[Freedombox-discuss] [ZS] ZS reboot seed

Thu Sep 20 18:19:36 UTC 2012

----- Forwarded message from Bryce Lynch <virtualadept at gmail.com> -----

From: Bryce Lynch <virtualadept at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:49:35 -0400
To: doctrinezero at googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [ZS] ZS reboot seed
Reply-To: doctrinezero at googlegroups.com

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Dirk Bruere <dirk.bruere at gmail.com> wrote:

> Given that you know vastly more about it than most of us, including
> me, could you put together some suggestions as to how we proceed, with
> recommendations?

I'll take a crack at it:

A lot of the Zero State notes and docs are online in Google Pages.
That's pretty much a wiki.  The usual wiki software (MediaWiki, Trac,
MoinMoin, et cetera) is nice, but not distributed.  One server, one
database, one wiki.  While it's possible to cluster the databases not
all software plays nicely that way, and in fact a lot of database
software we're likely to get hold of has serious hardcoded limitations
on the number of nodes (MySQL, I'm looking at you).  There are
alternative wiki implementations that do the same thing but make it
possible to share the whole shebang across arbitrary numbers of nodes,
potentially more one per member of the Zero State, potentially more
than one per member.

The first thing that comes to mind is Ward Cunningham's Smallest
Federated Wiki (https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki).
 It's a web application (Ruby/Sinatra/JavaScript) which runs on a
machine and is accessible through a web browser.  It's designed such
that multiple instances of the server can connect to one another over
a network and synch up, so it's really one wiki spread across lots of
machines at the same time.  Multiple people can browse the wiki,
create and edit pages.  I dont' see why we can't have instances
communicating over a darknet.

The one that I keep coming back to (and not just because I suck at
Ruby apps) is called Fossil
(https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki),
which is a distributed revision control system, bug/ticket tracker,
blog, and wiki.  It uses many of the same techniques as (and in fact
is compatible with) the revision control system Git
(http://git-scm.org/).  Again, it's accessed with a web browser,
everything is versioned, and multiple instances can synch up with one
another in a by-any-means-necessary approach.  Revision control is
good for more than just source code - a lot of us use it to help
manage our configuration files as well as things we write.  We can
check stuff we're working on into revision control if we wanted to.
We could definitely use the wiki and blog.  The ticket tracker could
be used to assign and keep track of tasks (ticket #31337: Create
Friendly AGI) that we're working on.  Fossil can automatically synch
off of a single server, or instances can synch off of each other and
merge the data.  It's cross platform.  And, if something does happen,
all it takes is a single instance of Fossil to re-bootstrap because
every node has... well.. everything.

We could import everything important into one of these systems and
others could set up and synch their own copies of the whole Zero State
superstructure.

Chat isn't particularly difficult: While we could set up our own
servers we could also just as easily take advantage of any and all
XMPP services out there.  There are skillions of them, and most of
them can cross-chat between one another.  I do that a lot with friends
aorund the world: My jabber.ccc.de account can talk to the endno.de
folks, the Blackbird folks, and so on.  If we really wanted to we
could set up our own XMPP servers.  But there are other ways.

Lately I've been experimenting with Litter
(https://github.com/ptony82/litter), a distributed microblogging
system written in Python.  Unpack it, run it, and it does pretty much
what you'd expect of Twitter.. save that it automatically seeks out
and finds other instances of Litter on the network using IP
multicasting and exchanges messages with them.  It's pretty nifty and
very lightweight.  I haven't tested it with Tor or I2P yet, though.

Torchat (https://github.com/prof7bit/TorChat) is actually implemented
in a number of languages, but they all do pretty much the same thing:
If you're running Tor on your laptop or workstation it'll set up a
hidden service that is uniquely yours.  Other Torchat users can, if
they know the address, add you as a friend and you can IM over the Tor
network.  It's a pretty nice IM client.

Tahoe-LAFS (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs) is a massively
distributed file storage and sharing grid.  The idea is that you
install it and join a grid, and you donate a portion of your disk
space to the grid that people can use to share and back up files.  If
some number of members built a grid we could put Zero State related
materials into it for us to access - Fossil trees, documents, videos,
audio recordings, whatever we needed to replicate and make available,
we could.

The next question is how to network all this stuff together. Tor
(https://torproject.org/) is the first thing that comes to mind
because it's the most popoular and heavily worked on right now.  There
isn't a whole lot that we couldn't set up so that it's available only
to Zero State members through the Tor network who know the .onion
addresses.

If we wanted to go about it another way, we could use something like
SocialVPN (https://socialvpn.wordpress.com/).  It's written in C# but
designed to be Mono-compatible, and it's a peer to peer VPN that
connects users over... XMPP.  Rather than hunting for IP addresses of
other nodes to connect to, the addresses are usernames of some people
you probably already have in your IM friends list.  As I recall, their
primary test transport for this project is GChat.  However, my concern
is that it implicitly exposes your socnet because the usernames and
addresses of your IM friends/VPN nodes might be in the clear.  I'm not
sure yet, I haven't looked into it.  It also hasn't shown a lot of
development in the past year.

For whatever software development we do in the long run, we'll need
someplace to put it all.  If we go with Fossil we'll have a very
useful hosting environment already.  However, there are some
alternatives which should be explored (though they're not as
distributed-friendly as Fossil).  Gitlab (http://gitlabhq.com/) does
pretty much what Github (https://github.com/) is, though it's F/OSS,
meaning we can set up as many instances of it as we like, anywhere we
like.  It does project management, Git repository hosting and
management, bug tracking, fork and merge management, it has a wiki...
It's written with Ruby On Rails.  We can also clone Github with
Redmine (http://xdissent.com/2010/05/04/github-clone-with-redmine/).
I have personal reservations about Redmine (because I suck at Ruby and
have been fighting with it at work for most of a year now) but if
someone here is good with it, feel free to consider it as an option.

So, how do we search all this stuff?  I've been running a YaCy
(http://yacy.de/) node for over a year as part of their grid and I'm
quite pleased with how well it works as a search engine.  It's
basically a distributed search engine that you can either proxy your
traffic through (and it'll index everything you browse through it -
it's privacy aware, too), or it can be fed links that it'll index,
follow, index, follow...  It can be run as part of a private search
grid (Crusoe Mode), so we could set up a private YaCy network (and run
the traffic over Tor) to index all of our resources.  It's written in
Java but installs pretty easily, though the indices are pretty big so
disk space will be necessary.  I'm long overdue to add a couple of
terabytes to my YaCy box.

-- 
The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS]
https://drwho.virtadpt.net/
"I am everywhere."

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