[Freedombox-discuss] [gnu-prog-discuss] MediaGoblin, now an official GNU project :)

Tue Aug 9 18:03:23 UTC 2011

Hiya,

Sorry it's taken me a while to respond.

I've looked at GNUNet before, and it looks interesting!  I'm not sure
it's compatible with MediaGoblin, except for possibly as a storage
backend though, or unless there's some sort of tunneling system built
into GNUNet.

As you noted, we're using OStatus.  In regard to "firewall busting" and
the like, I don't really know.  If we were living in an IPv6-everywhere
world, I think this wouldn't be an issue.  Regardless, OStatus is a set
of web-oriented protocols that are, well, designed to run on the world
wide web.  GNUNet looks like it's its own kind of protocol, so not sure
how compatible that really is.  But again, I don't really know. :)

I'm not really part of the design process of OStatus either.  In fact,
OStatus itself is kindof a meta-standard... a standard that just wraps a
bunch of other good standards. The reason for OStatus altogether here is
interoperability between services.  Honestly, if I went with the
technology I *really liked* on the backend, federation would be done via
XMPP/Jabber.  But I think more than anything else it's important to do
federation via a clean protocol that has a lot of backing and
momentum... and OStatus, being what StatusNet/GNU Social and a bunch of
other things use (and being composed of a bunch of standards that are
also gaining a lot of strong adoption), seems like the best fit.

But!  Looking at the GNUNet VPN site, it does look like this is a sort
of tunneling.  In that case, if the web can run through GNUNet and act
just like it appears to be the web in general, sure, I don't see why it
couldn't be compatible. :)  I wonder how similar this is to miredo,
something I also know very little about but would like to know more?  I
guess I've marked it down as something to research more later.

Thanks for your enthusiastic response to the project!
 - cwebb

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <luke.leighton at gmail.com> writes:

> On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 10:08 PM, Christopher Allan Webber
> <cwebber at dustycloud.org> wrote:
>> Hiya all,
>>
>> I'm happy to say that MediaGoblin is now *officially* *GNU*
>> MediaGoblin.  I'm very excited about this!
>>
>> Some information about MediaGoblin if you aren't already familiar:
>>  - We're attempting to build a distributed, modern media publishing tool
>>   for the web (images for now, but the infrastructure is being designed
>>   to also support video and other media types)
>>  - We're python based
>>  - About that distributed thing: we're currently only distributed in the
>>   sense that anyone can run an instance, but the immediate plan is that
>>   within the next couple of months we'll begin working on federation
>>   via OStatus
>
>  http://ostatus.org/
>
>  fascinating.
>
>  christopher, you're aware that the freedomboxproject (which isn't
> about providing people with actual "boxes" at all, it's about bringing
> together the software that can _be_ installed on a "box") has been
> looking for this kind of stuff, in order to allow people to transition
> off of the present non-free services such as flikr, facebook etc.?
>
>  also, out of interest, have you seen this?
> http://blog.bittorrent.com/2011/06/30/uchat-we-just-need-each-other/
>
>  btw i can't tell if ostatus has built-in firewall-busting (like the
> gnunet infrastructure does).  one of the key reasons why all of these
> "federation" projects (e.g. sipwitch) are technically unsuccessful is
> because they don't have proper firewall-busting built-in.
>
> the reason why they don't have built-in firewall-busting is because
> it's f*****g hard to get right, and takes years to perfect and cover
> all the edge-cases.  such as what happens if you have 3 levels of NAT
> (including one within an ISP), how do you even _find_ that that's
> occurring, let alone cope with it (and no, STUN, TUNSS and UPnP aren't
> good enough... on their own)
>
>  many ISPs have designed their infrastructure based around the "you're
> dumb, you'll only wanna download and that'll be HTTP boyo: Like It And
> Lump It" utterly shit paradigm, such that if there are two people on
> the same ISP's local NAT'd segment, it's practically impossible to
> open a direct connection between the two, even though it would be
> faster and would save the ISP a lot of bandwidth and money.
>
>  gnunet is the only free software infrastructure that we have that has
> been designed - somewhat accidentally - to deal with this.  it
> contains NAT traversal as well as UPnP, _and_, critically, contains
> "forwarding" for when a direct connection (which is undesirable in any
> case) all goes wrong.
>
>  gnunet was designed to provide a level of anonymity by "hopping"
> packets between systems (in the exact same way that TOR does).  it
> turns out that this hopping is crucial to any service that wants
> reliable, easy-to-use, zero-configuration-needed non-server-centric
> peer-to-peer connectivity.
>
>  personally i believe that the easiest way to achieve that is to get
> gnunet-vpn up-and-running (preferably the ipv6 version), at which
> point it will be possible to just have a totally transparent network
> that will "Just Work".  at a later point, integration with gnunet's
> modular architecture would provide some level of optimisation, and
> provide anonymity that it is too easy to accidentally ignore (if just
> using gnunet-vpn).
>
>  on top of gnunet-vpn, chris, the service that you've written would be
> absolutely fantastic.  i'd be interested to hear peoples' assessment
> of what the benefits of the combination of ostatus, mediagoblin and
> gnunet-vpn would bring.
>
>  l.
>
>  p.s. ostatus specification here:
> http://ostatus.org/sites/default/files/ostatus-1.0-draft-2-specification.html
>

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