[Freedombox-discuss] Introductions

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi,

My name is Michiel de Jong. I'm new to participating in open source
projects, but I'm a dev professionally and, like you, was motivated by Eben
Moglen's vision and would like to contribute.

I found you while trying to set up an open-source project that explores the
combination of PGP and Bittorrent, to do things like email, social
networking, etcetera over encrypted bittorrents. It was thinking of it as a
desktop application, but after reading this list, i think it would be very
compatible with the freedom box effort.

I wanted to note a few things, for what they're worth - feel free to shoot
them down if I missed the point, or if this is outside the scope of
FreedomBox:

1 - i think there is a need for search. we agree facebook has too much
power. but what about youtube? if i post a video on youtube, then it's
public, searchable, and not in any way private. but I wouldn't be surprised
if they do their fair bit of "spying for free" as well. my point is that to
really beat all the existing "platforms" (youtube, twitter, ...), you need
search (although maybe only at a later stage).

2 - multiple users may want to use the same plug server. It could speed up
adoption in for instance a house share if you can create accounts for your 5
or 6 house mates on one single plug server.

3 - maybe (I'm not entirely sure about this one myself) one user may want to
"trust" several plug servers to store his encrypted files. I already trust
my friends to hold encrypted backups of my data. So I might as well store a
second copy of all my stuff on the freedom box at my parents' house. Also,
maybe I also want to run a "freedom box" on my laptop, for lower latency
when I´m in an internet cafe. I feel there must be a flaw in this reasoning,
because it completely decouples the applications/usefulness from the actual
product/hardware, and I don't know whether that's good or bad. At least
maybe it's something that needs defining. Make of it what you will.


Cheers!
Michiel.
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