[Freedombox-discuss] What Do You want to use the FreedomBox for?

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

A minor clarification... :-)

On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 11:26 PM, Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The approaches I can think of are:
> a) pagekite et al, which would then become a central point of attack/failure

Yes and no. PageKite's "central point of failure" is by design the
exact same central point as that of the web itself: the DNS system.

PageKite assumes that there are many different front-end relay servers
available, and connections can move from one to another at any time.
So if one relay is taken down, the website is simply routed to another
one and DNS gets updated.  This works today.

Of course, the PageKite service which my company provides is indeed a
"central point of attack/failure", but as the solution is open source,
you don't need to rely on it unless you want to. Obviously as we grow
we hope to become more resilient and robust and remain "the best way
to use PageKite", but we're certainly not the *only* way.

One other option, is the possibility for the community to
collaboratively share resources and provide relay service whenever a
FreedomBox detects that it is lucky enough to have a public,
unfiltered IP address.  The reason the project didn't go down that
road from the very start, was due to security: as PageKite carries a
fair bit of legacy plain-text HTTP traffic, a volunteer-based relay
network would be a tempting target for abuse because relays could
rewrite web pages on the fly to inject malware.

However, if people only tunnel end-to-end SSL encrypted HTTPS traffic
(which is arguably the only reasonable strategy for the FreedomBox use
cases anyway) then it would actually be perfectly safe to accept relay
service from untrusted strangers. :-)

Censorship via. the DNS network is really the only major stumbling
block, but it affects many other services as well, not just PageKite.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: https://pagekite.net/