<div>Hi all,</div><div><br></div><div>> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">trying to hack together an experimental version of the freedombox in a virtual server image, </span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">> with whoever wants to join in. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">The starting point will be this:</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">> <a href="http://pagekite.net/community/DebianFB/" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(42, 93, 176); ">http://pagekite.net/community/DebianFB/</a> [...] </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">and the goals will be this:</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">> <a href="http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/goals/" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(42, 93, 176); ">http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/goals/</a></span></div>
<div><br></div><div>People are still actively discussing the 7 goals set by the freedomboxfoundation in the IRC channel, but I have to leave, so as promised, here is a little round-up email of today's Sunday Hackfest. This email describes my personal findings, it is not an attempt to reflect everybody's opinions, nor everything that was said. A better source for that would be: <a href="http://titanpad.com/3LsfCMplSR">http://titanpad.com/3LsfCMplSR</a> which was/is the working document we used and are using. Also, people that were, and still are, in the IRC channel today, please add any info to this email thread. Also, if you see anything incorrect here, or biased (as i'm sure is inevitable), please correct it.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I didn't produce a next snapshot of the virtual machine, because everything is still in such an exploratory phase. Instead, the product (from my side) of today's Hackfest would be the following "draft", which more or less in words describes what should be on the freedombox for it to accomplish its 7 goals:</div>
<div><br></div><div>1) Safe social networking, in which, without losing touch with any of your friends, you replace Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other centralized services with privacy-respecting federated services;</div>
<div><br></div><div>-> I looked into this one. I think many of the open source distributed social networks out there "replace Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other centralized services with privacy-respecting federated services". There is a choice between xmpp federation and OStatus federation. The tricky part is "without losing touch with any of your friends", which means an aggregator for both free and non-free social networks. I looked at diaspora, but their current solution is not feasible. It relies on registering an api key with Facebook, and although this makes sense if there are, say, 100 diaspora nodes in the world, it does not make much sense if there are millions. I also investigated facebook-notify, which uses OAuth to be a read-client for facebook. It only displays notifications (not lower-priority news), but I'm sure it should be possible to write a client that OAuths against facebook to read and write, much like a twitter client. I will continue to look into this.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>2) Secure backup: Your data automatically stored in encrypted format on the Freedom Boxes of your friends or associates, thus protecting your personal data against seizure or loss;</div>
<div><br></div><div>-> this doesn't seem to require much thought. Just a cronned rsync job would already do the trick. You would have to have a user interface where you request and allow backups from/to friends that you know from meatspace. maybe use PGP's WoT, or out-of-band passwords for confirmation. Nobody is currently actively looking into this.</div>
<div><br></div><div>3) Network neutrality protection: If your ISP starts limiting or interfering with your access to services in the Net, your Freedom Box can communicate with your friends to detect and route traffic around the limitations. Network censorship is automatically routed around, for your friends in societies with oppressive national firewalls, or for you;</div>
<div><br></div><div>-> i think this can only be done with a wifi mesh. Volunteers for looking into this?</div><div><br></div><div>4) Safe anonymous publication: Friends or associates outside zones of network censorship can automatically forward information from people within them, enabling safe, anonymous publication;</div>
<div><br></div><div>-> this is the one we talked most about in #<a href="mailto:freedombox@irc.oftc.net">freedombox@irc.oftc.net</a>, i think. freenet and gnunet were generally considered too young by some. Tor was highly regarded, but it needs to be combined with some sort of mirroring. Nobody is currently actively looking into this (although many people were talking about it).</div>
<div><br></div><div>5) Home network security, with real protection against intrusion and the security threats aimed at Microsoft Windows or other risky computers your network;</div><div><br></div><div>-> willma is looking into this one, and also into general detection intrusion and security hardening. Willma indicated that this goal needs some clarification as to what its author means.</div>
<div><br></div><div>6) Encrypted email, with seamless encryption and decryption;</div><div><br></div><div>-> this can easily be done with SquirrelMail. Somebody could experiment with setting this up, with the automatic PGP key generation and everything. Volunteers?</div>
<div><br></div><div>7) Private voice communications: Freedom Box users can make voice-over-Internet phone calls to one another or to any phone. Calls between Freedom Box users will be encrypted securely;</div><div><br></div>
<div>-> Asterisk has been mentioned. Any volunteers for experimenting with this?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Next week I'll do another Sunday Hackfest with whoever wants to join, and I think we can make it a regular thing.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div>Michiel</div>