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Freedom Box Foundation Wants Plug Servers For All
An anonymous reader writes "From the NYTimes.com article: 'A Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, [is] putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers. ... Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.'"
Take the power back to the people.
"Once everyone is getting them, they will cost $29." -- Eben Moglen
And then everyone will get to watch their Internet bills double or triple as the ISP discovers that they're "running a server" in violation of the ISP's acceptable use policy and "helpfully" upgrades their service to business class.
Why rebuild the Internet? Just call this Internet 3. The Internet was built with redundancy in mind. This sounds like it would be the ultimate redundant solution. My question would be how to prevent an attacker from taking out a multitude of nodes from a single point. Or, how hard will it be to return your node to the network after it has been brought down by an attack?
I just want a small wifi router with a built in raid array. :(
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
A one-man effort is not going to work; and if it is, it will certainly take way more than one year to build a free open network.
You need lots of intelligente people working hard, and once they have the design, they need an important amount of money; not just 500k.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Wires. That requires an external provider, either a private monopoly or the government. And of course that lets them tap the wire.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
What the hell do these wall plugs attempt to achieve?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
How will this stop whatever local govt exists from compelling the ILEC to give optical tap access?
It won't.
If the world isn't beating a path to your door you're doing something wrong.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
There will need to be some other way for them to network than through ISPs. They are the bottleneck. Perhaps, some sort of mesh network?
Otherwise, Your ISP takes exception to a server running on your domestic network - despite the fact that a large amount of people on /. do just that. Even if they allow that, they can limit what goes across their wires - in times of emergency perhaps no encrypted traffic or HTTPS.
You are going to either have to live in high density housing or figure out how to fit microwave relays all over the suburbs.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I have about 5 of the guru and sheeva plugs, they all eventually brick from bad power supplies or shutdown and when they overheat.
Having seen some of Eben's lectures, I recall his angle is that the problem is that companies/government agencies control the servers, and thus control your data and data on you. He want's people to run their own email/document/media/social networking services on platforms that network with each other rather than monolithic, centrally controlled servers (be they in private or public hands). The idea is not some much a different 'network', that's still in the hands of ISPs, but a different, decentralized approach to services that handle personal data etc.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
If you're part of a revolution, being able to communicate digitally with your local peers is just as important as being able to communicate with someone at the other end of the world. Cheap plugs that build/connect a wireless mesh network could achieve that goal. I feel like most people in this thread aren't thinking big enough. The revolution isn't happening in the outback, think "central and crowded". The main problem might be getting one plug to cover enough area that it network can form at all, but should be a solvable problem. They'd also have to be configurable enough to be resilient to any cheap/directed attack (so not using a hard-coded frequency, whatever)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
You want to decentralize the Internet?
Break up the big telcos and ISPs.
It's as simple as 1...2...Net Neutrality!
You are welcome on my lawn.
What we need are many ISP's that's called Capitalism. What we have are 1 or 2 ISP's that Feudalism.
You're wrong on so many points. First, depending on the market, there might be dozens of ISPs in any given area. Second, it all depends on the market, which is free-market capitalism.
So quit your bitching or go start your own competing ISP. It's not that hard to do.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
For dial-up, sure.
For anything approaching useful speeds? Give me a break. The government regulates access to the poles, and in return for exclusive access to said poles the power company, telephone company, and cable company are bound by regulation to take government money and charge as much as they like, as long as enough of that money ends up in the pockets of the regulators.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Text is nothing. [...] 25 friends
Tell that to someone who just got tens of thousands of hits after having been linked from the front page of a site like Slashdot.org.
I'm afraid I have to call bullshit on that. Sure there are several ISPs here, but they all use the same ISP to sell them the bandwidth, meaning that you end up paying more for the same service. You're likely to get better customer service, but at the end of the day you should, you're paying a lot more for service. Around here we've got Hughesnet, Comcast, Qwest and Clear. That's it. At this point any other ISP is going to have to contract with Qwest to provide service.
And around here the link you put forward isn't available, which is the problem, there are good ISPs out there, just not in this region because Qwest has the regional monopoly over DSL service.
In practice, which is why I called bullshit, you don't ever have more than 4 choices that are legitimately separate. And from my list you can pretty much strike Hughes and clear for not being sufficient.
This thread is great. It's about distributing access, and all posts are by AC. Does it get more paranoid?
Of course I had to post this as AC. You understand.
The long name is "Invisible Internet Project" and the I2P acronym was chosen to signal that its P2P-friendly. Technically the software is called a "router" because it routes as it anonymizes, much like Tor.
Fundamentally I2P is a network transport layer (like IP, whereas Tor is more like TCP) that comes with a few applications to handle email, web and torrents. You can get plugins for it now that provide things like a distributed filesystem (a port of Tahoe-LAFS) on top of which distributed websites (called deepsites) are being built.
I know that I2P has weathered some attacks. I think it can do this mainly because the network is less centralized than Tor (there are no directory or other 'authorities' programmed into I2P).
geti2p.net
That's not the point. From the article: "By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material." Basically, they can't just confiscate your server, and then also have the info of thousands of other people. They'd have to get warrants (or at least go door to door) to fetch each of those boxes. And if you live in a different country, getting your info would be even more difficult.
I was in the audience when he explained the concept. The comments and the article I've seen so far does it no justice. Just watch the video.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say