ArkOS: Building the Anti-Cloud (on a Raspberry Pi) 166
angry tapir writes "arkOS is a Linux distribution that runs on the Raspberry Pi. It's an initiative of the CitizenWeb Project, which promotes decentralization and democratization of the Internet. arkOS is aiming to aid this effort by making it super-simple for people to host their own email, blogs, storage and other services from their own home, instead of relying on cloud services run by third parties. about the project."
Home servers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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That shit is bananas.
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What felony?
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Capital murder.
Re:Home servers? (Score:5, Funny)
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Ask Aaron Swartz.
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Just looked him up on Wikipedia, and no notice of him actually committing a felony. He was charged, but never convicted, and not even mention of it being related to a TOS. And the charge was not for a felony, instead "... with intention to commit felony".
So again: what felony for violating TOS are you talking about?
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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz [wikipedia.org]
"Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[16] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.[17]" Emphasis mine
Let's go one step further:
Source: http://www.ask.com/question/is-wire-fraud-a-felony [ask.com]
"Yes, wire fraud is a fe
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That's charged, not convicted.
Besides, still no word where the TOS come in play.
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Yes the ability to get admin rights or add code while the owner is away/sleeping would be tempting as part of a larger offensive military cyber capacity.
With tasks been outsourced to private security firms and "jokes" about individuals on "lists" this could get interesting:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/ex-nsa-chief-jokes-about-hunting-down-snowden-advocates-targeted-killings/ [arstechnica.com]
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-10-02/chief-dhs-privacy-officer-government-calle [zerohedge.com]
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So ditch Comcast?
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that isn't an option is many areas
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It won't for me, not because it can't, but because Comcast is granted a regional monopoly by the local government.
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It won't for me, not because it can't, but because Comcast is granted a regional monopoly by the local government.
Mediacom (consistently ranked poorly in customer satisfaction) has the same here, but surely you have other Internet options. I use DSL from CenturyLink. (Yes, I know, connection speeds. But that doesn't matter when the other doesn't work, and in practice, they aren't that different.)
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You haven't seen the latest South Park episode have you?
Re:Home servers? (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine Comcast will have something to say about this - something like "No more internet for you, TOS-breaker"
This is true, their TOS generally forbid any services (listening ports for inbound connections) which pretty much means you can't host web servers or email servers. They actively scan for these, and contact you if they find them.
Yet, oddly they want to open a public wifi access point on every customer's cable drop so that their customers can have mobile wifi on mobile devices everywhere.
Seems sort of odd.
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No.
One of these things increases usage without your ISP receiving additional money
The other one increases usage with your ISP receiving additional money, without requiring them to pay for the buildout or even the electricity to actually provide the service.
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the charge business extra for this privilege. If they give it away to consumers then business... especially small business will ask... "why are we paying more"... and that is why comcast etc have a hissy fit about this sort of thing.
violation of net neutrality (Score:2, Troll)
Re:violation of net neutrality (Score:5, Informative)
By "appropriate" do you mean, "one that Comcast deems appropriate" or one that is technically appropriate?
Believe it or not, there was a time, before ownership of the internet was turned over to the big telecoms, when you could host whatever kind of service you wanted on your internet connection. Back when there were these things called "ISPs" that you paid and they gave you bandwidth and that was pretty much the end of it.
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The amount of money you paid to those ISPs (which were for sure part of those big telecoms you love to hate so much) was definitely a lot more than what you pay now, for a lot less bandwidth. If you were in a building they happened to have a line running to. You couldn't get those connections at home.
If you want to run servers, you're likely to use a lot more bandwidth than an average user. Makes sense you have to pay for that. Ask your ISP for a business account which has fixed IP and is allowed to run ser
Re:violation of net neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends on criteria and perspective.
You mean, "Ask your telecom for a business account", don't you? Are there still such thing as "ISPs"?
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Are there still such thing as "ISPs"?
There are but many home/small buisness customers are pretty much forced into using an ISP that is vertically integrated with the provider of their access connection and have very few choices (often only one) for reasonablly performing access connections. This seems to be especially a problem in the USA.
Afaict enterprise customers who pay for dedicated bandwidth can still usually choose their infrastructure and internet providers seperately in most places.
Re: violation of net neutrality (Score:2, Informative)
Really? Odd, I'll have to inform Concast of that. I pay $80 a month for business Internet, I do run my own servers, VPN in. To comcast. At my house.
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Actually some game engines don't chew up that much data when running as a server. We routinely run a small FPS game engine at night because we don't need the bandwidth in the evening.
There seem to always be 4 to 8 people rocketing away in there after 7pm.
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I imagine Comcast will have something to say about this - something like "No more internet for you, TOS-breaker"
This is true, their TOS generally forbid any services (listening ports for inbound connections) which pretty much means you can't host web servers or email servers. They actively scan for these, and contact you if they find them.
Yet, oddly they want to open a public wifi access point on every customer's cable drop so that their customers can have mobile wifi on mobile devices everywhere.
Seems sort of odd.
If they actively scan for open ports you could set-up port-knocking where they would have to ping certain ports in a specific order and use encrypted payload that changes based on when it sent so that it is not vulnerable to them replaying it.
Re:Home servers? (Score:4, Interesting)
I imagine Comcast will have something to say about this - something like "No more internet for you, TOS-breaker"
Click. Click. Aaaand it's now a tor service. Because fuck you, Comcast. -_- They have a long history of screwing up people's internet. I just configure the router to pipe all traffic to a VPN, encrypt it, and call it a day. They get exactly zero bytes of unencrypted traffic. Go ahead and try and say anything about my traffic other than "It always goes from point A, to point B, and while the packets vary in length, the bandwidth usage is the same 24/7/365. Because I use QoS on my router and purposefully stuff my Torrent client full of things, even if I don't need them, just to keep the pipe full. Sortof a quiet fuck you to traffic analysis techniques. -_-
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Will work fine for a few days.
After that you have reached your data limit for the month.
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Comcast stop capping their customers a while ago. I still double check every time Steam has one of their holiday sales though. :)
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Comcast stop capping their customers a while ago.
Well, yes and no [comcast.com]. Comcast still contacts people, but in most, but not all [stopthecap.com] markets, the cap was removed. They still throttle and use shaping technologies, which is why my QoS is setup the way it does; On paper, I have almost twice as much bandwidth as I can reliably get without triggering a transient bandwidth clamp-down on my service. Weeks of careful experimentation has revealed that Comcast only provides unmetered access at about 75% of your rated line speed. Go above that, and at certain times of the day
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Well, if you do that, all you've done is move the problem. If you want to host your own mail, you need a connection _somewhere_ which will allow incoming SMTP traffic on port 25, because that's how email works.
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Use I2P. Then its all just encrypted P2P traffic.
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Ssshhh! Don't you know the first rule of i2p?
The first rule of I2P is the more people use it, the more secure they are.
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I still find IRC has lag over i2p, though. It's barely useable for anything.
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Its self-defeating if people don't know about it or use it.
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Which is a complete bullshit stipulation, given that "server" and "client" are really just a way of expressing which machine is initiating a connection.
In a perfect world, net neutrality would outlaw such clauses.
Also, I wish I could find the link, but do you not remember the guy who crossed out certain terms in the EULA for a product and it was determined reasonable by a court of law? Makes sense: it's not really an "agreement" unless both parties are making compromises.
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"In a perfect world, net neutrality would outlaw such clauses."
True, but in a perfect world, everyone would understand how to run a mail server, and how to avoid malware.
Having worked for an ISP's AUP department, I really can see both sides of the argument. Most people with internet connections really don't have a fucking clue what they're doing, and ISPs have to deal with that _somehow_. The problem is really the 'lack of a free market' one: if there was a proper market, there'd be a geek provider in each
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Wait, what!? But they're the good guys!
.
Home server not the fix-all (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm running my own server for mail, my web site, and various other little bits.
Not running from home: bandwidth is a primary issue, especially my uplink is too slow. My host has at least some 100 Mbit for me, maybe more - shared of course with many other sites but it's there for those bursts, so the few people daily that visit my site have a quick response.
Other concerns are dynamic IP (will need dynDNS, not sure how well that works), uptime, power use, hardware management... I pay some USD 350 a year for my virtual server. All in. Fixed IP, fast hardware, fast bandwidth, reliable connection - more reliable than from home with our over-sensitive RCD. More than enough for a small setup, a couple dozen mails a day, a dozen or so web site visitors a day. Not going to run that from home: more work, more cost, more trouble.
Re:Home server not the fix-all (Score:5, Insightful)
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You just have bad software.
If you had decent software, you'd be eager and happy to have a home server. Your problem after all isn't a hardware issue now is it?
So... what's the six things you'd need for you to consider this easy?
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Maybe.
Renting a server (virtual or physical), "your" server is still the property of the service provider. This project is about enabling people to avoid the problems associated with that.
Also, I don't think co-location will be much help, either. While you certainly own the server, it's still in the custody of a third party.
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So put your server at NSA then, like everyone else. Just don't come complaining when you get shot in the head for emailing the wrong person.
The Government doesn't need a reason; they shoot first and rationalize later. Police especially enjoy murdering car crash victims and evading justice. God bless America!
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I run a home-based website. Dynamic IPs aren't a problem. First, if you're always connected your IP almost never changes. Second, routers with updated firmware (like DD-WRT) can update your dnyDNS provider automatically. I use dyn.com (I'm not sure if you can still sign up for their free service).
The main problem with self-hosting will be your ISP. You may or may not have to change your website's port every once-in-a-while to get around blocking. In addition, many consumer IPs are blocked by stupid ne
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more reliable than from home with our over-sensitive RCD.
RCDs are rarely over sensitive. They have a pre-defined trip point and a pre-defined trip time. Odds are far greater that you have some gear somewhere in your house that is leaking current into the earth and that you're already very close to the trip point. If you have an old fridge or oven I would look there first. Pool pumps or any other electro-magnetic devices are good culprits too.
Nothing to do with home servers, just some advice of where you may start looking for a potential problem. If it is the RCD,
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Most of our electronics are reasonably new. Our old washing machine used to be a real issue, we have a new one now. Fridge maybe a decade old, no more. Really I've been searching a few times really hard when the problem occurred: power would go down all of a sudden, and just wouldn't go on again. Once I had to switch off all power groups, switch them on one by one, finally find out there are two that each would trip the breaker. That's strange, you'd expect one. Anyway in the end I never found the culprit.
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It may be a slight intermittent fault pushing you over the edge. If you have a friend who's an electrician or EE see if he can bring over a clampmeter and clamp around both the active and neutral cables going through your RCD. Both at the same time will give you a measure of earth leakage.
It's common for some devices to leak. In our case we had a dodgy beer fridge leaking ~30mA and our RCD tripped at 40mA (country standard, not sure how things work were you life). Turns out there was an ants nest amidst all
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Will see, it's been a while that we had a spontaneous cut. Usually can just switch it on and everything is fine.
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I've been running a public-facing web server at home for over 10 years. I use DynDNS (I joined right after they were founded; so for a small 'donation' (as it was at the time) I got lifetime service. :D ) and I've used it with different ISPs, and static and dynamic IPs. Name-wise, everything works great.
Bandwidth-wise, I used to have 1.5M down/256k up and it was fine. Not blazing fast or tons of capacity, but for "a couple dozen mails a day, a dozen or so web site visitors a day" even that was plenty. I use
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Seconded. I've been doing the same, since 1999. Web spiders are responsible for most of my upstream bandwidth, and I only notice when I'm looking at the log files. None of the 4 ISPs I've had over the years have complained or blocked my service.
The only actual problem I've had is email deliverability. Most destinations would bounce my emails because they came from a Dynamic IP. I configured Postfix to forward everything through Time Warner's mail servers, and I haven't had problems since.
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You could host your own website or blog on your home service and never miss the bandwidth.
So assuming you weren't going to disconnect your home Internet, all for the price of zero dollars per year.
You could host your family photos an pithy blog on a wall wart sized appliance.
Till your ISP steps in. Too many ISPs forbid this for no rational reason.
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Till your ISP steps in. Too many ISPs forbid this for no rational reason.
It's because blocking/forbidding it means they don't have to spend money having their IT staff help anyone running into difficulties hosting things. It's much easier for them if everyone obediently consumes.
It's also because they can -- far too few tech-oriented people consider it more important to have an ultra-fast connection than it is to be able to use it as they see fit. I feel the *minor* inconvenience of slower speeds on DSL is worth knowing my ISP lets me do what I wish (even if I don't use it muc
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Too many ISPs forbid this for no rational reason.
Can they not be convinced?
My ISP (Plusnet) is a division of the old state monopoly (BT), and they even have a page on how to set up a home email server: http://www.plus.net/support/email/smtp_mail.shtml [plus.net]
I don't run a home email server -- it's too much effort to filter spam -- but there's been a web server running on port 80 for the past year. My mum has another web server in her house (for family photos), with a competing ISP (o2?) and that's been running for almost 10 years.
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My ISP (Plusnet) is a division of the old state monopoly (BT), and they even have a page on how to set up a home email server: http://www.plus.net/support/email/smtp_mail.shtml [plus.net] [plus.net]
To be fair, they tell you nothing about setting up a home SMTP server, they merely show you how to get your Plushnet mail forwarded to your server after you get it set up. You are on your own as far as getting Postfix or Sendmail up and running.
But at least they are ahead of the game here compared to most US broadband providers.
To bounce back on topic, it is precisely inexpensive consumer devices such as the Raspberry Pi solution discussed and similar very small "wall wart" style computers that can come lo
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At home i'd have to pay the electricity for a server that's up all the time, and maybe buy a separate computer for it.
Also it allows me to acces my mail and files from just about anywhere, at high speed, without worries. My uplink from home is simply too slow - also an issue for web visitors, this way their pages load much faster.
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Thanks, not living in UK. Would have two decades ago though... it's one of your former colonies. Now part of China.
To make matters worse, at my home only ADSL available. No fibre.
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And: what people expect from it.
For a personal web site, I'd love to play with it. Doesn't matter too much if it goes wrong, if it's slow (due to limited uplink speed), or goes down because someone tripped over the cable. I guess there are plenty of uses for such a server; and for many low-bandwidth uses your home connection will be more than good enough.
But for business, not so much. I used to do this (when I had an office with 20 Mb up/down line); now I went with a cloud server simply for reliability. I w
Why stop with the infrastructure? (Score:2, Insightful)
We could decentralize and democratize the protocol standards as well.
There will be lots (Score:1)
Why not decentralized the network too? (Score:4, Interesting)
It should come with I2P like TAILS does:
I2P-Bote: Decentralized / anonymized email based on DHT
Tahoe-LAFS on I2P: Decentralized and anonymous file storage
Syndie on I2P: Decentralized and anon blog
and
I2P itself: A general replacement for IP. Like a cross between Tor and bittorrent, where everyone is expected to contibute to bandwidth and so reduce the centralization (and opportunity for attacks) as much as possible and expand the approved uses to anything (instead of just web browsing).
Take away the centralized power of the ISP and government to monitor and control every aspect of your online life.
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Take away the centralized power of the ISP and government to monitor and control every aspect of your online life.
The government and the corporations are controlling everyone! Seriously who gives a fuck, its the internet, what are you doing on it that youre so desperate to keep secret and hidden? In the end all you are battling is information freedom and that is a battle you will ultimately lose, you are communicating with the outside world and frankly if you think you can keep that private youre just a naive idiot.
Great idea, unfortunately... (Score:2)
Until there's widespread FTTP (GPON or AON) it will be more pain than it's worth.
I have run a Linux server for years with just these services on ADSL & ADSL2. Mail is fine, even a Jabber server is fine, even private file hosting is ok, if a bit slow, but once you start hosting websites your ability to actually use your own Internet when you're home is diminished.
I was hoping that the National Broadband Network (NBN) would stay 93% FTTP here in Australia, but unfortunately with the change in government t
Seems like the percloud, just (Score:1)
Google already says no. (Score:5, Insightful)
"about the project" (Score:2)
Great copy paste job boys :)
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I've got a really cool idea! We should totally get slashdot to get someone to read and tidy up the posts before they're well posted. You know, edit them to make them more readable. We could even give those people a title, say, "editor"....
Net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, it seems that providers that prohibit home servers (either by TOS or by actually blocking e.g. port 80) are in violation of FCC-10-201 (net neutrality).
This was brought up before on Slashdot http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/30/2322253/google-argues-against-net-neutrality [slashdot.org] with specific reference to Google Fiber's TOS prohibition of incoming ports. The complaint is described in http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf [cloudsession.com] . I wish someone would pursue this against all major providers, not just Google Fiber.
There is simply no valid reason to prohibit incoming ports. This issue is not bandwidth - most home servers use far less than say streaming video. In any case if it's abused, the providers can use their existing procedures to deal with bandwidth abusers.
This is really at the heart of network neutrality. The only reason I can see for prohibiting incoming ports is to prevent individuals from competing with commercial interests that provide network services. Personally, it really PO's me that my ISP blocks ports 80 and 443. I keep my files on a home server, and although I can access them via ssh, many public wifi services (e.g. at hospitals) block every port, in and out, except 80 and 443. I can't really complain about the public wifi (well, I can complain, but they'll just tell me that it's a free courtesy they're under no obligation to provide, so if you don't like it, don't use it). So, to access my personal files, I need to use a 3rd party's commercial server (cloud or VPN) that allows port 80.
(As for the dynamic DNS, that hasn't been a serious problem for me - my ISP keeps it fixed as long as my cable modem is powered and connected, and the IP only changes when I restart the cable modem. Anyway, that is a secondary and minor problem.)
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You know you can tunnel SSH over proxies, right? And you can tunnel SOCKS over that SSH session?
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This is amazing! (Score:2)
You mean I can run a server out of my home?! That's amazing!
How is this easier than spinning up a TurnkeyLinux [turnkeylinux.org] appliance on an old Pentium 4 (or better) desktop you can get for free in almost any part of the country?
Let's see - I need to buy the RaspberryPi, a case, and a power brick at a (practical) minimum, which puts the system in the $75+ range - compared to a repurposed desktop that will cost around $0. Of course, the difference is in the monthly power bill - the old Pentium 4 desktop will use much m
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Missing something? (Score:4, Interesting)
When did people not have the opportunity to host their own content?
For anybody that has ever hosted their own email server, Raspberry Pi is NOT the right platform to do this on. While you can easily set up an email server on any Linux distro, the reality is that you need something a little bit more powerful than Raspberry Pi to process the ten's of thousands of spam messages a minute you are going to get. And don't think that just because you are "clever" enough to set up your own email server that you will be immune to spam.
And it seems a lot the the Slashdot denizens seem to have forgotten the bygone era of the "Slashdot Effect", when people and companies used to try and host their own websites which couldn't handle a sudden influx of people that used the RTFA. Even a lot of corporate servers couldn't handle when hundreds of thousands of people suddenly jumped onto their websites all at once back in the day. This is why many corporations and consumers just started using hosted services which have a larger, dynamically scalable infrastructure to handle sudden jumps in traffic.
Finally, with things like Facebook and Twitter and a slew of other social networking services, these all but decimated the "personal blog". Nobody cares to go to www.myblog.com and read some mindless ranting from a conspiracy nut. The problem with "decentralization" is that you will be lost in obscurity.
So, aside from hosting anything more than a hobby website for friends and family to touch base with, good luck.
Any linux distro does this (Score:3)
I get that we're all busy frolicking with our Raspberry Pis, but any Linux distro on an old PC will do this. There's nothing "Pi" about this. You don't need a new distro for this either. Maybe a handful of shell scripts or some kind of GUI to manage all the bits and pieces would be nice, but this is all a solved problem.
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Why duplicate Freedom Box? (Score:2)
This sounds like the same concept that the Freedom Box Foundation [freedomboxfoundation.org] has been working on for a while. It would seem like a better use of resources for these groups to get together and pool their efforts rather than do the same thing twice.
Re:The world's largest botnet (Score:5, Funny)
Is officially under construction. Once a few of these get owned it will be quick before they're all compromised.
I agree. I mean, Linux runs the majority of web servers. Just look at THAT giant botnet. Best use MS IIS server, on Surface RT -- No one's doing that so it's far safer.
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You complete disregard that many eyes make all bugs shallow.
Probably because that is entirely false.
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New server, check your data and your back online.
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The graphics firmware blob and driver module are the only non-free pieces of code in there. The rest of the software is all open-source, and even the schematics (Though not the multi-layered PCB layout) have been published. Very useful schematics too - they show you which polyfuse needs briging if you want any hope of powering a USB hard drive.
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First you obviously need to get the Huawei Dongle working with wvdial or something similar. This took me perhaps a week.
Then you need to contact your cell phone service provider and ask for an unrestricted APN otherwise they block all connections to your dongle. This took some paper
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...or PWS [wikipedia.org]?
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You misunderstand. People are being NATed BEFORE it reaches their own equipment. Providers doing this claim it is to fight off the dwindling IPv4 supply. It also makes it impossible to get any services through without begging the provider. I'm experiencing this right now as my router is pulling a 10.x.x.x/8 address on its WAN. No amount of port forwarding on my pfSense box is going to work around that. I have a ticket open with my ISP to request a public IP but I have no idea if they're going to tell me to