[Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBuddy to use Tor to resolve IP address of nodes?

[Graham Burnside]

I've had a couple of hours recently to catch up on how freedombox is
developing. I was reading through the debian wiki and noticed that the
method being used to resolve the IP address of nodes in the network is
via Tor hidden services.

I know that Tor is well tested, but is this not far too centralized a
way of bootstrapping the networks? More so, is it not going to make a
lot of people nervous about hosting a node on the network. It wouldn't
take more than the mention of silkroad and CP in the mainstream media to
taint the whole project.

Has there been any discussion into alternatives? Such as running a basic
xmpp client on each box, which periodically contacts your friends' boxes
with its current IP address, encrypted and signed using PGP? The host
freedombox JID could be distributed with public keys. This would allow
anyone with a domain name to run a tracker for their friends' boxes, or
to just use a free jabber server.

- Graham.