On 03/15/2011 05:26 PM, Clint Adams wrote: > If we design for some kind of petname system, I can address > your FreedomBox as "Bjarni's FreedomBox" or "BRE's site" > or "That PageKite Guy's Dreamplug" and that name can > map to something.pagekite.net or > http://axqzzpkfwezf3kku.onion/ or tcp:ohvei9ab.fb2fb:8080 > or something that uses nothing resembling DNS or IP. > As addressing schemes change, I want to be able to switch > between them easily, but still retain the exact same > human-readable addressing and the exact same FOAF-type > relations. > > Should we not do that, and say "Here are three different > service providers you can choose from to sacrifice your > personal privacy to, but you are free because you have > choice," I think we are missing the point.
I don't think we're on different sides of this actually. I certainly hope we will have a system for addressing someone's FreedomBox through multiple schemes, both internal to the FreedomBox network and publicly facing for all the communication we want to do with people and organizations who don't have FreedomBoxes. It is primarily when trying to talk with people who don't have FreedomBoxes that I think we will run into the need for things like Dynamic DNS. Whether the organization running that system is a non-profit operating to support FreedomBox users worldwide, or some super-node box my friend runs, most of us are still going to be reliant on someone with a publicly route-able IP address if we want to talk to the world at large. If we're not going to end up in the devil's choice situation you describe, I think we need to build technical and legal infrastructure to make choosing people whom we have a /reason/ to trust an easy part of setting up your FreedomBox. Maybe that means setting up non-profits, maybe that means additional relationships in the web of trust, or setting up a bunch of public TOR search nodes in the Pirate Party offices, I don't know what will work best. On a side note, I think there are a number of services that are naturally centralized and that will be quite difficult to re-implement in a different manner (at least until someone cracks the distributed search problem). Social networking is the biggest of those, followed closely by the related social tools like linked-in and online dating. These systems only work when they are supported by a network effect, and it is not clear to me how you establish such a network effect without at least some minimal phone book-like central listing. Once everyone knows how to contact each other, you can operate as independent nodes, without the need to keep using the phone book, but the major reason people join such networks is precisely because they need to find out how to contact someone, not because they are impressed by how much better Facebook's messaging client is than gmail. That was primarily what I was trying to get at with the "Dynamic DNS Facebook" link (http://churchkey.org/2010/03/17/dynamic-dns-facebook/)) -Ian All of these systems rely on the network effect of being able to find Since we're going to be dependent on them, if we want people on the general net to be able to communicate with us. I just think we need a reason to If that organization ends up maintaining DNS records More generally, there are some services that naturally favor centralization _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
