[Reader-list] [Fwd: <unlike-us> Building the Freedombox]

[Patrice Riemens]

bwo unlike-us list/ Marc Stumpel


BANGALORE, November 6, 2011 by Deepa Kurup from The Hindu:
http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/karnataka/article2601600.ece

Jonas Smedegaard holds in his hand a box that's no larger than a power
adapter and much lighter than an average laptop charger. A Danish
technologist and a well-known Debian developer, Mr. Smedegaard is a hero of
sorts in the world of free software, and no less than an idol to the
students he's meeting at various tech conferences, lectures and workshops
being held this week in the city.

Besides being among the key developers involved for over a decade in the
evolution of Debian, the Free Linux distribution, his ‘stardom' has a lot
to do with the year-old collaborative project that he is part of: the
FreedomBox. With its promise to decentralise information and power by
simply taking online interactions off the cloud and the centralised servers
owned by corporations, the FreedomBox has been one of the most-talked-about
projects in recent times.

Still very much in its development stages, Mr. Smedegaard carries a small
prototype of what the box will be. His eyes light up when he talks about
the possibilities of a perfect world where the Internet would be a
conglomeration of personalised nodes, where power structures and
hierarchies cease to exist. The actual product, software stacks and all, he
says, will take at least a year to complete. However, the hardware part of
the plug (akin to a mini-server) is nearly ready and is currently being
manufactured by GlobalScale, a hardware company.

The Box runs on an ARM chip (however, it is not tied to this chipset) and
has a 512 MB RAM. Though it will provide for internal storage, he explains
that the way he sees it, users can simply add on external hard drives for
storage memory. The device will run on the Debian Operating System,
customised to provide privacy tools with an extremely simple user
interface. This is the part that Mr. Smedegaard works on.

The technologist, who identifies himself as an “idealist and Internet
architect” on his visiting card, got on to this ambitious project after he
heard a lecture by academic, hacktivist and lawyer Eben Moglen, who
propounded the simple yet powerful idea of the FreedomBox. A personal
plug-in server, stacked with software applications that provide privacy and
security, he envisaged, would ‘free' the online experience and restore
anonymity online. It would enable people to have conversations online that
are safe, secure, and the controls for which are located in your own homes.
Priceless? Mr. Smedegaard agrees.

The FreedomBox is nothing but an Internet server, he says. This means you
reach it exactly the same way you would connect to a service located in,
say, California. “So you do not physically connect your devices to the box.
Instead, you connect the box to the Internet, and then connect your (other)
devices to the Web where they locate the box as they would any other Web
service.”

The ‘look and feel' of the services, or the interface itself, Mr.
Smedegaard feels, is critical.

One possible design, he explains, could look like Facebook or any popular
email service interface. “You would then type your FreedomBox address,
login and password, and then have access to mail, chat, storage, etc. Like
Facebook and Gmail, there could be specialised apps providing an alternate
interface more suitable for the small screens on phones.” Another possible
design, he explains, could be “native” services for mail or chat (many
services already provide native access to email and chat).

Currently, the price of a FreedomBox is around $163. This, Mr. Smedegaard
and the brains behind the Box, are confident it will come down
significantly.

The tools for most of this already exist, points out Mr. Smedegaard. “It's
not about inventing tools but about delivering what we have, and what we
know can decentralise the system in a way that non-geeks can use.”

He feels very strongly about this: “As geeks, we do not realise that the
world out there (of non-technical users) is not going to learn the
interfaces we are familiar with. The interface has to be simple.” He
believes it isn't that people want to give all their information to private
companies, it's just that they don't know any other way, he says. “The
FreedomBox will give them the way out.”
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