[Freedombox-discuss] blogging in the FB (was Re: Roadmap Brainstorming)

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 2:28 PM, Les Orchard <l.m.orchard at pobox.com> wrote:
> On 3/18/11 8:41 AM, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson wrote:
>
> There's also the privacy goal of the FB, for which you really need the
> ability to put layers of indirection between your personal IP and the rest
> of the world. Pagekite, at a minimum, but the more options the better.

You can actually connect over Tor to your PageKite front-end
(where-ever it is, doesn't have to be the pagekite.net service).  This
slows down your site quite a bit, but gives you lots of indirection
and means even your front-end provider doesn't know where your origin
server is. :-)  If you use TLS for your PageKite tunnels and serve
only a HTTPS site, both the Tor exit nodes and the PageKite front-end
are completely blind.  I don't think many will need this level of
privacy, but it's already implemented and covers all the bases, I
think.

> As for the performance thing, well, just don't say anything interesting.

Of course. I'm talking about sites where people might actually
password-protect everything by default.  FreedomBox is after all a
very privacy oriented effort. For a traditional, open to the world
blog, the existing cloud stuff is in many ways perfectly suitable.

> The first time you get linked-to from someone like John Gruber on Daring
> Fireball, your personal access to the net gets swamped. If that's a mesh
> network, you probably take down everyone around you, too. A residential ISP
> in the US might raise an eyebrow, too.

Assuming people are sticking with clear-text HTTP (arguably a bad
idea), whatever in-the-cloud help is provided (PageKite or otherwise)
could also do some caching and take the top off the spike.

That's on my road-map, but not high on the list because that sort of
thing is always a massive source of bugs and I consider usability to
be more important at this early stage. If people start hosting HTTP
origin servers on cell phones, priorities could change pretty quickly.
;-)

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

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