difference is that, if you lose access to one server, you can switch to another server, or start your own if you have enough money. (The other difference is that XMPP is not a broadcast medium.)

A proper uncensorable platform would be peer-to-peer. That's where IPv4's lack of true end-to-end connectivity has irritated me for years. There are attempts to work around this problem using, for example, BitTorrent's distributed hash table protocol or Bitcoin's blockchain or both or Onion routing. The problem is that there is no money in a truly peer-to-peer communications system, so development has always been slower than centralized systems.

p2p wireless mesh based on %100 open source software and hardware

Check this out

http://freedomboxfoundation.or...

Support this project! This is the future of freedom and privacy!

https://freedomboxfoundation.org

This sounds like the same concept that the Freedom Box Foundation has been working on for a while. It would seem like a better use of resources for these groups to get together and pool their efforts rather than do the same thing twice.

When I was a kid, I always thought, of course Facebook won't go off, they ask for your name... who in their right mind would give...

I still don't get why people insist on not giving a fuck about their privacy, but you're right, seems too late now, my doubts in Facebook didn't stop it from gaining all the momentum it has so far, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying/believing. Even if encryption can only buy you time, doesn't mean you shouldn't encrypt.

And for suggestion #2, freedombox seems quite promising, especially the meshing part.

Check this out

http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

p2p mesh based on %100 open source software and hardware

It doesn't matter if anyone does that. The RIAA and MPAA homepages aren't hosted by third parties that accept takedown notices.

And that is how we rather trivially see our way clear of this problem. Are you people forgetting that the WordPress software is open source? You can run it on any Linux machine, with trivial ease. Are you people forgetting that we are all peers on the Internet? By the very nature of the protocol, you CAN NOT be shut down. Host your own content! When a bogus DMCA takedown shows up, laugh at it. Put it up on your site and ridicule it.

The Pirate Bay has showed us the way. Follow.

The only thing missing is automated deployment to additional servers to handle the load if a random crappy little blog suddenly starts picking up a lot of hits. So, build that feature in to WordPress. Bittorrent has already demonstrated that people are perfectly willing to give a little of their own bandwidth in exchange for something they value. Free, automated, instant, demand-driven mirroring is something valuable. If the price is having your own connection participate in a service swarm occasionally, people will be fine with that.

Take control of your own content. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Here's the route. Make this a feature of the Freedom Box.

In today's America, you don't own anything that the government doesn't want you to own.
Heck, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can come in and take your house if they feel like selling it to a developer for cheap.
But to make the Feds' job a little bit harder, I hope that everyone will use the Freedom Box once it is available.
And get a real, privacy-protecting VPN while they are still legal, rather than a fake with a catchy name.

Oops, wrong href: FreedomBox.

FreedomBox is the answer!

And for a thought-provoking treatment of the issues, for sci-fi fans (or freedom fans, really), consider reading Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother", downloadable for free.

You're barking up the wrong tree. Most companies use email as one means of communicating among employees, and most companies use email to communicate with recipients at *other* companies. That's a whole lot of traffic that Google et al don't need to snoop on, unless said company's CTO is braindead.

Does Google use their "snooping" for anything other than delivering more targeted ads? It's not like they're reading users email and stealing corporate secrets or anything.

Sure, there's plenty of reasons to run internal mail servers, but Gmail provides a great service that meets the needs of a large number of users, businesses, universities, etc. If they didn't, they wouldn't be as big as they are.

The university I used to work for moved ~30,000 student email accounts to Google Apps for Universities. It authenticates using the university's locally hosted authentication system. Saved them a huge amount of support hassles, servers, storage, electricity, bandwidth, etc. and those resources could then be used on other useful projects.

And in fact, there's little reason for even your grandma to be on gmail. An inhouse Linux router/mail server combo would be perfect for intra-family messaging. If the GNU freedom box project can get off the ground, we'll begin to have a real alternative to the corporate overlords.

My parents like Gmail because it provides tons of space, good searching facilities, excellent spam filtering, and a built-in web-based chat/voice/video client so they can easily click two buttons and be chatting with my sister or me. Yes, it's possible to setup something similar on one's own, but it's (a) a hassle and (b) likely to be not as cleanly integrated as Gmail, which is a big turn-off for non-technical users.

If you want to protect your data, you probably aren't emailing it.

You're barking up the wrong tree. Most companies use email as one means of communicating among employees, and most companies use email to communicate with recipients at *other* companies. That's a whole lot of traffic that Google et al don't need to snoop on, unless said company's CTO is braindead.

And in fact, there's little reason for even your grandma to be on gmail. An inhouse Linux router/mail server combo would be perfect for intra-family messaging. If the GNU freedom box project can get off the ground, we'll begin to have a real alternative to the corporate overlords.

The FSF is way, way ahead of you. http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/

I prefer the Freedom Box.

This is the ridiculously effective, self-informing privatized new STASI.

The investors will get money from payments by the worlds rich power-elites (the worlds poor power-elites can't afford it), requesting whatever information they find pertinent to their particular cause.

For now, it's mostly targeted marketing for corporations and the odd aiding in arrests here and there by goverments.

Soon it will be spiraling down into the corporate fascist dystopia, where the rulers of the world will use Facebook to find you and get you out of their way if their algorithms deam you are likely to be a nuisance in the future.

unless...

http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

How big is a 3g module? Does the enemy sell prepaid sim-cards by mail-order to foreign lands or could we do roaming? At least we could use this thing with 3g in our country against our citizens...

Seriously, though (and I didn't rtfa), wouldn't one want to ruggedize the board itself and not go with an off-the-shelf plug computer?

And as for great firewalls and government control of the internet and such, they could load it with FreedomBox (sooner or later) to have it use TOR and mesh networking (later) and stuff. Possibly at least as ironic as any of the examples in that song...

It's like ra-e-ain
on your wedding day

It's the wo-o-orld bully
using freedombox to oppress you

isn't ironic, don't you think?

This is exactly what Eben Moglen would like to do with his FreedomBox. Basically Diaspora (plus other stuff) in a plug computer with an easy setup.

Mr Moglen is putting his money where his mouth is. It goes further than what you describe, but is a consistent application of the underlying privacy concerns.

Certainly. But we should also spread the word about the potential of facebook &Co. being used for bad, privacywise and freedomwise.

Those of us that can bare possibly being seen as obnoxious spoilsports should convince people to migrate to a distributed system owned and controlled by the users.

We should put a freedombox in every home (when thesoftware is ripe enough).
http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

We may end up seeing something similar to what happened with search engines- successive stages of different companies until someone got the product well enough to dominate the market (a long with a healthy dose of early mover effect compared to new rivals).

I'm hoping we'll make some progress. We should get a "social media" that is made by, for and of the people (to borrow from something that may not actually deserve that description). Powered by something like diaspora* and the freedombox.

ps. Check out the new .sig if you have an opinion on women.

not everyone keeps/needs a server at home.

The misconception that people would have no use for a home server has led to prevalence of highly asymmetric Internet connections suited more to a spectator culture than to a participatory culture. Have you heard of the FreedomBox?

Exactly. Put most of your stuff on a freedom box.

The Foundation:
http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/

The Debian Project Page:
http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox

This is a more long-term solution, but think of it as the elegant solution to the problem.

> http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

https://freedomboxfoundation.org/

TFIFY!

> http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

https://freedomboxfoundation.org/

TFIFY!