[Freedombox-discuss] http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/07/18/0153204/Security-Consultants-Wa rn-About-PROTECT-IP-Act

[James Vasile]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:51:50 +0200, bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 04:14:37PM -0400, Ted Smith wrote:
> > On Mon, 2011-07-18 at 12:19 +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> > > a non-centralised non-attackable truly peer-to-peer
> > > replacement for the existing DNS infrastructure. 
> > 
> > Is this something the FreedomBox Debian project or the FreedomBox
> > Foundation have committed to producing?
> > 
> > Such a replacement would be an extremely sophisticated product of the
> > conjunction of multiple technological advancements that simply don't
> > exist yet. It was my understanding that the Freedombox project was more
> > about integrating existing systems than attempting to develop novel
> > solutions.
> 
> Having spent some time thinking about it, I agree this is actually not
> really realistic to assume the that freedombox project would implement
> such a system soon. 
> 
> At least for the use case in which owners would buy a domain and host it
> on their freedombox. I don't see actually any way to be sure that this
> domain couldn't be taken down.
> 
> Still I believe that the freedombox project could at least setup a dynamic
> DNS service ala dyndns, where owners could register a subdomain.

Ian and I have spent a lot of time discussing how dynamic DNS might be
useful.  We used to talk about just as you have a personal and a work
email address, you might have a personal and a work URL.
(e.g. responsiblecoworker.box.jamesvasile.com
vs. crazypartydood.box.jamesvasile.com).  I have some doubts about that
approach, but I still think dynamic DNS might ease some hard problems
even though it introduces some difficult problems of its own.

The Foundation has not so far considered as part of its mission the
hosting of services to support deployed FreedomBoxes.  People keep
asking us to do it, though, so maybe we'll consider such things in the
future.  For now, though, I don't think we have the organizational
bandwidth to take that on even as we do everything else.

That said, if you want to spearhead the creation and maintainence of a
freedom-respecting dynamic DNS service, we might be able to give you
some organizational resources to do it.

> 
> I believe that the only way to actually workaround the super-hierarchical
> DNS problem is by community support. If the top domain providing this
> service was run by public well-known and supported
> organisations/individuals, it would be hard to force them to shut down a
> subdomain, or/and threaten them to do so, cause they are public entities,
> with a big community supporting them.

One ideal for the FreedomBox is that it be self hosting.  All the
servers it relies on should be other FreedomBoxes.  That's a lofty goal,
though, and it would take a *lot* of time to make that reality.  For
example, there is, AFAIK, no package to easily serve distributed dynamic
DNS.  The upshot of all this is that any solution we choose here is
likely to be less than ideal.  Again, though, if you see a solution
here, I encourage you to work toward implementing it.

> 
> Maybe the first todo in this direction would be to setup an organisation
> (or use the freedomboxfoundation.org?), who's members would be well known
> "privacy concerned" people/organisations, that would register a domain.
> Then think about a way to do this service in a privacy aware way.

Dynamic DNS run by a freedom loving group sounds great. I'd use it.  It
also sounds like a whole separate project in addition to the FreedomBox.
I'm not going to tackle that any time soon, but I'd certainly cooperate
with anybody who does.

Best regards,
James