[Freedombox-discuss] Independent email services

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 11:23:46PM +0100, Marc Manthey wrote:
> Am 26.02.2011 um 23:00 schrieb Matthias-Christian Ott:
> >Another aspect is the centralised nature of the DNS. Though there
> >have been some ideas , I'm not aware of a working solution
> >and I doubt that there can be a global, consistent, self-organising
> >and anonymous DNS.
> 
> 
> I am very enthusiastic from  the idea of  "zeroconf
> "(http://zeroconf.org )  and  "wide area bonjour" (
> http://dns-sd.org/ )

I haven't looked in detail into Wide-Area Bonjour, but it seems to me
that it's just dynamic DNS updates with DNSSEC to announce services
outside of LANs where multicast is used for service discovery.

> and this projects takes the best pieces of everything to build a
> distributed name system.
> 
> --------
> 
> UIA is a distributed name system and ad-hoc routing infrastructure
> which provides zero-configuration connectivity among users' mobile
> devices without the use of centralized servers. Each user has a
> local namespace which is shared among all her devices and is always
> available on every device. Users can assign personal names to each
> of their devices, and can also name other users and access their
> friends' namespaces. UIA devices automatically maintain connectivity
> with other named devices, both in ad-hoc networks and in the global
> Internet when available.
> 
> 
> http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/uia/

This is not the problem I was talking about. If you talk about
decentralised systems, it's often mentioned that regardless what want
to do if you rely on DNS the system becomes centralised again. That's
somewhat true, because DNS is hierachically organised with some
central control. So one could think about how to decentralise DNS.

There have been proposals (and I'm probably not aware of all of them),
but it seems to me none of them can provide the quality of service
as the current DNS does. Given that you established a consistent,
global and anonymous DNS (that's technically not unbelivable), it's
still questionable who owns and eligable to register certain DNS
names. Even with the current system this is a problem and registries
have developed policies for this, but still there are disputes which
sometimes end in a court.

I think the FreedomBox Project is primarily not about making all data
transmission self-organising, completely anonymous and decentralised
(which has been proposed here by some), but merely about giving
everybody as personal server which stores their data instead of cloud
computing company in datacenter somewhere where you don't have complete
control. And when running your personal server at home means to that you
have to manage DNS records, then we can't do something about it and
freedom doesn't come without efforts.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian