[Freedombox-discuss] In-the-cloud infrastructure and business involvement (was: distributed DNS)
Le mercredi 16 mars 2011 ? 17:34 +0000, Bjarni R?nar Einarsson a ?crit :
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 4:13 PM, <bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org> wrote:
>
> Why would it be needed if the main idea is that each service
> is hosted on your
> freedombox or the one of your friend, which helps a lot to
> bring back data
> close to you, or in trusted places. Sure some pieces will be
> hard to get
> rid off, like a registrar for the top level domain, but there
> are ways get
> rid of a lot of this pieces.
>
> For the FreedomBox to be really useful, you'll want to be able to
> connect to it when you are away from home - it becomes your "personal
> cloud". It also needs to be able to communicate with other FBs.
> These both imply it needs a name and a way to be reached, which is one
> of the things being discussed. There are lots of options!
>
> If you want to be able to reach the box using standard tools, say a
> web-browser, then it needs to be compatible with today's web: normal
> DNS, reachable IP address - both of which require lots of help from
> the cloud if your ISP is filtering your traffic or you don't have a
> public IP. If you are OK with using specialized software to interact
> with your FreedomBox remotely, then you may not need such
> compatibility.
>
> Same if you want to be able to send normal e-mail to the box, or send
> normal e-mail from the box, it needs to be compatible with SMTP and
> needs help from the cloud to work around existing spam protection and
> ISP filters. If you are OK with only communicating with other FB
> users, then again, you don't need SMTP and may not need help from the
> cloud.
>
> I tend to assume compatibility is something we want, and something the
> project will fail without. But others may well disagree. :-)
The freedombox project is based on softwares in debian, which all do
have built in standard protocols today in use ; except if you purposely
disable them. e.g. by simply shipping a web browser, it will allow
people using the "cloud", as you call it, for any purposes they want.
There should be no fear about compatibility here. The issue you're
raising up here is quite different: as in some case the internet core
principle "end to end communication" is broken, you are talking about
some servers in the middle to provide communication services. Which I
will name as: moving bits as a business model.
Therefor, before proposing such business, we should ask ourselves why
this situation?
As you pointed this out, let's take SMTP as an exemple. In my own
country, france, some ISP are blocking clients to use SMTP server at
home (like orange) and some do not (like FDN http://www.fdn.fr/ ). The
reason they use for this blocking is "spam": i.e. your ISP is not
trusting you or your system, or maybe both.
Thus some big companies are building so called "trustworthy" systems
restricting people's power: in this model they take away people's
responsibility and they do act as a father putting clients in a childish
position. They cover this is some technical argument; like average joe
user cannot secure its system, thus their highly qualified engineers
have to do the job for them.
But, as a matter of fact, there is still spams all around the internet,
which in one hand prove this kind of methodology does not work. In the
other hand, it give those companies an advantage: you strictly needs
them, or what you call the "cloud", to move your emails. i.e. moving
bits as a business model.
For those familiar with the internet design, it was explicitly designed
to avoid this situation. This is called the "end to end" principle, in
which every computer in the network should be able to directly
interoperate with any another computer. In such design, there is no
business for moving bits.
Why are ISP breaking it? Because, in the long run some intent to break
another core principle of internet: "net neutrality", in witch any
communication should be treated fairly. Indeed, once one can force you
to use their very own services for communication, they can charge you
AND the other end. e.g. providing better routes for some services and
bad ones for some service not agreeing to have commercial
relationship...
e.g. read this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/16/tim-berners-lee-net-neutrality
As I hopefully explained above, those practices are against the internet
design. Today, with the freedombox project we can oppose this strongly.
Indeed the hardware is here to allow people becoming their own internet
provider (24h/24h low cost but powerfull enough hardware, mesh wifi,
network stack with IPv6 which are in *all* operating systems).
We do have the design for end to end communication and it is a standard.
IPv6 provide enough addresses to connect every piece of rock on earth.
There is even a standard advocating against NAT in IPv6:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4864.txt
"Abstract
Although there are many perceived benefits to Network Address
Translation (NAT), its primary benefit of "amplifying" available
address space is not needed in IPv6. In addition to NAT's many
serious disadvantages, there is a perception that other benefits
exist, such as a variety of management and security attributes that
could be useful for an Internet Protocol site. IPv6 was designed
with the intention of making NAT unnecessary, and this document shows
how Local Network Protection (LNP) using IPv6 can provide the same or
more benefits without the need for address translation."
Thus all the issues you raised here are taking care by the internet evolution,
and only bad business model like moving bits prevent it.
Best regards,
Yannick
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