Hi, my first message here. There has been some talk of using FOAF+SSL. It seems like a good system for many purposes, and I do believe it should be included, but I have some concerns. The WebID concept looks tied to DNS and by extension, hierarchical namespace. This presents a few problems, first that Freedomboxes, at least some of them, are going to be organized in a non-hierarchical organization of connected pods or web of trust. If the user chooses to delegate their WebID url, they are going to be reliant on a third party, which is what FreedomBox is trying to avoid. If they want to host their webid on their Freedombox, they are going to be obligated to join a hierarchical and probably public namespace. Tying to IP isn't practical, as most of these are going to be on a dynamic IP.
While FOAF+SSL is very appropriate for many users, FreedomBox owners that wish to create discreet private connections (friends-only networks, or perhaps activists) shouldn't have to rely on it. Not saying the FreedomBox will, but I believe that should be kept in mind. I believe it should be carefully considered before making any services necessarily dependent on it. Also, I see there has been some discussion in the past on the FOAF+SSL mailing list regarding using DNS. The conclusion seemed to be that if you are running on the public Internet, DNS is just how you navigate it. While this is reasonable, this is a technical conclusion, and the FreedomBox has different goals. First off it probably shouldn't be dependent on an outside, centralized naming authority anywhere, and secondly that recent events have shown us that DNS names are susceptible to political wrangling, like DNS rerouting, national blocks on domains and US government seizure of domain names. I see this as a real problem for FreedomBox owners (I personally like the term "owner" rather than consumer or user.) I wanted to bring this up and see if the group has anything to say on this. Thanks, Erik _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
