[Freedombox-discuss] my summary of yesterday's Hackfest

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 03:55:10PM +0100, Michiel de Jong wrote:

>  - xmpp is better than smtp in the same way "Internet Mail 2000" is: it
>puts the burden with the sender, thus discouraging spam.
>  - downside is, this means you would have to send your communications
>through several different channels. people will still be using standard
>email, without using freedombox, and will not be encouraged to use pgp
>there.

FreedomBox peers have no use for smtp if a better alternative (e.g. 
xmpp) is provided too.  Non-FreedomBox peers either are geeky enough to 
know how to setup the preferred mechanism of FreedomBox, or cannot be 
expected to use GPG anyways.


>addendum: after also reading the two recent threads about email on the 
>mailing list, i think we should maybe discourage the use of email, yet 
>still offer a pgp-enabled email client, and maybe an easy way to 
>register your own domain name (from a choice of TLDs) and rent an 
>in-the-cloud mailserver for it. however, the question is, if we want to 
>promote something that is better than email, do we still want to 
>promote pgp as an intermediate solution?

PGP makes good sense to support for users.  Not sure, though, that it is 
sensible for a FreedomBox to store private keys on behalf of users, 
which is needed for the Plug to decrypt emails.

Makes better sense to me for the box to stick to SSL encryption and 
store its own private keys for that - and only manage public keys of 
e.g. PGP on behalf of user(s) and peers.



>it was discussed that Asterisk has currently no consensus on how to 
>proceed with adding the necessary configuration options to debconf, so 
>that would sort of block the route for plugpbx's configuration going 
>into a debian package.

I disagree:

My preaching is that we should throw ideas here (what I call "dreaming), 
but engage in inventing/improving code _elsewhere_ and engage in package 
code for Debian _elsewhere_, and here work on _installing_ and 
_configuring_ existing Debian-maintained code.

...but then when we - like with Asterisk - run into a properly Debian 
maintained project which lacks the ability for use to "remote-control" 
an installation with the configuration that we need for it to work 
out-of-the-box, we should not give up but work with the Debian 
maintainer of said package to improve the packaging.

Particularly regarding Asterisk I did mention on IRC that the package 
seems not very actively maintained currently, but that should not stop 
us from e.g. filing a bugreport of severity "wishlist" kindly requesting 
that the package support automated setup of some particular features of 
Asterisk that we specifically list and are willing to refine further 
if/when the maintainer shows interest in it.

Important to me that we do it like that: work via bugreports against the 
various Debian packages, when we have figured out what we believe could 
serve us better from that package.  Discussing it here is silly because 
too few of us knows the details of a) packaging and b) each particular 
implementation of some protocol or routine - compared to the package 
maintainer(s) and all those already using that package and potentially 
tracking bugreports against it.


Regards,

  - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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