[Freedombox-discuss] 'No sysadmin' is the key to Freedom Box

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Matt Willsher <matt at monki.org.uk> wrote:

>
> On 4 March 2011 20:09, Tracy Reed <treed at ultraviolet.org> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 10:53:13AM -0800, Tony Godshall spake thusly:
>> > both the above have a remote sysadmin.
>> >
>> > named Apple and Google.
>>
>> Only in the same sense that my Linux box has a remote sysadmin named
>> CentOS or
>> RedHat. Apple/Google never directly ssh into your phone. Although since
>> you are
>> running their code they can do whatever they want just like RedHat can
>> theoretically do whatever they want with my servers.
>
>
> RedHat has no remote kill switch for your apps. Apple does for iOS,  Google
> does for Android.
>

At least in the Android case, replacing the Google firmware with something
that lacks this backdoor is not terribly hard. Now, I'm not saying we should
advocate everyone reflash their phones - but the devices themselves are
quite capable and are being mass produced already. As such, they are a very
interesting development platform.

Cutting a deal with one of the manufacturers would be within the realm of
possibility for an organization like the FreedomBox foundation.

A better argument against using phones as a basis for FreedomBox development
is simply cost. Those big fancy touch screens are not cheap and for a server
device that is probably wasted money (unless it doubles as a clock or
picture frame or something). But prototyping on a phone and assuming that
when mass produced the screen and battery will be replaced with a wall
socket and charging circuit could be a completely sane strategy for this
project.

I'm not saying it *should* be, but I really think you are being overly
negative here. And if we end up with something that *can* run on refurbished
mobiles (cracked screens are a common failure mode), taking advantage of
built-in bluetooth and 3G and wifi, then that's not a bad thing, now is it?

For most people it goes via a proxy and there is little that can be done
> about that until there is a wifi mesh and then you've going to want either
> mobile IPv6, VPNs or dynamic DNS so the clients can find the 'server'.
>

All of these problems apply to some degree to other in-the-home consumer
devices as well.

There are all sorts of ISPs out there and as I've argued on other threads,
assuming that the FreedomBox will be a router with a routeable, unfiltered
IP address will exclude a massive number of users (myself included). As the
IPv4 crunch gets worse it may even exclude most people on the planet - if it
doesn't already.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

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