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

All they need to do is everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware that no one has adopted with software which no one has written is not a replacement for social networking sites.

Re:All they need to do is everything

[Unoti]

Hardware that no one has adopted with software which no one has written is not a replacement for social networking sites.

You raise a good point, but this is a chicken and egg issue. Back in the day, near the dawn of the personal computer, user's personal machines were generally not networked. You could get a network card, but there wasn't much point for most users. This is because there were not generally useful network-aware applications, there was a lack of lots of other machines to communicate with, and a lack of generally useful information to share on the network. Each of those kinds of problems posed a barrier to solving the others.

Facebook, dating sites, and other social network sites in general have the same kind of chicken and egg problem when starting up-- there is no real value for the early adopters because nobody else is there yet.

So your statement that hardware that no one has adopted with software which no one has written is not a replacement for social networking sites is completely true, obviously. But at the same time, there has to be a way to make the statement false. Otherwise, we must say that today's existing social networking sites can never be replaced. Because whatever replaces them will, at the time of their birth, have zero people using them.

It may well not work out or not catch on, but somehow, some day, today's existing status quo will fall and be replaced by something else. And something else has to be built before it can be used.

Re:All they need to do is everything

[mrogers]

It may well not work out or not catch on, but somehow, some day, today's existing status quo will fall and be replaced by something else.

I can't help thinking this is how the Communist Manifesto would have sounded if it had been written by Marvin the Paranoid Android. ;-)

Re:All they need to do is everything

[Xamusk]

I think there's more trouble facing the early adopters. For example, even the hardware isn't all that good to start with. The "modern replacement" of SheevaPlug (mentioned in "hardware is being taken care of") isn't all that good. In fact, this new version, the GuruPlug, suffers greatly of an lack of thermal design. This causes the plug to overheat and start rebooting, until the embedded power supply fails (also because of heat dissipation problems). As a result, to use one of those, the user must also mod the hardware, which creates all sorts of trouble. The manufacturer doesn't even care about it, and keep selling it for those naive enough (like me) to think that the manufacturer should take care of those problems before even starting to sell a product.

Re:Any tech specs yet?

[mrogers]

Someone please just tell me: are they nailing down a protocol spec first so that we can all do our own interoperable implementations, or at least all contribute code, and so not have the time wasting nightmare that was the Freenet project?

They've done better than that: they've written the code, bundled it into a convenient cross-platform installer, documented everything, and ported a ton of apps to run on top of it, including BitTorrent clients, web servers, anonymous email and IRC. It's all free as in speech and free as in beer, and there's a supportive community of developers and users.

Yeah, I know, I couldn't believe it either. It's called I2P.

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.

Re:Transcript

[Lennie]

The idea is to have a small box, which does not use a lot of power. Which you can use to securely communicate with your friends in a distributed fashion, without someone else having the logs they can analyze and sell to companies, like Facebook is doing.

A small server which is simple to use, easy to update (most people shouldn't need to admin their own box) and backup. It will hold your data, and possible your friends (you keep my backup, I keep yours, encrypted ofcourse, think: duplicity ).