I like the idea of having your data and services untethered from a specific provider, but I could see a system like this generalized to support any hosting situation, and not just a dedicated home server. My ideal system:
* Minimal effort install to a local machine as well as any of the major cloud providers, and some sort of architecture to easily add more providers.
* Clear separation of system/apps and data
* ability to easily backup and migrate data from one installation to another
* Commercial providers that specifically provide setup, hosting, and support for this solution
With these features, you could choose your level of privacy and effort, and be assured that you will have a sustainable system in the future, even when you're working 12 hour days during that crunch and have no time to mess with your personal cloud.
I've looked at what this is, but it's not clear to me. Is this an alternative to Tor? How can it enable users in China to surf the internet for free? Is it some kind of VPN? A short intro is welcome! :-)
It's supposed to be a cheap and complete server you can just plug into your own home. Remember answering machines? That they would store your voice mails, and it was a machine in your own home, which you could control all on your own? Your data physically stored under the same lock and key that you use for the rest of your life?
That's the idea with Freedombox. Host your own email server, website, chat server. Servers nowadays are called "clouds", so the idea is to have a "cloud" in your own home, under your control.
A great explanation of why freedomBox is necessary and important is the keynote from Eben Moglen at Fosdem (Free and Open Source European Meeting) 2011.
Why Political Liberty Depends on Software Freedom More Than Ever
I think FreedomBox is a Debian "pure blend" configured to provide self-hosted communication services such as blog, dav, tor, voip, vpn, wiki and xmpp on low-power open hardware such as single board computers, and any other hardware that runs Debian.
It frightens me how literal this looks to be intended: that freedom is (almost exclusively) a function of infrastructure, rather than "the human layer". It's a dead-serious attempt to "hot-wire" politics by means of better crypto and smarter tech, to avoid having to engage in the constructive design and defense of laws which guarantee freedom.
Our dependence on technology enables new vectors of control and I am not as optimistic about the ability of laws to guarantee these will not be abused. Trust in government as an agent of freedom is a very recent (not to mention regional) development. I say we err on the side of freedom and don't tempt government too much with opportunities for technology-assisted totalitarianism.
Yes, the name of the project is aspirational, but there's a bit of fallacy of relative privation in this argument, don't you think? Why can't technical specialists use their skills toward a common goal of greater freedom? Should they spend that time and effort faxing their congresspersons instead?
Eben Moglen is both technically and legally savvy (he's the one who wrote the GPL). He works on both fronts, and the FreedomBox project which he inspired is but part of his overall work.
Oh, I thought rms only wrote GPLv1 and got a lot of assistance from Moglen for GPLv2, but I suppose you're right, my bad, it was only until GPLv3 that Moglen had a big impact.
> political freedom from authority is only ever won via extreme violence.
Eh, that's the most extreme end. Political freedom from authority is won by having more power, period. That power can come in many forms, but at its most primal can come from having the capability of lethal force. The power of a representative government is supposed to be in being able to vote out those that are destroying you, not in you having to take up arms to solve the issue.
For most of human history, political freedom was won by being too far away / hard to reach. A few miles of moderately rough terrain would do in many instances, or a modest slope.
The FreedomBox Foundation is led by Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center (http://softwarefreedom.org/), which takes care of the human and law layer.
I think the Freedombox concept is the technical part of the two prong solution to the problem. EFF handles free speech and privacy. Freedombox deals with the just in case situation if/when EFF fails.
In March 2013, in Boston, Mr. Moglen publicly blamed the ever-receding launch date of the FreedomBox on a fire at the dev's house.
Or something like that. I wasn't really paying attention!
The whole thing sounded like vaporware, and I hadn't yet heard him speak about matters of privacy law and software freedom--topics on which he is on far better footing!
Agreed. I couldn't figure it out at all without navigating around a bit. Someone with some HTML/CSS ability should attempt to donate some time to fixing this web page's messaging issues to get the product across better, to those technical or otherwise.
* Minimal effort install to a local machine as well as any of the major cloud providers, and some sort of architecture to easily add more providers.
* Clear separation of system/apps and data
* ability to easily backup and migrate data from one installation to another
* Commercial providers that specifically provide setup, hosting, and support for this solution
With these features, you could choose your level of privacy and effort, and be assured that you will have a sustainable system in the future, even when you're working 12 hour days during that crunch and have no time to mess with your personal cloud.