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On 3/7/11 6:09 AM, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTim5QBo12TcR+zaDMvRUN+98ooQ6e5oSCRmc_etP@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 3:22 PM, Yannick <span
dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:sevmek@free.fr">sevmek@free.fr</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt
0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);
padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>
* blogging<br>
In the same way if we plan to put some service for blogging,
like a web<br>
server e.g. Nginx+php/mysql support, with a nice tool to start
your own<br>
blog e.g. wordpress, what if your ISP provider puts you behind
a NAT for<br>
the port 80? How will people be able to read your blog? One
solution is<br>
mesh wifi, i.e. everybody being a provider. It will probably
need some<br>
engineering.<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
This is exactly the problem I am working on, with PageKite ( <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://pagekite.net/">https://pagekite.net/</a>
). We hope to have official Debian packages ready within the
next couple of months.<br>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
FWIW, this is something I think the FreedomBox could really use:
While it seems technologies like mesh networking have issues to be
worked out, there are incremental improvements available to put more
network control into the hands of individuals.<br>
<br>
So, for example: PageKite. That's a promising tool to move the
origin of your content onto hardware you control. Stick a
PageKite-connected origin server behind a caching HTTP proxy to
absorb traffic (eg. squid or nginx), and you might have a decently
performing personal web site.<br>
<br>
Along with that, consider web publishing tools that produce static
files (Jekyll versus WordPress). Push those files up to Amazon S3
and other cheap hosts. Make it easy to switch between hosts and
update DNS entries (remember wikileaks), keep the bulk of the smarts
on the FreedomBox.<br>
<br>
Progress from there to more robust solutions that use P2P and a
content-addressable network, which should have been made easier by
switching to tools that emit static content.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTim5QBo12TcR+zaDMvRUN+98ooQ6e5oSCRmc_etP@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div>
You touched on this and also e-mail, both of which are areas
where FreedomBoxes can be assumed to need some "help" from the
cloud if they are to provide self-hosted services which are
backwards compatible and interoperable with today's Internet.<br>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
I think that's a key notion: "self-hosted services which are
backwards compatible and interoperable with today's Internet"<br>
<br>
Provide on-ramps. Embrace and extend existing platforms—for example,
a self-hosted microblogging rig that connects to Twitter as a
client, but also publishes static HTML & feeds and pings
PubSubHubBub servers and uses OStatus to federate with others like
it. Build a Facebook app that also maintains a "wall" on your own
servers.<br>
<br>
I think some services, like IMAP/POP3/SMTP for email, could be
troublesome thanks to spam and suchlike. But, the more a FreedomBox
can act as a bridge between free and non-free services, the easier
the transition will be.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTim5QBo12TcR+zaDMvRUN+98ooQ6e5oSCRmc_etP@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div>
PageKite is really, really easy to use to make a self-hosted
website visible to the outside world (circumventing NAT and
all that other nasty stuff), but it is so because there is a
business (my company) behind it providing in-the-cloud
infrastructure. I believe that for the FreedomBox to scale to
thousands or millions of end users, such support businesses
will need to exist, and at some point we'll want to have a
discussion about what they should look like: how must
companies behave in order to be "Freedom and FreedomBox
compatible"? :-)<br>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
One of the key things with PageKite is that, yes, you're providing
in-the-cloud infrastructure with running PageKite servers—but,
you've also provided the source to run our own. That should help
commoditize the service of tunneling a self-hosted server out to the
web and save us from lock-in. That's the kind of business I'm not
afraid to support.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTim5QBo12TcR+zaDMvRUN+98ooQ6e5oSCRmc_etP@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div>
Of course, some will just reject commercial involvement
entirely... but not all, and I think some of those 1000s of
small businesses will be providing on-line support services to
FreedomBoxes, and we don't want them to become freedom
inhibitors either.<br>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
That's where providing the source and commoditizing your own market
can help here. You probably won't get rich by offering one or more
focused, easily replaceable building-block services like server
tunnelling or static web hosting, but I think that's the kind of
thing FreedomBox needs.<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:l.m.orchard@pobox.com">l.m.orchard@pobox.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://decafbad.com">http://decafbad.com</a>
{web,mad,computer} scientist
</pre>
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