Freedom Box Foundation Wants Plug Servers For All

An anonymous reader writes "From the NYTimes.com article: 'A Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, [is] putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers. ... Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.'"

"Running a server" in violation of AUP

[tepples]

"Once everyone is getting them, they will cost $29." -- Eben Moglen

And then everyone will get to watch their Internet bills double or triple as the ISP discovers that they're "running a server" in violation of the ISP's acceptable use policy and "helpfully" upgrades their service to business class.

He forgot something

[commodore6502]

Wires. That requires an external provider, either a private monopoly or the government. And of course that lets them tap the wire.

How will they communicate?

[Gonoff]

There will need to be some other way for them to network than through ISPs. They are the bottleneck. Perhaps, some sort of mesh network?

Otherwise, Your ISP takes exception to a server running on your domestic network - despite the fact that a large amount of people on /. do just that. Even if they allow that, they can limit what goes across their wires - in times of emergency perhaps no encrypted traffic or HTTPS.

You are going to either have to live in high density housing or figure out how to fit microwave relays all over the suburbs.

Revolution

[eddy]

If you're part of a revolution, being able to communicate digitally with your local peers is just as important as being able to communicate with someone at the other end of the world. Cheap plugs that build/connect a wireless mesh network could achieve that goal. I feel like most people in this thread aren't thinking big enough. The revolution isn't happening in the outback, think "central and crowded". The main problem might be getting one plug to cover enough area that it network can form at all, but should be a solvable problem. They'd also have to be configurable enough to be resilient to any cheap/directed attack (so not using a hard-coded frequency, whatever)

Re:Diaspora, Decentralized DNS, whatnot

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully it will fail as spectacularly as the once upon-a-time one-man effort to write a 80386 kernel for fun. God knows that didn't go anywhere after being announced!