[Freedombox-discuss] [ZS] ZS reboot seed

Thu Sep 20 18:44:52 UTC 2012

I am sorry I missed the start of this conversation because the mail below -  
* http://zerostate.net
* smallest federated wiki, fossil
* XMPP
* litter, torchat 
* YaCy
- etc. is superb.


Nick Hardiman
nick at internetmachines.co.uk
@intmachines


On 20 Sep 2012, at 19:19, Eugen Leitl wrote:

> ----- Forwarded message from Bryce Lynch <virtualadept at gmail.com> -----
> 
> From: Bryce Lynch <virtualadept at gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:49:35 -0400
> To: doctrinezero at googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: [ZS] ZS reboot seed
> Reply-To: doctrinezero at googlegroups.com
> 
> On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Dirk Bruere <dirk.bruere at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Given that you know vastly more about it than most of us, including
>> me, could you put together some suggestions as to how we proceed, with
>> recommendations?
> 
> I'll take a crack at it:
> 
> A lot of the Zero State notes and docs are online in Google Pages.
> That's pretty much a wiki.  The usual wiki software (MediaWiki, Trac,
> MoinMoin, et cetera) is nice, but not distributed.  One server, one
> database, one wiki.  While it's possible to cluster the databases not
> all software plays nicely that way, and in fact a lot of database
> software we're likely to get hold of has serious hardcoded limitations
> on the number of nodes (MySQL, I'm looking at you).  There are
> alternative wiki implementations that do the same thing but make it
> possible to share the whole shebang across arbitrary numbers of nodes,
> potentially more one per member of the Zero State, potentially more
> than one per member.
> 
> The first thing that comes to mind is Ward Cunningham's Smallest
> Federated Wiki (https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki).
> It's a web application (Ruby/Sinatra/JavaScript) which runs on a
> machine and is accessible through a web browser.  It's designed such
> that multiple instances of the server can connect to one another over
> a network and synch up, so it's really one wiki spread across lots of
> machines at the same time.  Multiple people can browse the wiki,
> create and edit pages.  I dont' see why we can't have instances
> communicating over a darknet.
> 
> The one that I keep coming back to (and not just because I suck at
> Ruby apps) is called Fossil
> (https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki),
> which is a distributed revision control system, bug/ticket tracker,
> blog, and wiki.  It uses many of the same techniques as (and in fact
> is compatible with) the revision control system Git
> (http://git-scm.org/).  Again, it's accessed with a web browser,
> everything is versioned, and multiple instances can synch up with one
> another in a by-any-means-necessary approach.  Revision control is
> good for more than just source code - a lot of us use it to help
> manage our configuration files as well as things we write.  We can
> check stuff we're working on into revision control if we wanted to.
> We could definitely use the wiki and blog.  The ticket tracker could
> be used to assign and keep track of tasks (ticket #31337: Create
> Friendly AGI) that we're working on.  Fossil can automatically synch
> off of a single server, or instances can synch off of each other and
> merge the data.  It's cross platform.  And, if something does happen,
> all it takes is a single instance of Fossil to re-bootstrap because
> every node has... well.. everything.
> 
> We could import everything important into one of these systems and
> others could set up and synch their own copies of the whole Zero State
> superstructure.
> 
> Chat isn't particularly difficult: While we could set up our own
> servers we could also just as easily take advantage of any and all
> XMPP services out there.  There are skillions of them, and most of
> them can cross-chat between one another.  I do that a lot with friends
> aorund the world: My jabber.ccc.de account can talk to the endno.de
> folks, the Blackbird folks, and so on.  If we really wanted to we
> could set up our own XMPP servers.  But there are other ways.
> 
> Lately I've been experimenting with Litter
> (https://github.com/ptony82/litter), a distributed microblogging
> system written in Python.  Unpack it, run it, and it does pretty much
> what you'd expect of Twitter.. save that it automatically seeks out
> and finds other instances of Litter on the network using IP
> multicasting and exchanges messages with them.  It's pretty nifty and
> very lightweight.  I haven't tested it with Tor or I2P yet, though.
> 
> Torchat (https://github.com/prof7bit/TorChat) is actually implemented
> in a number of languages, but they all do pretty much the same thing:
> If you're running Tor on your laptop or workstation it'll set up a
> hidden service that is uniquely yours.  Other Torchat users can, if
> they know the address, add you as a friend and you can IM over the Tor
> network.  It's a pretty nice IM client.
> 
> Tahoe-LAFS (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs) is a massively
> distributed file storage and sharing grid.  The idea is that you
> install it and join a grid, and you donate a portion of your disk
> space to the grid that people can use to share and back up files.  If
> some number of members built a grid we could put Zero State related
> materials into it for us to access - Fossil trees, documents, videos,
> audio recordings, whatever we needed to replicate and make available,
> we could.
> 
> The next question is how to network all this stuff together. Tor
> (https://torproject.org/) is the first thing that comes to mind
> because it's the most popoular and heavily worked on right now.  There
> isn't a whole lot that we couldn't set up so that it's available only
> to Zero State members through the Tor network who know the .onion
> addresses.
> 
> If we wanted to go about it another way, we could use something like
> SocialVPN (https://socialvpn.wordpress.com/).  It's written in C# but
> designed to be Mono-compatible, and it's a peer to peer VPN that
> connects users over... XMPP.  Rather than hunting for IP addresses of
> other nodes to connect to, the addresses are usernames of some people
> you probably already have in your IM friends list.  As I recall, their
> primary test transport for this project is GChat.  However, my concern
> is that it implicitly exposes your socnet because the usernames and
> addresses of your IM friends/VPN nodes might be in the clear.  I'm not
> sure yet, I haven't looked into it.  It also hasn't shown a lot of
> development in the past year.
> 
> For whatever software development we do in the long run, we'll need
> someplace to put it all.  If we go with Fossil we'll have a very
> useful hosting environment already.  However, there are some
> alternatives which should be explored (though they're not as
> distributed-friendly as Fossil).  Gitlab (http://gitlabhq.com/) does
> pretty much what Github (https://github.com/) is, though it's F/OSS,
> meaning we can set up as many instances of it as we like, anywhere we
> like.  It does project management, Git repository hosting and
> management, bug tracking, fork and merge management, it has a wiki...
> It's written with Ruby On Rails.  We can also clone Github with
> Redmine (http://xdissent.com/2010/05/04/github-clone-with-redmine/).
> I have personal reservations about Redmine (because I suck at Ruby and
> have been fighting with it at work for most of a year now) but if
> someone here is good with it, feel free to consider it as an option.
> 
> So, how do we search all this stuff?  I've been running a YaCy
> (http://yacy.de/) node for over a year as part of their grid and I'm
> quite pleased with how well it works as a search engine.  It's
> basically a distributed search engine that you can either proxy your
> traffic through (and it'll index everything you browse through it -
> it's privacy aware, too), or it can be fed links that it'll index,
> follow, index, follow...  It can be run as part of a private search
> grid (Crusoe Mode), so we could set up a private YaCy network (and run
> the traffic over Tor) to index all of our resources.  It's written in
> Java but installs pretty easily, though the indices are pretty big so
> disk space will be necessary.  I'm long overdue to add a couple of
> terabytes to my YaCy box.
> 
> -- 
> The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS]
> https://drwho.virtadpt.net/
> "I am everywhere."
> 
> -- 
> -- 
> Zero State mailing list:
> http://groups.google.com/group/DoctrineZero
> 
> 
> 
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> -- 
> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
> ______________________________________________________________
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