[Freedombox-discuss] Introductions

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Sun, Sep 05, 2010 at 02:59:15PM +0100, Matthew Johnson wrote:
>On Sat Aug 28 21:11, paxcoder wrote:
>> On 08/28/2010 06:30 PM, Sam Hartman wrote:
>>> We should not forget that as we're promoting the technology for 
>>> people to maintain their own information, we also want to promote 
>>> business models that are compatible with that information.
>>>
>> You're missing the aim of the project entirely. We will make 
>> FREEDOMbox to enable more private, secure networking for persons. 
>> Have you watched Moglen's talk[1]? It's not about making a cheap 
>> server and selling it to companies. If it were, we'd probably be 
>> non-free and provide services like UbuntuOne. We won't.
>
>Well, I was in that talk at the time (as was Sam) and actually I agree 
>with Sam here - but of course there are some provisos.

I fully agree with you above, Matthew.

FreedomBox should provide freedom of choice, independence being default.

An important encouragement factor is for our users to be able to still 
socialize Facebook, gmail and dropbox, while they participate in growing 
a decentral network interacting independent from those services.



>Actually, I think things like secondary MXs, smart hosts and other 
>services could have the option of being hooked through commercial 
>services. As long as you're not tied to a single provider and the FB 
>arranges that everything is encrypted while it's in the cloud, then 
>it's still maintaining your privacy.

Almost.  It's still maintaining *most* of your privacy:

Only encrypted parts of communication is kept private.  So if e.g. 
sending encrypted email via gmail, google can (and will) still patterns 
like track when and how often you post, who you post to and receive 
from, how big your posts are, etc.

Example of abuse: Try tell your boss that you overslept and she might 
have subscribed to a paid Google service informing at what hours her 
employees were active in the Google cloud.

trying to ruin such pattern-based surveillance by systematically sending 
noise both day and night will be an arms race: Google will then rank 
higher the quality of patterns involving other Google users that also 
send unencrypted mails and thus can be verified to not be track-me-not 
scrambling bots.

Goal is to abandon the centrally-structured internet. FreedomBox can 
work in that mode, but more importantly it can be used in a transition 
phase where central service are only discouraged.


 - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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