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All Packages Needed For FreedomBox Now In Debian

Posted by Unknown on from the i-think-you-mean-gnu-slash-freedom dept.

Eben Moglen's FreedomBox concept (personal servers for everyone to enable private communication) is getting closer to being an easy-to-install reality: all packages needed for FreedomBox are now in Debian's unstable branch, and should be migrating to testing in a week or two. Quoting Petter Reinholdtsen: "Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable. It was the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images during build and on the first boot. Now all one need to get going is the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from Debian. And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can build everything directly from Debian. :) Some key packages used by Freedombox are freedombox-setup, plinth, pagekite, tor, privoxy, owncloud, and dnsmasq. There are plans to integrate more packages into the setup. User documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki." You can create your own image with only three commands, at least if you have a DreamPlug or Raspberry Pi (you could also help port it to other platforms).

11 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Open? by kthreadd · · Score: 2

    I don't know about the owned by Oracle; it's free software as far as I know.

  2. In plain English, what's a FreedomBox? by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A 3 sentence description that doesn't use meaningless mumbo-jumbo vision statement as found on the linked wiki?

    (a summary of its goals and how it compares to prior art?)

    1. Re:In plain English, what's a FreedomBox? by Cow+Jones · · Score: 2

      Easy my ass. GP is absolutely correct, they completely fail to give a summary of what a FreedomBox is and why we should care. I've read those pages you linked and there is no summary. The closest thing I could find are links to video presentations with titles like "FreedomBox Update", "FreedomBox 1.0" and "Freedom, out of the box!".

      --

      Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
    2. Re:In plain English, what's a FreedomBox? by Gaygirlie · · Score: 2

      Look, its easy. On the https://wiki.debian.org/Freedo... page, theres a link to Learn about Freedombox, which Im sure gives useful information on the project.

      A huge bunch of various talks and presentations that are only meaningful to someone who is already familiar with the project? No, that's far from clear and easily-accessible for someone who is not familiar with the stuff, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox seems like the most reasonable available explanation for it. And yet, it's totally not enough.

      I still don't really get what they do or what they want, and I really have to say that this kind of approach really doesn't endear random people to the project -- people, that might otherwise start contributing to it. It wouldn't take them much more than a day or two to explain it all on their website and make the project and its developers more approachable, but alas, I get the feeling they want to maintain their own, precious little clique instead.

    3. Re:In plain English, what's a FreedomBox? by kamapuaa · · Score: 2

      Freedombox has a wikipedia page, and seems to want to place Facebooking/email/all your communications on an independent private server that only let you communicate with other people who have freedomboxes.

      Maybe if they can put this on a machine that costs $5 and requires 5 minutes (or less) of setup it will actually go somewhere. As it is, it's like being the only person you know to own a videophone.

      --
      Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
    4. Re:In plain English, what's a FreedomBox? by IronChef · · Score: 2

      I spent a few minutes looking at the linked site, and searching, and could not find the answer to that question. There were some promising-looking links to freedomboxfoundation.org but the site was not responding.

      Either I need to turn in my geek card, or more likely, someone needs to turn in their web content editor card.

    5. Re:In plain English, what's a FreedomBox? by smoothnorman · · Score: 2

      this is what it does: It provides the necessary software to support a private, possibly semi-secure, social network. Think: Facebook, but small and secret, presumably to protect your membership from an oppressive large authority.

      (this post is a traditional trick to get someone who actually can answer this sensible question to become so enraged by this incorrect reply that their activation energy is achieved and we get a good answer. so take what i've written up there as false bait. (this works particularly well when one wants a clear definition to obscure technical terms. just get yourself on a Haskell board, and write: "monads? simple! they're factory objects that provide closures for a formal lambda expression" then watch the horror and outrage and eventually you get the correct answer from the former lurker class))

  3. In Plain English: Security Crap by Elixon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Anything that claims to boost your privacy and security should not have something like pagekite included. I have just visited their home page and this is what greeted me as 2 step "linux flight plan":

      $ curl -s https://pagekite.net/pk/ |sudo bash
      $ pagekite.py 80 yourname.pagekite.me

    Am I stupid or what? Open my root account to some website page? Flight Plan to hell. Looking forward to somebody who will hack that site to create one file there saying "rm -rf /" LOL

    --
    Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
    1. Re:In Plain English: Security Crap by Cow+Jones · · Score: 5, Interesting

      $ curl -s https://pagekite.net/pk/ |sudo bash

      I've noticed this kind of crap more and more often lately, usually as one of the "preferred" methods of installation for projects on GitHub. Who in their right mind would run that? There's a reason why we have package systems and a method of signing said packages. Blindly trusting some website with root shell access... boggles my mind.

      --

      Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
    2. Re:In Plain English: Security Crap by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 2

      Whatever happened to trust? I mean, if you can't believe an anonymous benefactor on the internet, who can you trust?

      --
      "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
  4. Ok... What does it DO? by ilsaloving · · Score: 2

    I skimmed through all these pages and there isn't a single sentence describing what it does in order to accomplish it's goals.

    Ok, great, it wants to have distributed social networking, email, yadda yadda.

    Is it using Diaspora for the social networking aspects? Maybe it's using leftover magic beans?

    I'm not even going to waste my time downloading this thing if they can't even say how they're planning on achieving those goals.