[Freedombox-discuss] Some advice on moving Plinth forward?

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 11 February 2012 07:47, Daniel Bryan <danbryan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Not sure whether I've actually posted to the list before but I've been
> closely following FreedomBox since late 2010.
>
> I got a chance to talk to Bdale a little at Linux Conf. Au 2012 and I
> decided to have a go at hacking on Plinth.
>
> I'm keen to get started, and I've been discussing it with Alistair Davidson,
> who's a UX guy.
>
> Basically we want to rapidly prototype a simple end-user service
> configuration system. Does anyone have an idea of what it'd be really good
> to get up and running? Web server? Routing? GPG / other ident. stuff?

I think GPG is a given.  It's going to be important to have a strong passphrase.

Apache 2 I think makes most sense as a web server.  It should run HTTP
with a self signed certificate.

Apart from in Eben Moglen's original "freedom in the cloud" talk
dyndns has not come up much, but I'd suggest that would be really
nice.  See below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA&t=37m30s

I'd encourage people to use the same key for GPG and a WebID, this is
what I do and have had excellent results.  There's some code to
convert here:

https://gist.github.com/1505613

Aside from sending your GPG key to a key server you can also put it in
your homepage/user profile using some simple HTML5 markup.  It's quite
easy I can provide the markup when we're ready.

I think this combination will be one of the strongest identity
solutions anywhere.  And matches quite closely Eben's original vision,
and extends to all the other cool stuff that's been mentioned on the
list.

James mentioned privoxy too.  I'm sure there are other points to be
added such as xmpp, monkeysphere, tor etc.

Side question:  would there be any possibility of funning the web
server component on a desktop?

>
> We'll eventually need to have some kind of spec for how a developer can come
> along and contribute the configuration builder for a given service to Plinth
> in a standard format, but for now I think it'd be best to focus on usability
> and user experience.
>
> Has anyone else been looking particularly at this stuff? I'm sort of a bit
> lost for a start, but I have spare time and I reckon I'm a pretty killer
> Python dev so if I can get some direction to push me over the edge that'd be
> great :)
>
> Daniel
>
> _______________________________________________
> Freedombox-discuss mailing list
> Freedombox-discuss at lists.alioth.debian.org
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss