[Freedombox-discuss] The Freedom Box at the Chaos Communication Congress, Berlin

[Thomas Ruddy]

Dear all,

The Fbx was featured at the CCC Congress in Berlin on 2011 Dec. 28 in a lightning talk. The five-minute presentation was based on slides provided with permission by James Vasile, to whom credit was given. It was received well by the 200 persons present. It comes here (the second one after Mitch Altman's),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uUb81CmsOk&feature=related

It was followed by a workshop held in a small room, which filled up with 30 persons. Several cryptographers were present at the workshop, and they were allowed to pursue a discussion of such specialized issues as using the wireless function of Freedom Boxes to generate keys. One participant had extensive experience with plug computers, and addressed the heat issue. 

Another participant, apparently accompanied by his wife, recalled the travails of a police search of their house. The rest of James Vasile's slides were presented and the Dreamplug was demonstrated.  Pagekite was used to get access to the Dreamplug located behind routers and firewalls. 

The developer of one of the three leading Fbx prototypes, Nick.M.Daly at gmail.com , was available on Jabber chat to field more any difficult questions that came up. We discussed whether disk encryption would be possible given the requirement that Freedom Boxes have to be self-booting devices in amateurs' hands, and the applicability of Tahoe LAFS to the problem of encrypted storage.

A useful overview of all lightning talks can be found here, http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/wiki/Lightning_Talks

Thomas