Eben Moglen Calls To Free the Cloud

paxcoder writes "You have been informed about Diaspora, a (to-be) distributed free social network. What you may not have known is that it was inspired by an excellent talk by Eben Moglen called 'Freedom in the Cloud.' But it doesn't stop there. At Debconf 10 this month, Moglen went further, and shared his vision of a free, private, and secure Net architecture relying on ('for lack of a better term') freedom boxes — low-price, ultra-small, plug it into the wall personal servers. He believes they will catch on since they will eventually cost less than a router, provide more functionality and freedom to the user, and even help your friends bypass any censorship by encrypting and routing their traffic. Since hardware is being taken care of, we are called to assemble the software stack. The title of this sequel talk is How We Can Be the Silver Lining of the Cloud."

Comments

Re:Transcript

[paxcoder]

I guess that Tor or Freenet are two of the things that would be run on these. Then there's your mail which you don't let Google read, there is social networking secure with PGP (and so is your mail) - so under your control. The main thing is it all runs 24/7, comes pretty much preconfigured, and as said, is more convenient than a dumb router. Then there is telephony which I ommitted - who gives you encryption for your calls? Well now you can. There is also absolutely no reason why one should pay so much for a simple thing as sending an SMS. Your own web server if you want, torrent, versioning system I don't know... You've got CPU time to spare so BOINC perhaps.
In short, you have a simple to use server of your own and don't need to use loads of third party web services anymore. It's you and perhaps your friends - the *real* trusted computing. Think of your own application for this. Federated things are a way to go, lest we want to loose our freedom.

An excuse

[ksandom]

I'm split on this. Mostly I think it's excellent because it sounds feasible to get a lot of people behind it, which would then make it quite effective. It'll bring back a level of "privacy" that we took for granted not many years ago. It will also open up the connotations that come with that, although I'm sure that has/will be discussed to tiring length.

But where my concern really is, is the trend that those in power see something like this as if it's only purpose is crime. They will be scared of this, because it will undermine their ability to do their job. When there's something they are scared of, they clamp down on it and make an example of someone. If you're that person it doesn't matter if you've done anything wrong, because they will find something, and bend it to the context that allows them to say you've broken a law. eg It could be an image sitting in your browser cache that they can object to based on someones' religion, that came in an ad on a page.

Early adopters will face significantly higher risk than those adopting once the project is well established. In this countext I see three distinct routes:

1. Manage the athorities' and public view: Ideally sell the idea to them that this is a good thing for them. I can't think what angle that would be, but it would be worth it. Convince them that this isn't the evil devil they will otherwise assume it to be.
2. Ignore the authorities: Take a chance and go for it. Don't rub it in their faces. Just get on with it and try not to make a scene.
3. Rub it in their faces: Highlight that this is going to let people bypass their precious proxies that combat terrorism.

At one end of the scale, you may even get buy in, but hopefully won't attract too much negative attention. Potentially, you may have a more "legit" user base who have positive community concerns. At the other end of the scale, things could get rather ugly. The authorities will. not. like. you. They will do everything in their power to shut you down, and there will be significant risk to innocent people who had good intentions at heart. This is also very likely to attract the people who the authorities will have a legitimate concern over. You're going to get those in any scenario, but the proportions will make a big difference.

Take care. I really do believe this has a legitimate positive place in modern society.