[Freedombox-discuss] Independent email services

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 09:39:34AM +1030, Paul Gardner-Stephen wrote:
> > Another solution would be to create an overlay network and address
> > hosts by their public key fingerprint which I doubt will be easier for
> > the user.
> 
> This is part of what we are doing over at servalproject.org, where the
> primary goal is telephony over wireless mesh.
> I'm still writing up the detailed description of our overlay system,
> and will happily share it here when done.
> 
> > Addressing seems to be an unsolved problem for average people anyhow.
> > Not everyone will have their own domain or subdomain. And even if they
> > do, it requires manual configuration regardless how good the user
> > interface is.
> 
> Yes, it is a big problem.
> This is why serval has gone for ECC160 public keys as user identifiers.
> This avoids IP address collision, and yet allows us to stay IPv4 compatible.
> Also, the overlay doesn't prevent the use of clever IP addressing, it
> just provides a fall-back for when that isn't doable.

I suppose such an overlay network would work and wouldn't have problems
such as conflicts about names or spoofing. However, this would require
users to exchange 160 bits (in whatever encoding) to contact each other.
I doubt that people will like this. An identifier such as ott at mirix.org
is much easier to remember. But once you exchanged it, you can add it
to an addreess book and it's a problem anymore.

You probably have already thought about this. What is your approach
for the initial identifier exchange, especially when you can't copy
and paste it?

Regards,
Matthias-Christian