[Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox/Unhosted/PageKite for Access Innovation Prize 2012

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 11:51 PM, Michael Rogers
<michael at briarproject.org> wrote:
> On 08/07/12 23:41, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson wrote:
>
> Not quite - unlike scenario two, the user would get a subdomain from
> the PageKite provider, rather than using her own domain. And unlike
> scenario four, the user would generate a certificate for the subdomain
> and have it signed by a CA, rather than using someone else's wildcard
> cert.

I don't think most CAs are willing do that. I would love to be proven
wrong though.

There are multiple issues here though - subdomains may be free, but
they do tie your identity to whoever provided you with it and make you
depend on their DNS infrastructure.  Top level domains at least have
formal procedures and rules in place for handling transfers from one
registrar to another.

That's why this wasn't considered as a scenario.


One way to look at the scenarios I provided was from the point of view
of independence.

Scenarios One and Two give the user at least a theoretical possibility
of independence, where they can move from network to network and
provider to provider. This is very important IMO, but unfortunately
places a burden on the user to register and manage his own identity
(domain & cert) himself.

Scenarios Three, Four and to a lesser degree, Five, introduce
dependencies of various types which give more convenience to the user
in the short term but may not really be compatible with the long-term
vision of something like a FreedomBox.  I think of them as training
wheels. :-)

(When presented this way, I actually see it as a benefit for the
training wheels to be somewhat clunky and obviously imperfect. If your
training wheels let you go 30kph, you may never take them off...)

There are many other dimensions to this, but I feel this one is really
fundamental and many of the others depend on it. Being able to switch
service providers is in some ways a freedom which presupposes many of
the others; privacy, anonymity, security - they don't do much for you
if your provider cuts you off.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: https://pagekite.net/