[Freedombox-discuss] No need for new software components?

Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson bre at pagekite.net
Fri Feb 18 17:47:19 UTC 2011


On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 5:26 PM, e.waelde <ew.ng7125 at nassur.net> wrote:

>
> In the talk of Eben Moglen at Debconf 2010, he mentiones
> that we need some aggregators, which will transparently handle
> messages from several sources / or to several destinations.
> ...
>
I'm not aware that such pieces of software exist. But I'm not using
> these networks, so I'm by no means an expert. If they exist, they
> should be added to the Wiki page ...
>

This is one of Diaspora's goals. Whether they will succeed or not is still
unknown. But you are right, this software is unfinished.

The same reasoning can be applied to other services, obviously. Email
> being a more prominent one. If I have a friend with his/her own freedom
> box, of course I do not want to send email through my ISPs mail servers
> but directly to the email relay on his/her FreedomBox.
>

This is much less of an issue. E-mail is already decentralized. If every
Freedom Box has its own DNS name, direct routing of e-mail to Freedom Boxes
becomes at least theoretically possible. There are still many difficult
issues related to reachability and spam protection, but I think at least
some of those could be solved through clever use of existing tools.

(I've thought about this a bit, and could relatively easily add support to
PageKite to allow direct routing of incoming e-mail to a firewalled
FreedomBox, but it would be incompatible with SSL at the SMTP layer, so only
clear-text SMTP would work. The other alternatives are to set up SMTP relays
"in the cloud", or somehow give every FreedomBox a publicly routeable IP
address. For outgoing mail, we almost certainly need helper relays in the
cloud due to ISP port blocking.)

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/
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