On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Matt Willsher <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:matt@monki.org.uk">matt@monki.org.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div></div><div class="h5">On 4 March 2011 20:09, Tracy Reed <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:treed@ultraviolet.org" target="_blank">treed@ultraviolet.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 10:53:13AM -0800, Tony Godshall spake thusly:<br>
<div>> both the above have a remote sysadmin.<br>
><br>
> named Apple and Google.<br>
<br>
</div>Only in the same sense that my Linux box has a remote sysadmin named CentOS or<br>
RedHat. Apple/Google never directly ssh into your phone. Although since you are<br>
running their code they can do whatever they want just like RedHat can<br>
theoretically do whatever they want with my servers.</blockquote><div><br></div></div></div><div>RedHat has no remote kill switch for your apps. Apple does for iOS, Google does for Android. </div></div></blockquote><div>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Cutting a deal with one of the manufacturers would be within the realm of possibility for an organization like the FreedomBox foundation.<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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?<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>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'. </div>
</div></blockquote><div><br>All of these problems apply to some degree to other in-the-home consumer devices as well.<br><br>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.<br>
</div></div><br>-- <br>Bjarni R. Einarsson<br>The Beanstalks Project ehf.<br><br>Making personal web-pages fly: <a href="http://pagekite.net/" target="_blank">http://pagekite.net/</a><br>