[Freedombox-discuss] Addressing
On 08/27/2010 05:12 PM, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 13:45, Lars Wirzenius<liw at liw.fi> wrote:
>> On pe, 2010-08-27 at 18:59 +0000, Clint Adams wrote:
>>> In my mind, a fundamental requirement to the success of such a freedom box
>>> would be some sort of distributed, decentralized naming system.
>> I concur. In general, I think we are going to have to avoid any central
>> dependency for anything at all.
>
> So what naming systems do we have? There's IPv4 and IPv6 -- they have
> the problem that many people aren't addressable by IPv4, many more
> aren't by IPv6, and both are a pain for humans to deal with; there's
> DNS which is probably too much hassle for regular people to setup;
> there's email, though that doesn't allow totally automatic handling;
> there's a bunch of social network services like facebook, linkedin,
> identi.ca, and whatnot which may or may not have APIs to be more
> automatic than email; and there's public key encryption which lets you
> know who you're talking to, but not find them in the first place.
I agree that this is a fundamental part of the problem; if we can't get
the boxes to find each other, we can't get much in the way of
communication going on. It might be productive to break the problem into
two halves:
1) how are the boxes addressable from a non-local network, and
2) how do the people who own those boxes exchange information on finding
their boxes
The questions are related but don't have to have the same answer. For
example, protocols like webfinger [https://code.google.com/p/webfinger/]
could allow us to turn email addresses into a much more automatic
exchange of addressing information.
Similarity, if DNS is too complicated for people to set up, or for us to
have their boxes auto-configure, we could run a handful of dynamicDNS
services with monkeySphere authentication of clients. Then people could
continue switching "networks" as they want by changing dynamicDNS sites
and getting new contact information for the same box. (I wrote more
about that here: http://churchkey.org/2010/03/17/dynamic-dns-facebook/ )
Or, as was mentioned at the conference, we could set the boxes up to
find each other over TOR. I'm not sure how the social exchange of
contact details works in that setting but I'm sure someone else on the
list does.
-Ian
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