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."
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.
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. -_-
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.
Re:Home server not the fix-all (Score:2, Interesting)
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 used to have an image that was in the top 5 matches on images.yahoo.com for 'ac cobra wallapaper' and I sometimes got hundreds of hits a day -- no problem at all. A dozen hits per MINUTE is only one every 5 seconds so ANY web host should be able to handle that easily. I currently have a moderately-priced 18M down/1.5M up fiber-to-the-curb service. (AT&T in Florida.)
The single biggest drawback with home hosting is the possibility of running afoul of your ISP's terms of service. Two big upsides: basically infinite storage (I can watch every single ripped movie or TV show that I own at any time, from anywhere, on any device, for free, because I have a symlink in Apache leading to my media folders) and fast transfers when you're at home to upload new content -- I can drag 2 GB of photos from my CF card right into my gallery web app and the bottleneck is the speed of my card reader.
Uptime: I trust my computer as much as any. If it breaks, it's faster & easier to fix when it's in my closet than when it's colocated somewhere. If it's a real "cloud" place... hell, even Amazon and Microsoft's Azure have had notable outages. (And when THEY go down, you are 100% SOL until THEY fix it. Which they want to do, fast, because they have so many customers, but because they're so huge and complex, sometimes the downtime is significant, despite all their resources.)
Power: I've got a UPS. Electricity is pretty reliable where I live. Since my home phone is now digital, my telco sent me a dedicated UPS for the router ("modem") because I'm no longer using POTS with its magical self-powering capabilities.
The $350 you spend each year would pay for a new Linux box or used Mac mini... every single year. Since I'd pay for my Internet service no matter what, and run it off a Mac mini that's always on anyway, I basically get a hosted website* with infinite storage and "enough" bandwidth for nothing more than the cost of the domains, and electricity. (Which on a Mini is practically like a night-light.)
* multiple domains, actually.