[Freedombox-discuss] Independent email services

Matthias-Christian Ott ott at mirix.org
Sun Feb 27 14:28:35 UTC 2011


On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 01:19:05PM +0100, Marc Manthey wrote:
> Am 26.02.2011 um 23:53 schrieb 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.
> 
> hi Christian, all
> 
> WAB , whitch means wide area bonjour uses a modified bind dns server
> todo the job
> 
> http://www.dns-sd.org/ServerSetup.html

Since you seem to be convinced of this technology, please explain it's
advantages with regard to decentralisation compared to to the current
DNS. It seems to me that it's just a convient way to do dynamic DNS
which includes service discovery via DNS.

> >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.
> 
> Every instance  running its own DNS and share the keys with trusted
> partys
> you should go a bit in deepth with the link i proposed.
> 
> 
> >>http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/uia/    < !!!!!

The document has 207 pages, can you give me a short summary how UIA
handles global consistency and availability? The impression I got
from a quick reading of relevant parts is that it doesn't want to
adress those issues and thus isn't a DNS replacement, but merely a
DNS alternative.

> Another approach http://dot-p2p.org/

This doesn't solve the problem of global consistency. Moreover, the
system won't be able to handle disputes. Without a central authority
and courts you can effectively solve all disputes (you can of course
argue that there won't be any disputes because all people are honest
and good or that people will solve them on their own which won't work
either, partly because such P2P network could be anonymous; both
isn't realistic, at the moment you have to assume the worst case:
nodes are dishonest and want to disrupt the network).

> >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 It is exactly about that !!

The mission statement of the FreedomBox Foundation confirms my
statement.

Often people forget that even if all software above the IP
layer is completely anonymous, decentralised, self-organising and
fault-tollerant, the Internet itself isn't (recent Internet outages
proof it). Such a global computer network can't differ from the social
model of the societies which build it.

> >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.
> 
> 
> What would be the progress ? we have that  since centuries allready ?

Yes, some people have. Other people, especially without the necessary
knowledge, don't run their own servers. The FreedomBox is for those
people. It will simply restore the Internet's orginal structure,
so essentially there's nothing new here.

> >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.
> 
> 
> so ? Whats your conclusion ?

As mentioned by others in this thread, even with the best user
interface the user will have to understand a bit of the DNS to manually
setup a hostname and maybe your grandmother won't be able to do the
intial configuration own her own, but of course others can help her.

Regards,
Matthias-Christian



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