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Ich bin sehr Stolz einen Gast aus den vereinigten Staaten hier auf der
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00:00:11,012 --> 00:00:14,086
Elevate begrüssen zu dürfen, es ist James Vasile von der Freedom Box Foundation
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James Vasile arbeitet an meheren Projekten
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z.b.Apache, ich denke auch Joomla und viele andere. Er ist auch Anwalt,
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und arbeitet für die Freedom Box Foundation und die Free Software Foundation.
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Er presentiert nun, meiner Meinung nach, eines der illusionärsten Projekte , das ich in Jahren sah.
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wie wir hier sehen können, eine kleine Kiste, die Freedom Box.
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Ja, James wird eine Präsentation geben und dann werden wir
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in einer gesprächsrunde Fragen beantworten.
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so James, es ist deine Bühne.
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Danke Daniel.
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Ich bin jetzt seit ein paar Tagen auf dem Elevate Festival
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Ich besuchte einige Vorlesungen, sah Filme und hörte Musik
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und es ist ein grossartiger Platz wo alle diese Ideen zusammmenkommen.
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Ich möchte mich bei Daniel für die organisation bedanken
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und natürlich auch bei Joseph.
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Im besonderen bei Daniel , der mich dazubewegte hierher zu kommen.
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und ein wirklich toller Gastgeber ist.
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Vielen Dank noch einmal.
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APPLAUS
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lange Zeit zurück, in den Anfängen des Internets
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als wir anfingen das internet zu benutzen um miteinander zu reden,
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Sprachen wir meistens direkt zu den menschen, richtig ?
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Think about how email works, on a technical level
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You take a message, you hand it off to your mail transport agent
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It sends it through a network, directly to the recipient.
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It hops through some other computers, but funadmentally
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you use the network to talk directly to your other computer
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the other computer where the recipient gets his or her mail
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It was a direct communication medium.
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If you're old enough to remember a program called 'talk'
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Talk was the first, sort of, interactive you type, they see it, they type, you see it
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instant message application.
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This again, was direct.
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You would put your, put their name, into your program, and address
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they would put theirs into yours, and you would just talk directly to each other
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You didn't send this message through servers. That centralised technology.
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From there, from those beginnings of talking directly to each other
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we started to build communities, emailing directly to people.
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But that was relatively inefficient.
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Talking directly to people, one-to-one, works very good for one-to-one converstions.
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But as soon as you want a group conversation
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as soon as you want to find people reliably who you haven't
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already set up contacts for, exchanged email addresses and such
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you run into friction, you run into problems
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So the solution to that, was to create more centralised structures
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and we did this with IRC
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IRC is a place where instead of talking directly to the people we're trying to reach
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we take a message, and we send it to an IRC server
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a third party
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and the IRC server then copies that message
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to all the people who we might want to talk to.
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We developed mailing lists, listservs
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And again, this was a way where we would take our message
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and hand it to a third party
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A mail server, that is not us and not the person we're trying to talk to
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and that mail server would then echo our communication to
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all the people we want to talk to
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and this was great, because you didn't have to know the
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addresses of all the people you wanted to talk to
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You could just all 'meet' in a common place
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We all meet in an IRC chatroom, we all meet on a listserv
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And there were a lot of IRC channels, and a lot of IRC servers
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and a lot of mail servers
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all across the internet
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A lot of places to do this communication.
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And if you didn't like the policies or the structures or the technology
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of any one of these service providers
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these IRC servers, or these list servers
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you could just switch, you could choose to run your own.
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It was very simple.
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This infrastructure is not hard to create, it's not hard to run, it's not hard to install.
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And so a lot of people did run, create and install it.
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There were a bunch of IRC servers, there were a bunch of different listserv packages
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But as we've moved forward in time,
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we've started to centralise even more.
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And, you can fast-forward to today
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where we're channeling our communication
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through fewer and fewer places.
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And we are making structures that are more and more central
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and more and more over-arching
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So, from the, the IRC way of talking to each other
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we moved to instant messaging applications.
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AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ,
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those were the early ways to do it
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and there were only a few of them
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MSN had its messaging system, Yahoo had its messaging system
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and when people wanted to talk to each other now,
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they were using third-parties again.
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But they were only using a few third parties.
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And if you wanted to switch providers,
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you would leave almost everyone you knew behind,
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your entire community behind.
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And so it becomes harder to switch.
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There are fewer options
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and the cost of switching leaves more and more people behind
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So you started to have lock-in.
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You started to have people who were chained to their methods of communication
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because the cost of losing your community is too high.
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And so if you don't like the technology, or you don't like the policy
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or you don't like the politics
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or if they're trying to filter you
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or censor you
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you don't have a lot of options.
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The cost of leaving is so high that you might stay.
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People do stay. And they accept it.
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And we went from that small basket of providers of this kind
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of communication technology
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to an even more centralised structure
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where there is effectively only one way to reach all our friends,
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in each mod of communication,
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Facebook.
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And Twitter.
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These two services rule everything.
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And I'm not going to stand here and say Facebook is evil
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and that Twitter is evil
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What I want to say is that having one place
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where we do all our communication
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leaves us at the mercy of the policies of the people
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that control the infrastructure that we are chained to,
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that we are stuck using, that we are locked into.
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You can't leave Facebook without leaving everybody you know
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because everybody you know is on Facebook.
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I was not a Facebook user.
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I was against Facebook.
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I thought it was bad to centralise all our communication in one place.
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I didn't like the privacy implications,
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I didn't like Facebook's censorship
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of things like pictures of nursing mothers.
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I don't think that kind of thing is obscene,
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and I don't think Facebook should have the ability to tell us
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what we can share with our friends.
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So I thought those were bad policies,
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and I reacted to that by not joining Facebook. For years.
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All my friends were on Facebook.
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I joined Facebook late last year. November.
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Because in November, a friend of mine passed away.
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His name was Chuck. He was a brilliant man.
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And he lived a lot of his life online.
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He was on Facebook, and he shared things with friends on Facebook.
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When he passed away I realised I hadn't communicated with him in a while,
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I hadn't really talked to him in a while.
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And the reason I hadn't was because I wasn't
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communicating with him in the place he communicates.
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I wasn't meeting him where he was, I wasn't on Facebook.
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I was missing out on something huge.
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That's the cost of not being there.
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And so I joined.
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Because I decided that as strong as my beliefs were,
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it was more important to me to be there with my friends and
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to talk to my friends.
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That's the power of lock-in.
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Me, a person who cares, as much as I do,
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who cares enough about these issues that I do something like this
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I got locked into Facebook. I'm there now.
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That's how I talk to a lot of my friends, whether I like it or not
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I am locked into Facebook.
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You know, I'm also on Diaspora. But my friends aren't on Diaspora.
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This sort of lock-in creates a sort of situation where
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we have one arbiter of what is acceptable speech,
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whether we like it or not.
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If they're free, we're free to the extent,
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only to the extent,
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that they give us freedom.
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And that to me isn't freedom.
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That to me is accepting what you're given.
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It's the exact opposite of making your own choices.
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The exact opposite of self-determination.
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All of our problems in communication can be traced
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to centralized communications infrastructure.
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Now, I've sort of told this story at the social level,
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in the way that we're talking about how to talk to your peers
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and your friends on the internet.
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But this story also exists when we think about relying on the pipes,
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relying on the hardware, the technical infrastructure behind the software.
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We rely on internet backbones,
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we rely on centralized cellphone networks,
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we rely on centralized telephone networks.
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The people that control these networks have the ability
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to tell us what we're allowed to say,
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when we're allowed to say it.
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They have the ability to filter us, to censor us, to influence us.
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Sometimes they use that ability, and sometimes they don't,
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and sometimes by law they're not allowed to.
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But at the end of the day
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the power doesn't rest in our hands.
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The power, from a technological perspective,
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rests in the hands of the people that operate the
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networks.
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Centralization doesn't just allow this sort of filtering and censorship.
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There's another big problem with centralization.
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The other big problem with centralization is that by
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gathering all of our data in one place
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it becomes easy
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to spy on us.
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So every time you go to a website
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pretty much
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the website includes, at the bottom of the page
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a little graphic or invisible Javascript thing
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that tells Google that you came to visit the page.
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Eva goes to a website, and the website says
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"Hey Google! Eva just came to my website!"
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Every time she goes to a website, that happens.
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And so Google effectively sits next to her and watches,
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while she uses the internet.
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Watches everything she does,
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and everything she enters,
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everything she looks at and knows.
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It's not just her search data, it's not just her Gmail.
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It's the entire picture of her digital life.
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In one place.
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That's a pretty complete profile.
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If you were able...
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...imagine if somebody could sit next to you and watch
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everything you did online,
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imagine how much they would know about you.
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That's how much Google knows about you.
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Google knows more about you than you know about yourself,
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because Google never forgets.
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Google knows more about you than your parents,
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than your partner,
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Google knows your secrets, your worst secrets,
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Google knows if you're cheating on your spouse
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because they saw you do the Google search for the
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sexually-transmitted disease.
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Google knows your hopes and your dreams.
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Because the things we hope and dream about,
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we look for more information about.
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We're natural information seekers.
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We think about something, it fascinates us,
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we go and look it up online. We search around.
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We look around the internet, and we think about it.
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And Google is right there. Following our thought process,
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the thought process in our click trail.
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That is an intimate relationship.
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Right? Do you want an intimate relationship with Google?
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Maybe you do.
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I personally, don't.
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But that's it, Google sits next to us and watches us use
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our computers.
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And if anyone actually did... if you had a friend who wanted
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to sit next to you, or a stranger said I want to sit next to you
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and just watch you use your computer all day,
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you would use that computer very differently to the way you do now.
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But because Google doesn't physically sit next to you,
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Google sits invisibly in the box, you don't know Google is there.
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But you do know, right?
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We're all aware of this. I'm not saying any of you don't know,
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especially in a room like this.
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But we don't think about it.
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We try not to think about it.
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We are locked in, to the internet.
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We can't stop using it.
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And the structures that exist,
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the infrastructure that exists,
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that has been slowly turned from
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a means to allow us to communicate with each other
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to a means of allowing us to access web services
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in return for all our personal information so we can be bought and sold
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like products.
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That is the problem. That is the problem of centralization, of having one structure.
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As soon as we put all that information in one place
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we get complete profiles of us, you get complete pictures of you.
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And that is a lot of information.
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It's valuable information.
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It's information that is used, right now, mostly to sell you things.
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And that, you might find objectionable.
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Maybe you don't.
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Maybe you don't believe the studies that say you can't ignore advertising.
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Maybe you think that you are smart and special, and advertising doesn't affect you.
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You're wrong.
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But maybe you believe that.
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But that information, that same infrastructure, that same technology that allows them
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to know you well enough to sell you soap
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allows them to know you well enough to decide how much of a credit risk you are,
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how much of a health risk you are,
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and what your insurance premiums should look like.
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In America we have a big problem right now.
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Insurance costs are out of control. Health insurance. We're having a lot of difficulty paying for it.
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Insurance companies would like to respond to this problem
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by knowing better who's a good risk and who's a bad risk
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so they can lower prices for the good risk and raise prices for the bad risk.
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Essentially they want to make people who are going to get sick, uninsurable.
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And if you could know enough about a person to know what they're risk factors are based on
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what they're digital life is, if you can get just a little bit of information about them,
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maybe you can figure out who their parents are and what hereditary diseases they might be subject to,
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you can start to understand these things.
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You can start to figure out who's a good risk and who's a bad risk.
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You can use this information for ends that seem reasonable if you're a health insurance
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company, but probably don't seem reasonable if you're
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the kind of person sitting in this room, the kind of person that I talk to.
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And that's the problem. The innocuous use. The use that seems kind of icky, but not truly evil,
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which is advertising.
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It's the same mechanism, the same data, that then gets used for other purposes.
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It's the same data that then gets turned over to a government who wants to oppress you
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because you are supporting wikileaks.
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And that's not a fantasy, that's what happened.
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It's the same information that anybody who wants to know something about you for an evil end would use.
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We have a saying in the world of information, that if the data exists, you can't decide what it gets
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used for.
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Once data exists, especially data in the hands of the government, of officials,
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once that data exists, it's a resource.
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And the use of that resource it its own energy, its own logic.
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Once a resource is there begging to be used, it's very hard to stop it from being used.
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Because it's so attractive, it's so efficient, it would solve so many problems to use the data.
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And so once you collect the data, once the data exists in one centralized place,
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for anybody to come and get it with a warrant, or maybe no warrant, or maybe some money...
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somebody is going to come with a warrant, or no warrant, and they are going to get that data.
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And they will use it for whatever they want to use it.
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Once it's out of the hands of the first person who collected it, who maybe you trust,
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who maybe has good privacy policies, who maybe has no intention to do anything with your data
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other than use it for diagnostic purposes, once it's out of that person's hands it's gone.
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You never know where it goes after that.
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It is completely uncontrolled and unchecked
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and there is no ability to restrain what happens to that data.
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So all of this is my attempt to convince you that privacy is a real value in our society,
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and that the danger of losing privacy is a real problem.
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It's not just the censorship, it's not just the filtering,
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it's not just the propaganda, the influencing of opinion, that's one aspect of it,
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it's not just the free speech. It's also the privacy, because privacy goes to the heart of our autonomy.
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About a year and a half ago to two years ago at the Software Freedom Law Center
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a man named Ian Sullivan who's a co-worker of mine,
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he bought a bunch of plug servers,
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because he was really excited at the thought of using them as print servers, and media servers,
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and he started tinkering with them in our office.
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My boss Eben Moglen who is a long-time activist in the Free Software movement,
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fought very hard for Phil Zimmerman and PGP when that was a big issue,
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he looked at this technology and he immediately realised that several streams had come together in one
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place.
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There's a lot of really good technology to protect your privacy right now.
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In fact that's the stuff we're putting on the Freedom Box.
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We're not writing new software.
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We are gathering stuff, and putting it in one place.
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Stuff that other people did because there are people who are better at writing software, and security,
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than we are. We're software integrators.
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And he realised there was all this software out there, and suddenly there was a box to put it on.
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You could put all that software in one place, make it easy, and give it to people in one neat package.
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Pre-installed, pre-configured, or as close to it as we can get.
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And that, was the vision for the FreedomBox.
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The FreedomBox is a tiny computer. Look at this.
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That's small, it's unobtrusive.
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So it's a small computer.
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And we don't just mean small in size... it doesn't take a lot of energy.
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I could be running this box on a couple of AA batteries for the life of this presentation.
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You could run it on a solar panel.
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It's very lightweight infrastructure.
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You plug it into your home network, and when I say home network,
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(I'm going to pass this around)
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When I say home network, I mean home network.
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This is technology we are designing for individuals to use to talk to their friends.
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Our use-case, the thing we're trying to protect is you guys, as individuals in your communities.
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This isn't a small-business appliance, it's not a large corporate applicance, this is a thing
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that we are truly aiming at the home market, and people who care about privacy on an individual level.
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You plug it into your home network to protect your privacy, your freedom, your anonymity and your security.
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That is our mission statement, I guess. Unofficially.
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That is what we believe we are trying to do with this device.
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So, what privacy means in this context, the way we're going to go about trying to protect your privacy
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is to connect you directly with other people and take everything you do and try to encrypt it
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so that only you and the person you are talking to can see it. This is not a new idea.
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We can do encrypted messaging, and we can do encrypted browsing.
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Now there are problems with encrypted browsing. Right now if you want to have secure browsing you generally
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use something called SSL.
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SSL is a system of certificate that allow a web server to say to you "we can talk privately".
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That's the first guarantee, a secure cryptographic connection (A).
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and (B) I can authenticate to you that I am who I say I am.
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So not only can nobody listen, but you know who you're talking to.
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You're not secretly talking to the government, when really you're talking to me.
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The problem with SSL, the big problem with SSL, is that the system for signing certificates relies
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on a trust hierachy that goes back to a cartel of companies who have the server certificates,
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who have the ability to do this "guarantee". So when the website says to you "I guarantee I am who I
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am", you say "I don't know you, I don't trust you". And they say "Oh, but this other company, I paid
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them money, and so they'll guarantee that I am me."
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Which is a really interesting idea - because I also don't know this company, why would I trust that company?
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I mean, the company is just old enough and influential enough that they could actually get their
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authority into my browser. So really my browser is willing to accept at face-value that this website
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is who it says it is, but I don't necessarily accept that.
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And then, we have the problem of self-signed certificate. Where if they say, none of those authorities
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in your browser trust me, I trust myself and look, I've signed a piece of paper -
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I swear I am who I say I am.
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And that, is not trustworthy at all, right?
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That's just him saying again "No, really! I'm me!".
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So this is a problem, because the FreedomBoxes are not going to trust the SSL cartel,
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and they are not going to trust each other, so they can't just sort of swear to each other that
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they are who they are.
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So we think we've solved this. I'm not going to say we've solved it, because we're just starting to tell
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people about this idea, and I'm sure people will have reasons why the idea can be improved.
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But there is a technology called MonkeySphere, that allows you to take an SSH key and wrap it around a
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PGP key, and use a PGP key to authenticate SSH connections.
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It's really neat technology that allows you to replace SSH trust with PGP trust.
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And we looked at that, and we thought, why can't we do that with SSL?
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So one thing we're going do with browsing is take an SSL certificate, an X.509 certificate,
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and wrap it around a PGP key and send it through the normal SSL layer mechanisms
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but when it gets to the other end, smart servers and smart browsers will open it up and use PGP mechanisms
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to figure out how to trust people, to verify the connections, to sign the authentication of the identity
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of the browser, of the server.
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This allows us to replace the SSL cartel with the web of trust, the keyservers.
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We're replacing a tiny group of companies that control everything with keyservers, community infrastructure.
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Anyone can set up a keyserver, and you can decide which one you want to trust.
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They share information.
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The web of trust is built on people, telling each other that they trust each other.
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Again, you can decide who to trust and how much you want to trust them.
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This is emblematic of our approach. We've identified structures that are unreliable because
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they are centralized, because they are controlled by interests that are not the same interests
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as our interests.
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And we've decided to replace them wherever we can with structures that rely on people,
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that rely on human relationships, that rely less on the notion that you can buy trust, and more on the
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notion that you earn trust, by being trustworthy, by having people vouch for you over time.
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So that's our approach to encrypted browsing. It's also our approach to encrypted messaging.
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We're doing Jabber for a lot of message passing, XMPP, and we're securing that again with PGP.
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Everywhere we can we're going to try to use the PGP network, because it already exists...
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as I said, we're not trying to invent anything new.
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PGP already exists and it does a really good job. So we're taking the PGP trust system and we're
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going to apply it to things like XMPP and make sure that we can do message passing in a way
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that we can trust.
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Once we have XMPP we have a way to send text, a way to send audio, sure...
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but also you can send structured data.
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Through that same channel. And you can send that data to buddy lists.
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So the system starts to look like a way to pass data in a social way. And we think this is the
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beginning of the social layer of the box.
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At the bottom of the box we have a belief that the technology should be social
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from the ground up.
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And so we're building structures that allow it to be social,
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that assume you want to connect with friends in a network of freedom,
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perhaps FreedomBoxes, perhaps other kinds of software, other kinds of technology.
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And we're designing with that in mind.
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With that in mind, we think we get certain benefits technologically which I'll get into later.
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We think we can simply things like key management, through methods like this.
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By privacy I also mean that we can install a proxy server, privoxy,
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we think the answer is privoxy here,
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privoxy on the box, so you can point your browser at the box, surf the web on the box,
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and strip ads, strip cookies, stop Google from tracking you from website to website to website,
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to remove, the constant person sitting at your side, spying, recording, listening to everything you do.
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In that vein, we don't just want to block ads and reject cookies,
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we want to do something new, relatively new.
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We think we want to munge your browser fingerprint, that unique pattern of data that is captured by your
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user-agent string and what plugins you have, and all that stuff
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that forms a unique profile of you that allows people to track your browser, companies to track your
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browser as you hop along the web, even if they don't know anything about you.
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It can sort of tie you to the browser, make profiles about your browser.
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And that turns out to be a very effective way of figuring out who you are.
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So even without a cookie, even without serving you with an ad, once they're talking to you they can
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uniquely identify you, or relatively uniquely.
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But it's relatively early in the browser fingerprint arms race.
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We think that with a very little bit of changing, we can foil the recording.
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and win this round at least.
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And instead of having one profile where they gather all of your data, you will present to services
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as a different person every time you use the service. So they cannot build profiles of you over time.
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That's what privacy looks like in our context. We're looking for cheap ways to foil the tracking.
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We're looking for easy things we can do, because we believe there's a lot of low-hanging fruit.
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And we'll talk about that more in a minute.
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Freedom is our value, freedom is the thing we are aiming for,
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freedom from centralized structures like the pipes.
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Now mesh networking, I have mesh networking in my slides. That is a lie.
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We are not doing mesh networking.
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The reason we are not doing mesh networking is because I do not know anything about mesh networking
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and one of the reaons I came here was to meet people who know a lot about mesh networking
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and I see people in this audience who know a lot about mesh networking.
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If you want to turn that lie into the truth, the way you do that
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is by continuing on your projects, making mesh networking awesome,
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to the point where I can say yes, we're going to put that in this box.
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Then eventually, by the time this box is ready to do real
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things for real people, we're really hoping that the mesh story
-
coheres, where we've identified the protocol and the technology and the people who are going to help
-
us. If you think you might be one of those people, we want to talk to you.
-
So yes, we are going to do mesh networking,
-
and that might be a lie
-
but I hope not.
-
We want you to have the freedom to own your data
-
that means data portability, that means that your data sits on your box and never goes to a third party.
-
It only goes to the people you want it to go to.
-
Fine-grained access control. Your data, your structures, you decide where it goes.
-
That's a user-interface problem,
-
that's a user permission problem,
-
an access control problem.
-
Access control is a solved problem.
-
Doing it through a convenient user-interface, that's not solved... so that's work to be done.
-
That's a big chunk of our todo list.
-
We want you to own your social network
-
Before Facebook there was a thing called MySpace, which was... I'm not even sure it exists anymore.
-
Before MySpace there was Tribe.
-
Before Tribe there was Friendster.
-
Friendster is now like a... "gaming network".
-
I don't know what it is but they still send me email
-
Which is the only reason I know they're still alive.
-
Before Friendster was the original social network.
-
We called this social network "the internet".
-
We talked directly to each other,
-
we used email, an instant messenger and IRC.
-
We talked to people using the structures that were out there.
-
It wasn't centralized in one service, we had a lot of ways of meeting each other
-
and passing messages.
-
What we lacked was a centralized interface.
-
So when we say "own your social network" we mean use the services of the internet,
-
own the pieces that talk to each other.
-
Hopefully we'll provide you with a convenient interface to do that.
-
But the actual structures, the places where your data live,
-
that is just the same pieces that we know how to use already.
-
We are not going to try to reinvent how you talk to people,
-
we're just going to make it so that the pipes are secure.
-
A big part of freedom, a big part of privacy,
-
is anonymity.
-
Tor can provide anonymity.
-
But we don't have to go all the way to Tor.
-
Tor is expensive, in terms of latency.
-
Tor is difficult to manage...
-
I don't know how many people have tried to use Tor, to run all their traffic through Tor.
-
It's hard. For two reasons.
-
For one, the latency... it takes a very long time to load a web page.
-
And two, you look like a criminal. To every website that you go to.
-
My bank shut down my account when I used Tor.
-
Because suddenly, I was coming from an IP address in Germany that they had detected in the past
-
efforts to hack them on.
-
So they closed my account, well I had to talk to them about it,
-
it did all get solved in the end.
-
PayPal as well closed my account down.
-
So that was the end of my ability to use Tor.
-
So we can't just run all our traffic through Tor.
-
It's too slow, and the network has weird properties in terms of how you present to websites,
-
that frankly, are scary.
-
Because if I look like a criminal to the bank, I don't want to imagine what I look like to my own government.
-
But we can do privacy in other ways.
-
If you are a web user, in China, and you want to surf the internet,
-
with full access to every website you might go to, and with privacy from your government,
-
so that you don't get a knock on your door from visiting those websites,
-
we can do that without Tor.
-
We don't need Tor to do that. We can do that cheaply.
-
Because all you need to do in that situation is get your connection out of China.
-
Send your request for a web page through an encrypted connection to a FreedomBox in...
-
Austria, America, who knows?
-
Just get the request away from the people who physically have the power to control you.
-
And we can do that cheaply, that's just SSH port forwarding.
-
That's just a little bit of tunneling, that's just a little bit of VPN.
-
There's a lot of ways to do that sort of thing,
-
to give you anonymity and privacy in your specific context
-
without going all the way into something like Tor.
-
Now there are people who are going to need Tor.
-
They will need it for their use case.
-
But not every use case requires that level of attack.
-
And so one of the things we're trying to do is figure out how much privacy and anonymity you need,
-
and from whom you need it.
-
If we can do that effectively we can give people solutions
-
that actually work for them. Because if we just tell people
-
to use Tor, we're going to have a problem.
-
They're not going to use it, and they won't get any privacy at all.
-
And that's bad.
-
So we want to allow people to do anonymous publishing,
-
and file-sharing, and web-browsing and email.
-
All the communications you want to do.
-
The technology to do that already exists,
-
we could do all of that with Tor.
-
The next piece of our challenge is to figure out how to do it without Tor.
-
To figure out what pieces we need Tor for, and to figure out
-
what pieces we can do a little bit more cheaply.
-
Security.
-
Without security, you don't have freedom and privacy and anonymity.
-
If the box isn't secure,
-
you lose.
-
We're going to encrypt everything.
-
We're going to do something that's called social key management, which I'm going to talk about.
-
I do want to talk about the Debian-based bit.
-
We are based on a distribution of Linux called Debian,
-
because it is a community-based distribution.
-
It is made by people who care a lot about your
-
freedom, your privacy, and your ability to speak anonymously.
-
And we really believe that the best way to distribute this
-
software is to hand it to the Debian mirror network and let
-
them distribute it. Because they have mechanisms
-
to make sure that nobody changes it.
-
If we were to distribute the software to you directly, we
-
would become a target. People would want to change the
-
software as we distribute it on our website.
-
They would want to crack our website and distribute their
-
version of the package.
-
We don't want to be a target, so we're not going to give you software.
-
We're going to give it to Debian, and let them give you the software.
-
And at the same time you get all of the Debian guarantees about freedom.
-
The Debian Free Software Guidelines.
-
They're not going to give you software unless it comes
-
with all of the social guarantees that are required to participate in the Debian community.
-
So we're very proud to be using Debian in this manner,
-
and working with Debian in this manner.
-
And we think that's the most effective way we can guarantee that we're going to live up to
-
our promises to you, because it provides a mechanism whereby if we fail to live up to our promises,
-
we cannot give you something that is broken. Because Debian won't let us,
-
they just won't distribute it.
-
There are problems with security.
-
There are things we can't solve.
-
One...
-
Physical security of the box.
-
We haven't really talked much internally about whether we can encrypt the filesystem on this box.
-
I don't quite see a way to do it.
-
It doesn't have an interface for you to enter a password effectively.
-
By the time you've brought an interface up you'd be running untrusted code.
-
I don't know a way to do it.
-
If anyone can think of a way that we can effectively encrypt the filesystem, I'd love to hear it.
-
But, on top of that, if we do encrypt the filesystem,
-
then the thing cannot be rebooted remotely, which is a downside.
-
So there are trade-offs at every step of the way.
-
If we can figure out some of these security issues, then we can be ahead of the game.
-
But I think the encrypting the filesystem is the only way to guarantee the box is secure, even if it's
-
not physically secure.
-
So I think that's a big one.
-
If you have ideas about that, please come and talk to me after the talk.
-
I promised I would talk about social key management, and here it is.
-
So we're building the idea of knowing who your friends are
-
into the box at a somewhat low level.
-
To the point where things that are on the box can assume it is there,
-
or ask you if it's there, or rely on it as a matter of course in some cases.
-
So we can do things with keys that make your keys unlosable.
-
Right now a PGP key is a hard thing to manage.
-
Key management is terrible.
-
Do you guys like PGP? PGP is good.
-
Does anyone here like key management?
-
We have one guy who likes key management.
-
LAUGHTER
-
He's going to do it for all of you!
-
So, none of us like key management.
-
Key management doesn't work, especially if your use-case is home users, naive end-users.
-
Nobody wants to do key management.
-
Writing their key down and putting it in a safety deposit box is ludicrous.
-
It's a very difficult thing to actually convince people to do.
-
Sticking it on a USB key, putting it in a zip-lock back and burying it in your backyard is paranoid.
-
I can't believe I just told you what I do with my key.
-
LAUGHTER
-
No, you can't ask people to do that.
-
They won't do it.
-
You can't protect keys in this manner.
-
You have to have a system that allows them to sort of, not ever know they have a key.
-
To not think about their key unless they really want to.
-
We think we've come up with something that might work.
-
You take the key,
-
or a subkey,
-
you chop it into little bits
-
and you give that key...
-
and we're talking about a key of a very long length, so there's a giant attack space
-
and you can chop it into bits and hand it to people without reducing the search space for a key.
-
You chop it into bits and hand all the bits to your friends.
-
Now all your friends have your key, as a group.
-
Individually, none of them can attack you.
-
Indicidually, none of them has the power to come root your box,
-
to access your services and pretend to be you.
-
As a group, they can do this.
-
We trust our friends, as a group, more than we trust them as individuals.
-
Any single one of your friends, if you gave them the key to your financial data and your private online
-
life that would make you very nervous.
-
You would worry that they would succumb to temptation to peek,
-
fall on hard times and want to attack you in some way,
-
fall out with you, get mad at you.
-
As an individual, people are sort of fallible in this sense.
-
But as a group of friends who would have to get together
-
and affirmatively make a decision to attack you,
-
we think that's extremely unlikely.
-
It's so unlikely that there are only a few scenarios where we think it might happen.
-
One...
-
if you are ill, and unable to access your box
-
or you're in jail
-
or you've passed away
-
or you've disappeared.
-
Or... you've gone crazy.
-
We call this type of event, where all your friends get together and help you,
-
even if you don't ask them for help,
-
we call that an intervention.
-
When your friends sit you down and say,
-
"you need our help, you can't ask us for it because you're not in a position to ask us for it",
-
that's an intervention.
-
If you have a moment in your life, a crisis in your life that is an intervention level event,
-
that's when you can go to your friends.
-
If your house burns down, you lose your key and all your data
-
You go to your friends, and you say "can I have part of my key back?"
-
"Oh, and give me that data that you have in a cryptographically-sealed box that you can't read."
-
To all your friends...
-
"My data please, my key please, ..."
-
"My data please, my key please, ..."
-
"My data please, my key please, ..."
-
You take all those pieces, you get a new box,
-
you load it all onto your box.
-
You have the key, you have your entire key, and now you can read your data.
-
And you haven't lost your digital life.
-
You have a key that is now unlosable.
-
Even if you never wrote it down, even if you never buried it in the backyard.
-
This is a hard problem in key management.
-
People lose their keys and their passwords to services all the time.
-
The only way we can think of to make that impossible, is this mechanism.
-
And of course it's optional.
-
If you're a person who doesn't trust your friends, even as a group,
-
or if you're a person who just doesn't have a lot of friends
-
(let me finish!)
-
...who doesn't have a lot of friends with FreedomBoxes who can be the backend for this,
-
you don't have to trust this mechanism.
-
You can do something else to make your key unforgettable.
-
But for a lot of naive end-users,
-
this is the mechanism.
-
This is the way they are going to never
-
lose their keys
-
Because the first time a user gets irretrievably locked out of his FreedomBox,
-
we lose that user forever.
-
And we lose all his friends forever.
-
Because it would scare you to lose such an important group of information.
-
Social key management.
-
This is the benefit of building social, of building knowledge
-
of who your friends are, into the box, at a deep level.
-
We have never done that before, with a technology
-
as a community project.
-
And it opens up new possibilities. This is just one.
-
There are others.
-
But it's a field we haven't really thought a lot about.
-
I think once we get out there and we start doing this kind of
-
construction, a lot of new uses are going to be found for this architecture.
-
I encourage you all to think about what changes,
-
when you can assume that the box has people you can trust, just a little bit,
-
because right now we live in a world where we are asked
-
to trust third party services like Facebook with all our photos,
-
or Flickr with all our photos, or Gmail with all our email.
-
We are asked to trust them.
-
We have no reason to trust them.
-
I mean, we expect that they'll act all right, because they have no reason to destroy us.
-
But we don't know what's going to happen.
-
We're effectively giving all our information to people we don't trust at all right now.
-
How does a network of people we trust, just a little bit,
-
change the landscape?
-
I think that's a really interesting question.
-
This box explores that question,
-
this box creates new solutions to old problems that previously seemed intractable.
-
So, I encourage everybody to think about how that might
-
change the solution to a problem they have with a technological architecture as it exists today.
-
Here's another problem...
-
Boxes that know who you are, and know who your friends are,
-
and know how your friends normally act,
-
can also know when your friends are acting weird.
-
If you have a friend who sends you one email a year, who suddenly sends you ten emails in a day,
-
that look like spam,
-
you know that box is rooted.
-
You know that box is weird.
-
Or if you are using the FreedomBox as your gateway to the internet,
-
and a box it is serving downstream, starts sending a bunch of spam through it, it knows.
-
It can say "Oh no! You're acting like a zombie."
-
"You should get a check-up."
-
It can shut off mail service to that box, and not let the messages out.
-
It can make that decision to protect the wider internet to make you a better citizen in the world.
-
If suddenly your computer starts saying "Hey, I'm in Scotland and I need $5000"...
-
but we know you're not in Scotland
-
Maybe this box, because it has contact information,
-
maybe this box sends you an SMS.
-
And says "Dude, you've been hacked, go do something about your box."
-
So the types of things we can do once we assume we have
-
close relations as opposed to arms-length relations,
-
the types of things we can do when we trust each other a little bit
-
and we trust our boxes a little bit, goes way up.
-
Way up.
-
And by bringing that infrastructure closer to us,
-
I mean Gmail is too far away to play that role from a network perspective.
-
But if the box is in our land, we can do that.
-
These boxes will only work if they are convenient.
-
There's an old punk-rock slogan, from the Dead Kennedys,
-
"Give me convenience, or give me death."
-
We laugh at that, but that's a belief users have,
-
and I deduce that based on their behaviour,
-
because every time there is a convenient web service,
-
people use it.
-
Even if it's not very good with privacy, a lot of people are going to use it.
-
And conversely, whenever we have web services that are very good at privacy, but aren't very convenient,
-
comparatively fewer people use them.
-
We don't think this box works without convenience.
-
If we don't get the user-interface right then this project
-
will probably fall over.
-
It will never gain any sort of critical mass.
-
So we need a simple interface,
-
we need a way for users to interact with this box in a minimal way.
-
They should think about it as little as possible.
-
That's the hardest problem we face.
-
Quite frankly.
-
The technology to do private communication, that exists.
-
A lot of the people in this room helped to build that infrastructure and technology.
-
We can put it on the box.
-
Making it easy and accessible for users, that's hard.
-
And right now we're trying to figure out what that looks like,
-
who the designers are going to be.
-
If you have user interface or user experience design that you want to bring to a project like this,
-
please, please, come find me.
-
In order to have convenience, we need to have the thing provide services that are not just
-
freedom-oriented, we need to use its position in your network as a trusted device
-
to do things for you that aren't just about privacy.
-
It needs to do backups.
-
This is important.
-
Right now the way people back up their photos is by giving them to Flickr.
-
The way they back up their email is by giving it to Gmail.
-
If we don't provide backups, we can never be an effective replacement
-
for the services that store your data somewhere else.
-
Even though they're storing it out there in the cloud for their purposes, you get a benefit from it.
-
We have to replicate that benefit.
-
So things that we don't think of as privacy features have to
-
be in the box.
-
The backups, the passwords, and the keys, you can't forget them.
-
We would like it to be a music, a video, a photo server,
-
all the kinds of things you might expect from a convenient box on your network.
-
All the things that you want to share with other people, this box has to do those things.
-
And these aren't privacy features, but without them we won't be able to give people privacy.
-
Our first feature, the thing we are working towards
-
is Jabber.
-
It's secure encrypted chat, point-to-point.
-
That will be the thing we are working on right now.
-
But in order to do that we need to solve this monkey-spherish SSL problem that I described.
-
We have code, it needs to get packaged and all that.
-
Our development strategy, the way we are going to do all the things we said,
-
because the list of things I have said we're going to do...
-
I can't believe you're not throwing things at me.
-
Because it's ludicrous to believe that we can actually do all these things by ourselves.
-
And we're not.
-
We're going to let other people make the software.
-
As much as possible we're going to encourage other people
-
to build stuff. We're going to use stuff that already exists.
-
We're going to use Privoxy, we're going to use Prosody, we're going to use Apache.
-
We're not going to reinvent the web server, we're not going to reinvent protocols.
-
I really hope that by the time this project is mature, we haven't invented any new protocols.
-
Maybe we'll use new protocols, but I don't want to be
-
generating new things that haven't been tested, and then putting them in FreedomBox.
-
I want to see things in the real world, tested, gain credibility and take them.
-
The less we invent, the better.
-
As far as timelines go, by the time we have it ready, you'll know why you need it.
-
People right now are figuring out that privacy is important.
-
They're seeing it over and over again.
-
In Egypt, the at the start of the Arab spring, one of the things the government did to try to
-
tamp down the organisation was to convince companies to shut off cell networks,
-
to prevent people from talking to each other.
-
In America they did the same thing in San Francisco I hear.
-
Turned off the cell towers to prevent people from organising to meet for a protest.
-
With Occupy Wall Street, you're starting to see infiltration,
-
you're starting to see people going and getting information
-
that Occupy Wall Street is talking about and turning it over
-
to the authorities, the police, the FBI.
-
So the need for privacy as we enter a new age of increased activism, we hope,
-
of increased activity, of social activity,
-
I think the need for a lot of this privacy stuff is going to become clear.
-
As the technology for invading your privacy improves,
-
the need for technology to protect your privacy will become stark and clear.
-
Our two big challenges as I said are user experience,
-
and the one I didn't say was paying for developers, paying for designers.
-
Those are the hard parts that we're working on.
-
And if we fail, we think that's where we fail.
-
Software isn't on that list, as I said software is already out there.
-
So you can have a FreedomBox.
-
If you like that box that we've been passing around the audience, you can buy one from Globalscale.
-
If you don't want the box, it's just Debian, it's just Linux, it's just packages.
-
Throw Debian on a box, we will have packages available through the normal Debian mechanisms.
-
You don't even have to use our repository.
-
In fact, I don't think we're going to have a repository.
-
You're just going to download it and install it the same way you normally do it if you're technologically
-
capable of doing that.
-
I grabbed a bunch of photos from Flickr,
-
my colleague Ian Sullivan took that awesome picture of the FreedomBox.
-
And that's how you reach me.
-
APPLAUSE
-
Thanks James, please sit down.
-
We are up for questions from the audience for James.
-
Please raise your hand if you have any questions about the FreedomBox.
-
Hello, thanks that was a very interesting presentation.
-
Thank you.
-
Your boss Eben Moglen, he has given a speech at a committee of the US congress
-
I believe, which has received a lot of attention
-
and in Iran during the green movement the US state department
-
I believe has told Twitter to reschedule maintainence so that
-
the opposition could keep using Twitter during the attempted revolution
-
and Hilary Clinton has given a very popular speech about
-
how America would support the promotion of internet freedom
-
and I think things such as the New America Foundation are
-
funding and supporting projects such as the Commotion mesh networking project
-
that we've already heard about before.
-
So in other words there's a link between politics and technology sometimes,
-
and in the past I believe certain influential Americans such
-
Rupert Murdoch or George W. Bush have viewed modern communication technologies as a way to
-
promote U.S. foreign policy and to spread democracy and freedom in the world.
-
So my question is, what is your relationship with your government?
-
That's a really good question.
-
So one of the things that we sort of figured out from the beginning was that
-
if we had close relationships with the U.S. government,
-
people outside of the U.S. might have difficulty trusting us,
-
because nobody wants to tell all their secrets to the American government.
-
So we were thinking about what that really looks like in the context of a box that could be used globally.
-
We are working very hard to engineer a device that does not require you to trust us.
-
I'm not asking for your trust.
-
I'm not asking for your trust, I'm asking for your help.
-
All the code we write you'll be able to see it, you'll be able to
-
audit it, you'll be able to make your own decisions about what it does,
-
you'll be able to test it if it trustworthy or not,
-
and if you decide that it is not, you can tell everyone,
-
and they won't use it.
-
So from a trust perspective, it doesn't matter what our relationship is with anybody.
-
So that's the first thing.
-
The second thing is that right now we don't have much of a relationship with the U.S. government.
-
Jacob Applebaum is somewhat famous for his work with Julian Assange on Wikileaks,
-
and his work on Tor, and security in general,
-
his efforts to provide you with freedom and privacy.
-
He is a guy who was recently revealed in the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. government has been spying
-
on. And he is on our team, he's on our technical advisory committee.
-
He's one of the people we go to for help when we need to understand security on the box.
-
So right now our position with the American government is that we're not really related except in
-
so much that we are a bunch of people who really care about these issues,
-
which maybe occasionally makes us targets. Which gives us a reason to use a box like this.
-
Coupled with that, there is a program in America - you were talking about Hilary Clinton saying
-
she was going to encourage technologies that will spread democracy.
-
So the way America encourages things is by spending money on it.
-
That's our typical way to support programs. We fund different things.
-
We don't generally have feel-good campaigns, we just pay people to make good work, or try to.
-
So the U.S. state department has a program to provide funding for projects like the FreedomBox.
-
We have not applied for that funding.
-
I don't know if we will.
-
However I do know that they have given funding to some very good and genuine projects that are
-
run by people I trust, so I try not to be cynical about that.
-
I imagine at some point that through a direct grant or a sub-grant or something,
-
some state department money might support some aspect of work that is related to us.
-
I mean, we might take work from a project that is state department funded,
-
just because it's quick work.
-
Have I answered your question?
-
Yes, thanks.
-
Hi, well you always have tension if you talk about privacy
-
since 9/11 you know, I heard this in America very often,
-
"we have to be careful", every body is suspicious and stuff.
-
So how do you react when people like the government say well,
-
you are creating a way to support terrorism, whatever.
-
That's a good question, and it's a common question.
-
Frankly every time I do this talk, it's one of the first questions that come up.
-
The answer is really simple.
-
The fact is, this box doesn't create any new privacy technology.
-
It just makes it easier to use and easier to access.
-
People who are committed to terrorism or criminal activity, they have sufficient motivation that they
-
can use the technology that exists. Terrorists are already using PGP.
-
They're already using Tor.
-
They're already using stuff to hide their data.
-
At best we are helping stupid terrorists.
-
LAUGHTER
-
Granted, I'm not excited about that, but I don't that's a sufficient reason to deny common people
-
access to these technologies.
-
And more importantly than the fact that terrorists and criminals have access to this technology,
-
governments have access to this technology.
-
The largest corporations have access to this technology.
-
Every bank, the same encryption methods that we are using is the stuff that protects trillions of dollars
-
in value that banks trade every day.
-
This is technology that is currently being used by everyone except us.
-
All we're doing is levelling the playing field.
-
The same technology that hides data from us, that causes a complete lack of transparency in a downward
-
direction, we can have to level the playing field a little bit.
-
More questions?
-
Thank you for your presentation.
-
Could we add to challenges, maybe we could produce it in a non-communist dictatorship?
-
Because I saw the label "Made in China", so I think it is just
-
paradox to produce something like the FreedomBox in this country, and I would also like to be independent
-
from producing in China. So that's just something for a challenge I think.
-
That's a really good question and important point.
-
So, we're not a hardware project. Hardware is really really hard to do right and do well.
-
We have some hardware hackers on our project.
-
Our tech lead Bdale Garbee does amazing work with satellites and model rockets and altimeters,
-
and he's brilliant. But this is not a hardware project.
-
All we can do is use hardware that already exists.
-
When the world makes hardware in places other than China, we will use that hardware.
-
Right now, we don't have a lot of options.
-
And we're not going to deny everybody privacy because we don't have a lot of hardware options.
-
When we have those options we'll take them.
-
In the meantime, if you are a person who really cares about this issue,
-
don't buy a FreedomBox.
-
Take the software, go find a computer that isn't made in China,
-
LAUGHTER
-
and go put the software on that box.
-
If you want a solution that is run on computers that don't exist, I can't help you with that.
-
If you want a solution that runs, I might be able to help you with that.
-
But yes, I agree that that is a real issue, and we are thinking about that.
-
We believe that there is an open hardware project story here.
-
And one thing we've been doing is working with the manufacturer of the box,
-
to get the code free, to make sure we know what's in it,
-
so that there are no binary blobs in the box,
-
so we have some assurances that we actually do have freedom.
-
At some point though, we do believe that somebody will solve the open hardware problem for us.
-
We're not going to be the hardware project, but there are people trying to do this in an open way.
-
RaspberryPi for example. They're not quite right for our use-case, but those kinds of projects
-
are starting to exist, and they're starting to be really good.
-
In a few years, maybe that will be the thing we move onto.
-
Now, I'm guessing that even an open hardware project like RaspberryPi does their manufacturing in
-
a place like China. And that's a big problem.
-
When the world is ready with a solution to that, we will be ready to accept that solution and adopt it
-
of course.
-
Any more questions for James? or statements?
-
This is more of a statement than a question I guess,
-
but should the FreedomBox start being made in China there will be a lot more of them coming out of
-
the back door and enabling privacy for people that don't get
-
it, but also as soon as it starts getting manufactured I'd imagine you may,
-
because you're not in it for the money as you told me last night,
-
you may be looking forward to how easy it will be to copy,
-
and with things like MakerBot, making a case, making a bot is easy,
-
you can do it in your bedroom now with 3D printers.
-
So there will be a bag of components, a board, made by some online place that is really into this,
-
and you can assemble these at home.
-
So you've just got to get it out there first I think, and lead the way.
-
Yeah, I think that's quite right in that we are not the only place to get a box like this.
-
I mean, we're putting it on a specific box to make it easy, but there will be lots of places that make
-
boxes, and hopefully there will be places where working conditions are acceptable to everybody.
-
And at that point you can make your own boxes,
-
you can put them on any box you can find.
-
The point of Free Software is not to lock you into a service,
-
a technology, a software, a structure or a box.
-
We're not going to lock you into anything, that's one thing we're extremely clear about.
-
If you manage to make a box like this at home, I would really love to hear about it.
-
If you can spin up a MakerBot to make a case,
-
and you have a friend who can etch boards,
-
and you make a box like this at home,
-
that would be big news and a lot of people would want to know about it.
-
More statements or questions? Yes...
-
So, if you lose your box and get a new one, how is it going to reauthenticate to the boxes of your friends?
-
I think I didn't get that one.
-
Yeah, so, the good thing about friends is that they don't actually know you by your PGP key.
-
Sorry, I didn't specify it, if you want a grand security and you want distribution to more than 12 friends,
-
so let's say a hundred, and they're like, all over the world.
-
You are probably going to reach them through the internet to get your key parts back,
-
and you are probably not going to be able to use the FreedomBox to get a new one because
-
it has to be authenticated.
-
So how do you do?
-
Well, you at that point...
-
if you don't have a FreedomBox, the FreedomBox can't provide you with a solution to that problem.
-
What you're going to have to do,
-
is perhaps call your friends.
-
Have a conversation with them,
-
convince them that you are the person you say you are.
-
Reference your shared experiences, maybe they know your voice,
-
maybe they just know who you are by the way that you act and the way that you talk.
-
There's not going to be any one way that we get our keys back.
-
If you lose your key, yeah, we're not saying that's never going to be a problem.
-
And I wouldn't recommend splitting your key up among a hundred people,
-
because that's a lot of people to ask for your key back.
-
The mechanism I have in mind is not that you get a little bit of your key from
-
everyone you know, it's that you spread out the key among
-
a lot of people, and you need a certain number of those people.
-
So maybe it's five of seven of your friends.
-
So you give seven people the key, but any five of them could give you a whole key.
-
So in case you can't reach somebody you can still manage to do it.
-
And we can make that access control as fine-grained as we want,
-
but a hundred would be overwhelming.
-
We wouldn't do that. Sure, you could do it if you wanted,
-
but I don't think you'll have a hundred friends you could trust that much.
-
Maybe you do, I don't.
-
More questions, statements?
-
Yes?
-
Erm, it's just a wish... but have you thought about the idea of using the FreedomBox to create
-
a community where you can exchange not only data but like
-
products or services, so that would maybe like, change the system?
-
One of the things we want to do with the FreedomBox is
-
create a thing that looks a lot like your current social networking,
-
minus the advertising and the spying.
-
A way to talk to all your friends at once.
-
Once you have a place, a platform, where you can communicate
-
with your friends, you can build on that platform
-
and you can create structures like that.
-
If we make a thing that has programmable interfaces, so
-
you can make apps for it, you can make an app like that,
-
if that's important to you.
-
What people do with the communication once they have it,
-
we don't have any opinions about.
-
We want them to do everything that's important to them.
-
And I think something like that could be important,
-
and yeah, that would be amazing if that were to emerge.
-
Some things I believe are easier to do in a centralized architecture than a decentralized one,
-
for example search, or services that require a lot of bandwidth.
-
I don't see how you can run something like YouTube on the FreedomBox.
-
So is your utopian vision one where everything is decentralized,
-
or is it ok to have some centralized pieces in a future network?
-
Look, if you're going to grant me my utopia then of course everything is decentralized.
-
But we don't live in a utopia, I don't have magic.
-
We actually have in our flowchart a box labeled "magic routing",
-
because routing is hard to do in a decentralized way...
-
You need someone to tell you where the IPs are.
-
And that's hard to do in a decentralized way.
-
We haven't solved it, and we don't think we're going to fully solve it.
-
We hope someone else solves it first of all.
-
But second of all, we don't know where the compromises are.
-
Some things are not possible to decentralize.
-
We're going to decentralize as much as we can,
-
but we're not committing to doing anything impossible.
-
If you can't run YouTube off this box,
-
which I disagree with by the way,
-
then you won't, because it's impossible.
-
If you want to run YouTube on this box you turn all your
-
friends into your content delivery network,
-
and all your friends parallelize the distribution of the box,
-
you share the bandwidth.
-
It's ad-hoc, BitTorrent-like functionality.
-
Yes, that technology doesn't exist yet, I just made all that up,
-
but we can do it.
-
The parts that are hard though, the things like the routing,
-
there will be real compromises.
-
There will be real trade-offs.
-
There will be places where we'll say, you know what, we have
-
to rely on the DNS system.
-
Everybody in this room knows that the DNS system has some
-
security problems, some architectural problems that make it
-
a thing we would ideally not have to rely on.
-
But you know what? This project is not going to be able to replace DNS.
-
There are plenty of alternate DNS proposals out there, but we are not going to
-
just chuck the old DNS system, because we want people
-
to be able to get to the box, even if they don't have a box.
-
We want you to be able to serve services to the public.
-
We are going to use a lot of structures that are less than ideal.
-
We're assuming that TCP/IP is there...
-
in the normal use case you're using the internet backbone
-
to do your communication.
-
The mesh routing story we talked about is not how you do
-
your normal use. That's an emergency mode if there's a crisis, a political instability, a tsunami,
-
if you can't get to your regular internet because it has failed you in some way because
-
it has become oppressive or inaccessible.
-
Then you would use something like the mesh network.
-
But in the normal course of business, you are using
-
a thing that is less than ideal, and that's a trade-off.
-
We can't as a project protect you from everything.
-
We are going to look for the places where we can make
-
effective protection. We are going to try and make it clear
-
the limits of that protection. And we're going to give you
-
everything we can.
-
And then, as we move forward, when opportunities to solve new problems present themselves,
-
we'll take them.
-
Well I have to add before when we had the talk, unfortunately German you couldn't
-
understand a lot.
-
I didn't understand it but I could tell that it was occurring at a very high level of technical competence
-
and that there was a lot of good information there.
-
And I'm really hoping that you'll take the video of it and put it up on universalsubtitles.org, or some
-
other service where people can subtitle it. And hopefully there'll be an English version and I'll get
-
to see it. I think there was a lot of really good information in there.
-
What's universalsubtitles.org?
-
Universalsubtitles.org is a great website. It's kind of like, you put a video up, and anyone can
-
add subtitles to as much or as little as they want.
-
And then other people can change the subtitles, and you can do it in as many languages as you want.
-
So you don't have to ask someone for a favour, "hey, will you subtitle my video?"
-
that's 20 minutes long or an hour long. You tell a community of people "we need help subtitling",
-
and everyone goes and subtitles 3 minutes in their favourite languages.
-
It's a very effective way to crowdsouce subtitling, and it's a very effective way to just share information.
-
We have a lot of videos with good information that are locked into languages that not everyone speaks.
-
So this is a way to get around that.
-
As FreedomBox, we use that project.
-
And I believe, if I'm not mistaken, I haven't looked in a while,
-
that it's all Free software that they are using. So you can download it and start your own if you want.
-
So back to my previous question - in the talk in the afternoon we heard about mesh networking
-
we talked about that, and it's actually not just being used in
-
emergency situations but people are really using it.
-
And especially, the philosophy that everyone becomes part of the net as not just a consumer
-
but providing part of the net, it certainly is like that that they
-
can share data among each other, they don't necessarily need
-
to go into the internet.
-
So, I would imagine the FreedomBox, with mesh networking,
-
we could essentially create a large network of many many
-
people using it.
-
We also talked about the mesh networking like FunkFeuer in Graz or Vienna
-
but it would be interesting to get them on mobile devices,
-
so that you could walk through the street,
-
theoretically people have these devices, and you could walk
-
through and it would automatically mesh and connect you.
-
So FreedomBox if applied to that, you told me this interesting example, you could screw them to
-
light posts on the street, so maybe elaborate on that,
-
maybe it could have an effect and give a lot of coverage.
-
The reason why we currently envision mesh,
-
and no decisions have been made, right,
-
but just in the way we think about it when we talk to each other,
-
and the reason why we think mesh networking is not your daily
-
mode of use is that the performance degradation is not acceptable to most end-users.
-
If mesh networking reaches the point where it is acceptable
-
if you're in a place where there's enough nodes, and you
-
have a density that you can move around then sure, that
-
can make a lot of sense. But for a lot of people who
-
exist as a person not near a lot of FreedomBoxes, they're
-
going to need the regular internet.
-
So yeah, we think mesh will be great where you have that
-
density, when the mesh technology is mature.
-
When that happens, we could have the most easy access
-
to municipal wifi by using the power in all the street
-
lights. Put a FreedomBox up in the top of every street lamp.
-
Unscrew the light bulb, screw in the FreedomBox, and screw the light bulb back on top.
-
So you still get light, we're not going to plunge you into darkness.
-
You still get light, but then you have a mesh node. Right there.
-
And you could do every 3rd or 4th street light down town, and you could cover
-
an area rather effectively.
-
It is a way to get simple municipal wifi without running
-
any fibre. And every time you have fibre you can link to it.
-
Like any time you're near fibre you can link to it and you'll
-
get your information out of that little mesh and into the regular network.
-
We could have municipal wifi with much lower infrastructure costs than most people currently think of
-
when they think of municipal wifi. And we can do it through mesh nodes.
-
And if we did it through mesh nodes we would be providing that service not only to people who have
-
FreedomBoxes, that just looks like wifi, it just looks like a regular connection.
-
You might need to do some fancy hopping, but it's not...
-
the mesh boxes themselves will do the fancy hopping, your phone itself won't have to do it.
-
While we are talking about phones,
-
I want to say that I'm not sure how phones fit into the FreedomBox.
-
I'm pretty sure there is a way that phones fit into FreedomBoxes,
-
but you can't trust your phone.
-
With the so-called smartphones it's not a phone actually but a little computer, no?
-
Yes, your phone, a smartphone is a little computer but
-
it's not a computer that you can trust, because
-
even if you replace the software on your phone,
-
with Free software, it's almost impossible to actually replace all the binary drivers,
-
it's almost impossible to go all the way down to the metal.
-
It's very hard to get a phone that is completely trustworthy
-
all the way down to the bottom of the stack.
-
So that's a problem we haven't quite figured out how to solve.
-
And pretty soon it's going to be impossible to put Free software on phones.
-
The days of jailbreaking your iPhone and rooting your Android phone might
-
very well come to an end. There is a proposal right now called UEFI.
-
It's a standard. We currently use EFI, this would be UEFI.
-
I don't know what it stands for, it's a new thing.
-
And what this proposal is, is that before your computer,
-
before the BIOS will load a bootloader on your computer
-
that BIOS has to authenticate, sorry, that bootloader has
-
to authenticate to the BIOS. It has to be signed by someone
-
the BIOS trusts, someone the BIOS manufacturer trusts.
-
And the person who puts the BIOS in your phone can decide who it trusts,
-
and they can decide they don't trust anyone except themselves.
-
If Apple sells you an iPhone with a BIOS that requires a
-
signed operating system, it might be very hard for you to
-
get another version of the operating system on there.
-
The proposals for this stuff are really in the realm of laptops and computers, that's where it's starting,
-
but believe me, technology spreads.
-
And if you want to be able to put Linux on a computer that you buy, on a laptop you buy,
-
very soon you might have a very difficult time doing that.
-
The standard is there, the companies paying attention to it
-
are not paying attention to it for our purposes.
-
They want to make sure that they can control what is on your computer.
-
So this is, you know, another political fight that we're going to engage in,
-
not the FreedomBox, but the community.
-
We're going to have to have this fight. UEFI. Look it up.
-
Start thinking about it. This is going to be a big piece of the puzzle for freedom in computing over
-
the next few years.
-
We're going to have some problems and we're going to have to find some solutions.
-
But wouldn't such an initiative, wouldn't that create a good market for companies who actually
-
would supply Linux on such devices, on the phone and on the laptop market.
-
I'm sure there are companies supplying that.
-
Absolutely.
-
And if the market in freedom were good enough to support
-
large-scale manufacturing and all that other stuff then we might get that.
-
And we might get that anyway.
-
I mean, the standard will include as many keys as you want,
-
so we might get the freedom.
-
But the manufacturers will have a really convenient way to turn the freedom off.
-
I think there will be a lot of boxes where you will have freedom.
-
But there will also be a lot where right now we think we can get Free software onto it,
-
where we won't be able to anymore.
-
It's going to be a narrowing of the market.
-
I don't think our freedom is going to completely disappear from devices.
-
But a lot of devices, if you buy the device without thinking about freedom, assuming you can have it,
-
you might get it home and discover that you can't.
-
Ok, we want to give the floor again to the audience for more questions or statements.
-
Ok, there in the back, one more.
-
Yeah, one more time, so...
-
Nowadays, where you can hardly really save your PC, laptop, whatever, against malware...
-
Isn't it really, a red carpet for hackers to, if you have social networks and circles of friends,
-
one gets some malware on his PC, mobile device, whatever,
-
has a FreedomBox, authenticates to his friends, the state is secure
-
wouldn't that open doors?
-
Sure, well, the human error is not one we can control for.
-
But someone who has a key that you trust is not necessarily someone who you let run arbitrary code
-
on your FreedomBox.
-
You might trust them to the point of having message passing with them, and trusting who they are
-
and what they say, but you don't necessarily trust the technology that they have and the
-
code that they have to be free of malware.
-
You'll still have to do all the things you currently do.
-
Right now if somebody sends you a file, it could have malware in it.
-
We're not making that easier, or better, or more likely to happen.
-
I think what we are doing is completely orthogonal to that problem.
-
At the same time, if we were to have email services on the box,
-
and you know we're not quite sure what the email story of a box like this looks like,
-
we probably would want to include some sort of virus scanning or spam catching,
-
all the usual filtering tools to give you whatever measure of protection might currently exist.
-
But the fact someone has a key and you know who they are
-
I don't think that will ever be the security hole.
-
Or at least we really hope we can make it so it's not.
-
If we fail in that then we've missed a trick.
-
Ok, any more statements or questions?
-
Ok, so, James, my last question would be...
-
You can actually buy the box right now?
-
Yes.
-
From a company?
-
Yes.
-
Maybe you can supply that information. But the software is being developed?
-
Yes.
-
Can you give an estimation about the timeline of your project, or the next milestones?
-
Sure.
-
So, the boxes are manufactures by a company called Globalscale,
-
they're about $140 US dollars.
-
There is a slightly older model called the SheevaPlug that is about $90.
-
It does just pretty much everything the Dreamplug does.
-
It has some heat sinking issues, but it's a pretty good box as well,
-
so if the price point matters to you you can get last year's model and it'll serve you just fine.
-
The software, right now we have a bare Linux distribution.
-
We spent a lot of time getting the binary blobs out of the kernel
-
and making it installable onto this hardware target.
-
We have a Jabber server, Prosody, that we are modifying to suit our needs.
-
And that should be ready, time-frame, weeks.
-
Some short number of weeks.
-
The Privoxy server, the SSH forwarding, some short number of months.
-
But those are our roadmap for the short-term future, is Jabber, SSH forwarding, browser proxying.
-
We also are working on the interface, so we're going to have an interface that you can actually
-
control some of these services with.
-
And the first thing we're doing with that interface is probably allowing you to
-
configure this box as a wireless router.
-
So it can become your wireless access point if you want it to be.
-
And your gateway of course.
-
So user interface in one vertical,
-
SSH forwarding, browser proxying a little bit out there,
-
a little bit closer: Jabber, XMPP secure chat.
-
And once we have that stack, we believe that we're going to build upwards from XMPP towards
-
perhaps something like BuddyCloud.
-
We're seriously looking at BuddyCloud and seeing what problems it solves for us
-
in terms of actually letting users group themselves in ways that they can then do access control
-
and channels and things of that nature.
-
And are you actually in contact with the hardware company producing the servers?
-
Yeah, we've had a number of conversations with them.
-
They've agreed that when our code is ready this is something
-
they are very interested in distributing.
-
More importantly we've had a lot of conversations with
-
them about freedom.
-
About why we do what we do, they way we do.
-
And how they need to act if they want to distribute code for
-
us and work with our community.
-
And what that means is we're teaching them how to comply
-
with the GPL, and we're teaching them how to remove the binary drivers,
-
and in fact we're doing some of that for them.
-
But they're Chinese, right?
-
No. No, Globalscale is not a Chinese company.
-
Their manufacturing is in China, but they're not a Chinese company.
-
And we're also talking to Marvel. Marvel makes the system-on-a-chip that goes onto the boards
-
that Globalscale is integrating into their boxes.
-
But we're also talking to Marvel about what they can do to better serve the needs of our community.
-
So a large part of our efforts is to try to convince manufacturers to make
-
hardware that suits our needs.
-
This box is a thing that they developed, they invented,
-
before they ever met us, before they ever heard of us.
-
And if we can get them enough business,
-
if by making FreedomBoxes and by putting our software on the box,
-
that enables them to sell more boxes they will be very happy
-
and when they design the next generation,
-
not the next generation of the DreamPlug, but the next generation after whatever they're designing now,
-
so we're talking a couple of years from now.
-
We can say to them, look, you're selling a lot of boxes
-
because you're making a thing that serves the free world very well.
-
Remove the 8 inch audio jack because our people don't need it.
-
Add a second wifi radio. Put antenna ports on it.
-
This box can go from something that looks really good for our purpose to
-
being something that looks amazingly good for our purpose.
-
And that will require scale.
-
And what that means is that the FreedomBox becomes a wedge for
-
making better hardware for everyone.
-
But it's not just the FreedomBox. The Tor router project is
-
also focused on the DreamPlug. They've also decided this is a good box for their purpose.
-
If you are making a box that is kind of like a FreedomBox but isn't the FreedomBox because
-
it's more specialised to what you want it for, think about
-
the DreamPlug as a hardware target. And let us know,
-
so that when we go to the company, we can say look,
-
look at all the business you are getting by being people that serve the Free world.
-
And then, hopefully, we can convince them to make boxes that better serve the Free world.
-
And that's not a fantasy. We are having those conversations with them,
-
and they are very receptive.
-
So I am pretty happy about that aspect we do.
-
And my last question would be...
-
since we are now, everything is turning mobile,
-
it's like we have these computers with an extra phone...
-
the phone is a small application on these devices.
-
Is there any plan or any idea or any project to say like, have
-
a FreedomPhone or Free mobile device?
-
So the way you connect to this box is kind of how you connect to your router,
-
port 80, browser.
-
But another way you could do it would be an app on your cellphone that bluetooths to the box.
-
I don't actually think the box has bluetooth, but you know,
-
an app on your cellphone that talks to the box over the network, say.
-
That's possible, we're thinking about that.
-
We're thinking about what that looks like for the large population
-
that exists out there that doesn't have computers.
-
There's an awful lot of people that only have cellphones, they don't have computers.
-
And we want them to have freedom too.
-
So figuring out how we can use a cellphone to talk to the box is a future problem.
-
We're not working on it right now, but we're certainly talking
-
about where it fits into the roadmap.
-
And that's why we are concerned about whether or not you
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can trust your phone.
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Because if you can trust your FreedomBox, but not the
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thing you use to access it then you don't really have the privacy you think you have.
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So, figuring out, can you trust your cellphone? Is a big part of the puzzle.
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It's a big thing that we don't know how to do yet.
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So let me make a little advertisement for another interesting project,
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there is a Spanish development, I think it is also produced in China,
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but it's called The Geek's Phone.
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And they have a compatible Android installation by default,
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and they are probably having a similar philosophy to keep the hardware open.
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So maybe there is a new cooperation on the horizon.
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Oh yeah, we love projects like that.
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I don't know a lot about their project, but I have heard of it
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and it is on my list of things to look into.
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I would love to see that succeed, that would be excellent.
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Well James, thank you for your presentation.
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I think it was really interesting. And thank you for coming.
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James will be back on this stage at 7pm when we have our final discussion on the 20 years of
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the world wide web.
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Thank you James for coming.
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APPLAUSE
