[Freedombox-discuss] Establishing Communicationbetween Freedomboxes

[Tony Godshall]

2011/7/7 Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson <bre at pagekite.net>:
> Hello all!
>
> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 9:39 AM, John Walsh <fiftyfour at waldevin.com> wrote:
>>
>> I just realised that the FreedomBox Foundation will have to offer a
>> centralised DynamicDNS service for those FreedomBox users with an ISP
>> provided Dynamic IP address. I am a user, but is this a reasonable
>> assumption.
>>
>> If my assumption is correct, then your FrienDNS service could probably
>> piggy-back on top of the FreedomBox service.
>
> John, I don't think this assumption is correct. It is almost certainly true
> that FreedomBoxes will need to be *able* to use a dynamic DNS service, but
> there is no reason there has to be only one such service, and no reason it
> has to be run by the Foundation.

The one Tor provides, basically a consensus of the various DNS
entries of the various Tor nodes, is pretty effective.

> More importantly, there are a few core reasons why designing such a central,
> single-point of failure into the system would be a mistake.

Is Tor centralized this way?

An alternative would be for FBs to join a big DHT and make sure
the results agree and are from multiple jurisdictions.  Obviously
you'd want a layer of encryption to avoid sniffing, and maybe a
layer of indirection so big bothers who are sniffing the exit nodes
can't match you to the person looking for octopusnotsogreat.org
(https://www.eff.org/whatistor) and well, we've almost got Tor
without the generalized connectivity obfuscation it offers.  Maybe
we just need to hack on Tor to make it faster.  Or maybe we just
need to add a huge number of Tor nodes (e.g. sell lots of FBs
preconfigured to join Tor)

> I find it more likely that (in the end) physical FreedomBoxes will be
> offered to end-users by multiple companies, and each company will
> pre-configure their boxes to use a particular set of providers for services
> like dynamic DNS, SMTP relaying and such. Or they will present the user with
> a list of choices during the set-up dialog.
...

Heh.  Oppressive regimes selling FBs, anyone?

T