Freedom Box
On Feb 5 2010 in an ISOC-NY Talk Eben Moglen proposed that the community should put its collective minds to work on a free (as in freedom) alternative to current social networks. This he suggested, would take the form of a network of individual portable social media servers - the Freedom Box.
Please feel free to add an ideas / links to related material on this page.
- Note: This page can be reached via the shortcut http://isoc-ny.org/fb
ISOC-NY ISX Project
ISXUbuntu is a longstanding project of ISOC-NY to create a Linux live CD which has been optimized for security and privacy while online. Problems with ubuntu caused other linux releases to be considered and the name has recently been changed to ISX.
There is a project mailing list: http://lists.isoc-ny.org/listinfo.cgi/isxubuntu-isoc-ny.org
Re-evaluating the scope of the project
I do not understand the significance of the hardware as a solution to the stated problem. It seems to me that the essential issue is that non-hierarchal (i.e. non-centralized) "externally"-managed web hosting does not exist. Users want web-hosting but don't have, nor should they require, the inclination or capacity to manage a web-server themselves.
A "specialized" piece of hardware to do this is superfluous; it can be done and done better in software using existing computers. Moreover, it is not resilient enough: If my hardware or connection go offline I want my hosted content to persist throughout the downtime. If we are trying sell convenience I doubt that we will beat the status quo using something strictly less hands-off.
In effect, what is required is a encrypted distributed data store (the "people's cloud") that is accessible over HTTP. It is here where effort should be directed. Potential data-mining can be mitigated by having only your friends (and possibly friends-of-friends) host your data.
All of these ideas have existed for years in Freenet and other overlay networks. Adoption of these previous networks have been hampered by their anonymity-preserving design requirements which exacts a significant transfer rate penalty. An overlay network which does not require anonymity is not subject to these problems.
Two additional benefits are of note: The first is censorship resistance. Centrally hosted sites are single points of failure and easy targets to effectively suppress information. Wikileaks is the notable exception that has survived only by localizing in a sympathetic country. However, wikileaks itself has noted that this venue shopping will be a short-lived solution. Worse it has not prevented the people behind wikileaks from being at high risk from retaliation from various nation states. Replicating content to thousands or millions of sites automatically makes the application of censorship absurd.
The second benefit is amortization of hosting costs of public-service websites. Some sites, like wikipedia, have enormous hosting costs that are unsustainble at their current growth rates. Charitable donations will soon become inadequate. A more cynical point is that these hosting costs are often used as a pretense to obtain increased salary funding for executives of these organizations. If the data were (read-only) cached in a distributed data store the technical costs would again become manageable (trivial?), funding could be put to use elsewhere and the application of funding more transparent.
