
Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You - davewiner
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html?_r=1&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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bootload
_"... Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the
Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch
every twitch of our fingers. ..."_

The key idea behind the _"Freedom box"_ is to own your logs and not let anyone
else infer without your express permission. The idea was discussed in full in
his speech, _"Freedom In the Cloud"_ at the NY Internet society, 2010FEB05.
You can read speech ~ [http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-
ny/FreedomIn...](http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-
ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html) or listen/watch here ~ <http://www.isoc-
ny.org/?p=1338>

~~~
wingo
And his recent FOSDEM speech can be read at
[http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2011/fosdem/moglen-
fos...](http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2011/fosdem/moglen-fosdem-
keynote.html). There was good discussion on the recent LWN story, too:
<http://lwn.net/Articles/426763/>

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Groxx
There's a ridiculous amount of a lack of information in that "news" entry.

"Rebuild the Internet"... how? They're evidently not planning on wall-warts to
route the Internet. "would decentralize information and power" how, precisely?
There's absolutely squat in the article about wtf the thing would do.

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retube
But what is it? What does it do? How does it work? I skimmed the article,
maybe I missed the answers to these, but seemed precious thin on actual
information.

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MatthewB
This seems like an awesome idea in concept but I agree with twir...what stops
the government from just getting the ISPs to turn off traffic?

I would pay $99 for myself and buy each and every one of my friends one of
these boxes if the concept proved true.

~~~
Wildweasal
Assuming the goal here is to have the Free Exchange of Information:

Step 1 is to own the hardware that serves up your information.

Step 2 is to own the path that your information travels upon.

You are correct, Step 2 is a significantly more difficult problem to solve,
but this does not mean that we should not try to solve Step 1 while we have an
opportunity to do so.

~~~
stewars
I believe IPv6 provides a start for what is necessary to solve Step 2.

IPSec is part of the protocol so these connections can be trusted. Also no NAT
issues so connecting directly between trusted 'plugs' may be simpler than with
IPv4. May need to start with a mesh network over a mix of paths that you own
and paths that you may not.

I have no real world experience implementing IPv6, just been looking into it
lately.

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ez77
_“They’re $99; they will go to $69. Once everyone is getting them, they will
cost $29.”_

They're $99 now? Where?

~~~
icarus_drowning
A Tonidoplug, which is a Sheeva plug with the Tonido software on it, is $99:

<http://tonidoplug.com>

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romaniv
I would start thinking about decentralization from the software end, because
it's much simpler to change. My #1 item would be decentralized alternative to
DNS. Once you decentralize names, the state of a particular physical server
stops to matter that much, because you can always point your name to another
server Without that you will always have a single choke-point - the server's
name.

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trout
Because having a night-light server plugged into your wall will prevent the
government from turning off internet services?

Because encrypted distributed servers running around the country will
efficiently serve internet traffic?

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naner
For pete's sake...

I'm a fan of Moglen and the SFLC but this is about as practical as a bicycle
with square wheels.

~~~
adammichaelc
What you've said doesn't add anything to the conversation. It's roughly
equivalent to standing up in the middle of a lecture, yelling "You suck!" and
then walking out without any explanation of your own ideas.

Why is his idea flawed? What would it require to succeed? Are there other
similar ideas that you think are good? Answering these questions would be
interesting. Doing what you did is not.

~~~
twir
I'll bite.

It's a fantastic idea. What is missing from it is how the infrastructure is
and probably always will be under the domain (pun intended) of corporations.

For example, how do we provide "internet access" with these servers? We don't
own the fiber; it it gets shut down we're dead in the water. ISPs run the
networks and therefore control the content and charge for it as much as they
want.

An alternative is state-controlled ISPs--but we all can guess how fun that
would be.

I'm trying to think of yet other alternatives, but I'm drawing a blank.

~~~
trout
I'm not entirely sure it's possible. We've seen examples of other governments
taking down sites because of the way internet protocols work, specifically BGP
[1]. I believe some number of the DNS root servers are directly or nearly-
directly controlled by the government. Service providers have legal
obligations to allow access into their facilities. We're not as bad off as
others - some governments do run the ISPs.

I don't see the difference between having encrypted data on a mini-server at
your house vs. housed at a provider. If the data was stored centrally and
there were few options, it would make the legal process of getting the data
easier. With the existing options for hosting data in many different
countries, this doesn't seem to be a problem. Even then, you could probably
stripe this data across centrally stored hosting solutions and still have a
more efficient and secure process than hosting off of a 'Freedom Box'.

Options seem to be: 1\. Distributed storage. The storage is striped across
these boxes all over, and no single box has any data. Nobody can subpoena the
data because of the process involved in getting the information from so many
people at once. I think using distributed storage would be very, very
difficult with data redundancy, latency, and maintaining security with such
high availability and access.

2\. Each box is self operating, but managed centrally. Data storage is
contained to a single (or few) boxes to simplify data access and speed. This
still allows centralized access to the data, and fewer people would be
involved in collecting the data. Higher levels of security could be
maintained, but legally easier to access.

3\. Self managed secure boxes that have a 'cloud' or 'bot' organization of
peer-to-peer relationships. Again, these types of systems work today, but
there are still centralized servers and most of the workload is still carried
by large servers/organizations.

It seems easier to simply make Tor more secure, which is a different debate if
that's even possible. The article reads like a lawyer who has some tech
experience thinks he has created a magic Internet v2.0 because he's found a
way to get around the legal ramifications of privacy without regard to
technical ramifications.

1\. [http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/022608-youtube-
outage-...](http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/022608-youtube-outage-
underscores-big-internet.html)

