The FreedomBox projectStefano Maffulli

2011 June 21st, San Francisco (CA)

I would like you to imagine the corners of the world where things don't turn out well for people that dare not to agree with power. And they rely on the Internet as the technological tool to enable their freedom of speech, their freedom to express their political views, their freedom to protest and get a better place to live and work in.

http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-3629119935

Keep those images in mind when I tell you that we have 4 forces doing anything they can to eliminate these freedoms on the net.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/96884693@N00/5658644927/

government

we have governments deeply concerned about the possible loss of control that comes from the freedom to tell stories any way we want and escape the framing that power puts around things

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/3664384371/

Content owners

we have content owners who believe that their bits are sacred and the possibility that those bits may be copied justifies controlling the net down to each endpoint and down to every eyeball and every eardrum

http://www.flickr.com/photos/soerenpeters/1151601662/

Data miners

we have data miners, the industry of the future, their job is to know what you want before you know it so that they can sell you to somebody. All that is required is to read your email, check every party that you go to, check every conversations you have with your friends. And they have arranged to make this possible.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer/4870003098/

Network operators

we have network operators that are transforming the end-to-end network (as described by Lessig) into the everything must come to us and all your life are belong to us!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/titanas/3596049112/

platforms

among the four, we have platforms, devices that won't let you remove the banner from a page, won't let you skip an ad, won't let you share a song, lend a book or even speak your mind.

The internet as we have designed it and experienced is being changed. it's being monitored, measured, watched by people for other people that will answer a subpoena if they get one.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/the-meir/5026552048/l

Advertising

You may think that you're not a revolutionary in a remote corner of the globe, these things are not about you. We living around the golden gate, in the golden plated Silicon Valley, we have our own set of issues with this architecture of the Internet.

Advertising in the 20th century was a random activity. You threw things out and hoped they worked. Advertising in the 21st century is an exquisitely precise activity. You wait for a guy to want something and then you send him advertisements about what he wants and it works like magic.

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/38/81/2388102_74d0d02c.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oceanflynn/315385916/

It started before Google, they perfected search. Search offers a service, for free: it crawls and gathers information around the web, centralizes everything in order to analyze the data and design correlations between words, pages, people. All designed in order to serve you advertising.

The free email

And there is email, free for you at the cost of being spied: companies whose main purpose is to scan and analyze your email to know more about you so that they can tell you what you want to buy before you even know it. What costs them a penny to run given the current cost of storage makes them millions selling you. You've turned into their product.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/notoriousxl/3030271346

The aquarium

Facebook is the next step: it's I will give you free web hosting and some PHP tools and you get spying for free all the time. And it works.

There was no architectural reason really. Facebook is the Web but instead of being spread, a collection of hyperlinked documents, intelligence at the edges of the net, is an aquarium and we're happy to be watched swimming in it.

Thats a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at spying all the time. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is subject to misuse. There isnt any other business model for them. This is bad.

This shouldn't happen

This shouldn't happen. Im not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. Were technologists, we should fix it. We've built the components of that aquarium, we can build an ocean where we are in control of where we go, what we do.

We made free software for over 20 years, we have made all the tools we need to fix the net. We can put anonimity back in the net. Change the routers and spread the intelligence back to the edges. We can make technology work for us.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anynonymoose/2588253456/

Powered by freedom

Services that improve privacy of communication

FreedomBox is software in a box. Oour software will provide services to people and businesses that will improve the privacy of their communication.

We have made software that can encrypt/decrypt email and store in a place where a search warrant is necessary in order to get it

We made software that can provide the equivalent of skype that is free voip with a higher level of privacy than Skype owned by Microsoft can possibly provide

We made distributed social networking to keep in touch with your friends and family, that offers you ways to share that don't require you to provide information into a centralized database owned by a fool.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/makelessnoise/195088755/

The nature of the hardware is a series of small server capable of running on batteries. and enable your home network to run in a smarter way.

Instead of running a dumb wireless router we envision a product that you can plug into a socket and, automatically, you'll have a router that cares about your privacy.Marvell Sheeva Core Embedded CPU @1.2 GHz2 GB on board micro-SDSDRAM: 512MB 16bit DDR2 @800 MHz 2 x Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps 2 x USB 2.0 ports (Host) 1 x eSATA 2.0 port- 3Gbps SATAII 1 x SD Socket for user expansion/application WiFi: 802.11 b/g Bluethooth: BT2.1 + EDRDigital out: S/PDIF with fiber optics intefaceStereo headphone out, Mic in

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andypiper/5450609876/

Technical committee

Jacob Appelbaum, from the Tor project

Bdale Garbee, Open Source and Linux Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard

Sam Hartman, former Chief Technologist at the MIT Kerberos Consortium and IETF Security Area Director

Sascha Meinrath, Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative

Rob Savoye, long-time GNU hacker, Gnash lead developer, and winner of the 2010 award for the Advancement of Free Software

Matt Zimmerman, former Canonical CTO

we have a nucleus of experienced developers

Jacob Appelbaum, from the Tor projectBdale Garbee, Open Source and Linux Chief Technologist at Hewlett-PackardSam Hartman, former Chief Technologist at the MIT Kerberos Consortium and IETF Security Area DirectorSascha Meinrath, Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology InitiativeRob Savoye, long-time GNU hacker, Gnash lead developer, and winner of the 2010 award for the Advancement of Free SoftwareMatt Zimmerman, former Canonical CTO

We'll soon have a prototype

What will it do

Safe social networking

Secure backup

Network neutrality protection

Safe anonymous publication

Home network security

Encrypted email

Private voice communications

First code idea

High-five mobile phones to establish trust

The objective is to enable two users, Jane and Ken, to exchange their private information (vcard, GPG keys) and establish a high degree of digital trust by simply scanning a QRcode. The updated status of 'trust' can be then transmitted back from the phone to their respective FreedomBoxes, securing future communication between Jane and Ken.

How it would work

On the phone:Use QR code to exchange private information and OpenPGP keys

On the FreedomBox:Once the phones are close to their paired FreedomBox, the box signs and sends the key signed to the owners

Private communication is established

Want to hack?

we'll have to make it easy for any ordinary person to run it, not more difficult than operating the smartphones that we all carry in our pockets. So you can put it in any place you like where if somebody wants to know what's in it they can get a warrant.

We're actively looking for UX designers. If you know a talented designer that wants to contribute her expertise or you know of institutions that may be interested in financing the development of the UI of FreedomBox let us know.

This is the challenge.

http://ninaturns40.blogs.com/nina_turns_40/2005/08 /good_things_abo.html

The FreedomBox will be useful in the parts of the world where governments are oppressing their citizens. In these places and here at home we want to go to people with great social networking, updates automatically, software so strong you couldnt knock it over it you kicked it, used in hundreds of millions of servers all over the planet doing a wonderful job. We can do that. That requires us to do only the stuff were really really good at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zenashots/5459794919/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oceanflynn/315385916/

We need to re-architect services in the Net. We need to re-distribute services back towards the edge. We need to go from an architecture of centralization like this one

The social network

to one made of people.

We need to de-virtualize the servers where our life is stored and we need to restore some autonomy to you as the owner of the server.

This is technical challenge for social reason. Its a frontier for technical people to explore. There is enormous social pay-off for exploring it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/luc/1804295568/

More info

http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/

https://lists.freedomboxfoundation.org/s/arc/tac

irc://irc.oftc.net/freedombox-tac

https://identi.ca/group/freedombox

http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss

Contacts details

Questions?

Follow FreedomBox on identi.ca/twitter@freedomboxfndn

I'm@smaffulli

http://maffulli.net