All Packages Needed For FreedomBox Now In Debian 54
Eben Moglen's FreedomBox concept (personal servers for everyone to enable private communication) is getting closer to being an easy-to-install reality: all packages needed for FreedomBox are now in Debian's unstable branch, and should be migrating to testing in a week or two. Quoting Petter Reinholdtsen: "Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable. It was the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images during build and on the first boot. Now all one need to get going is the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from Debian. And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can build everything directly from Debian. :)
Some key packages used by Freedombox are freedombox-setup, plinth, pagekite, tor, privoxy, owncloud, and dnsmasq. There are plans to integrate more packages into the setup. User documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki."
You can create your own image with only three commands, at least if you have a DreamPlug or Raspberry Pi (you could also help port it to other platforms).
Open? (Score:2)
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I don't know about the owned by Oracle; it's free software as far as I know.
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https://www.virtualbox.org/wik... [virtualbox.org]
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VirtualBox is GPL2. If you install Oracles proprietary crap, that's your problem.
"This is called "dual licensing". Since Oracle holds all the copyrights to the VirtualBox code, or is at least permitted to relicense code that is owned by external contributors or other parties, we are free to choose the terms under which we license the code to our customers, or the open-source community. "
So any code you submit, you also assign to Oracle so they can release it closed source. So not totally open.
Open? (Score:1)
Its still in development having just made it to unstable, it will run on anything that Debian supports. Give it time...
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So they want an open and decentralized social network. But the VM images are only in the Oracle owned Virtual Box format? And right now it is only built for new and hard to source appliances, not older desktop easily found in rubbish bins? And I still haven't found what it does that owncloud does not... You would think the web page or wikipedia would have a short "This is what the we do" page somewhere...
Add to that Owncloud is an available plug-in for FreeNAS, which will run on older desktops (although the plug-in is only available for the 64-bit release of FreeNAS) and besides setting up an additional BSD jails with these other services, seems this can be handled that way.
Will this migrate to Ubuntu soon? (Score:2)
Ubuntu's Debian-based - how much work will it take to migrate this to Ubuntu?
In plain English, what's a FreedomBox? (Score:4, Interesting)
A 3 sentence description that doesn't use meaningless mumbo-jumbo vision statement as found on the linked wiki?
(a summary of its goals and how it compares to prior art?)
In Plain English: Security Crap (Score:5, Interesting)
Anything that claims to boost your privacy and security should not have something like pagekite included. I have just visited their home page and this is what greeted me as 2 step "linux flight plan":
$ curl -s https://pagekite.net/pk/ [pagekite.net] |sudo bash
$ pagekite.py 80 yourname.pagekite.me
Am I stupid or what? Open my root account to some website page? Flight Plan to hell. Looking forward to somebody who will hack that site to create one file there saying "rm -rf /" LOL
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That's an unfortunate trend that's going on right now.
Re:In Plain English: Security Crap (Score:5, Interesting)
$ curl -s https://pagekite.net/pk/ [pagekite.net] |sudo bash
I've noticed this kind of crap more and more often lately, usually as one of the "preferred" methods of installation for projects on GitHub. Who in their right mind would run that? There's a reason why we have package systems and a method of signing said packages. Blindly trusting some website with root shell access... boggles my mind.
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Look, its easy. On the https://wiki.debian.org/Freedo... [debian.org] page, theres a link to Learn about Freedombox [debian.org], which Im sure gives useful information on the project. Heck, that page even links to additional resources here [debian.org].
Like I said: Easy.
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Easy my ass. GP is absolutely correct, they completely fail to give a summary of what a FreedomBox is and why we should care. I've read those pages you linked and there is no summary. The closest thing I could find are links to video presentations with titles like "FreedomBox Update", "FreedomBox 1.0" and "Freedom, out of the box!".
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Typical OSS frontpage. 10 pages of bug-fixes and version numbers and not a single paragraph on what the fuck the software is or actually does. And you people wonder why the general public chooses proprietary software over shit like this.
Yeah, what AC said about Open Source docs (Score:2)
In this case I know it's some kind of privacy software, but typically "FooBatz Release 5.4c is out!!!" is some gaming application or whatever. A half-sentence or more in the Slashdot summary would help, and so would a FAQ that starts with a section of "What is FooBatz?" rather than with "Why won't Ver 5.4b build on Slackware?"
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Freedombox has a wikipedia page [wikipedia.org], and seems to want to place Facebooking/email/all your communications on an independent private server that only let you communicate with other people who have freedomboxes.
Maybe if they can put this on a machine that costs $5 and requires 5 minutes (or less) of setup it will actually go somewhere. As it is, it's like being the only person you know to own a videophone.
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Freedombox has a wikipedia page [wikipedia.org], and seems to want to place Facebooking/email/all your communications on an independent private server that only let you communicate with other people who have freedomboxes.
That Wikipedia article is stub-length and equally non-informative. The email service is likely more universal than just other FreedomBoxes, but might need to set up decryption services on recipient clients.
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Click the "Use FreedomBox" link
Click the "FreedomBox in the Press" link. (I guess press coverage is part of using FreedomBox?)
Click on the link to the one and only article listed (Third link now?)
Scan article, it refers to a homegrown mesh network, wtf?... Do a word search on "FreedomBox", no hits? oh, article refers to it as 2 words: "Freedom Box"
Do a word search on "Freedom"
JACKPOT (sort of):
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this is what it does: It provides the necessary software to support a private, possibly semi-secure, social network. Think: Facebook, but small and secret, presumably to protect your membership from an oppressive large authority.
(this post is a traditional trick to get someone who actually can answer this sensible question to become so enraged by this incorrect reply that their activation energy is achieved and we get a good answer. so take what i've written up there as false bait. (this works parti
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It was a joke; if you check you will see that the two pages I linked to form a circular reference.
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Oh. Right. Damn, I should have noticed that. I'm sorry.
I just saw that all of your links were marked as "read" and didn't bother to check any further. Hats off to you, I have been well and truly trolled.
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I think the problem is that, in all those links, there isn't an obvious link to a clear explanation of what Freedombox actually does. There's a vague "vision statement" about ideological goals. There's a set of directions that tells you how to plug it in (hint: you plug it in). There are video presentations which I can't watch conveniently, but I assume will explain something-or-other. There isn't really a clear plain-english write-up of what's supposed to be accomplished by using one of these, nor the
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The joke is that if you click the first link, then the second link, you end up back where you started. It doesnt look like anyone got the humor though.
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Yes, it was sarcasm. I was referencing the circular linkage on the website. Click "learn more" and you go to page 2, which links you to about (the homepage).
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from what i can tell the 'freedombox' is using freedom as in freedom fries. it requires all the software to turn a pi into a server that is totally controlled via the internet with the ability to lie about who is sending the packets etc. some people call this type of software a 'rootkit' and it is understandable why they don't explain this to would be users who are expected to just flash a pi with it no questions asked. i could be wrong, but i'm not the only person on slashdot to 'doubt' the software.
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FreedomBox is a community project to develop, design and promote[1] personal servers running free software for distributed social networking, email and audio/video communications.[2] The project was announced by Eben Moglen at the New York ISOC meeting on February 2, 2010.[3]
src: wikipedia entry for freedombox.
If that is mumbo-jumbo to you, you're really not likely to be in a position to contribute code or docs.
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my linux distribution already includes the kitchen sink for many of these services.
Perhaps they're not packaged in a 'personal' context to enable you to run the next facebook on chrooted debian running on your smartphone, using various peer-to-peer encryption protocols. Is that the intent? Or a full-blown linux server that runs in a Hyper-V container from you Win 8 Pro desktop? Sounds very "hand-wavey'.
So, I'm just curious as to why a project with vaguely defined goals and no obvious roadmap or system archi
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I spent a few minutes looking at the linked site, and searching, and could not find the answer to that question. There were some promising-looking links to freedomboxfoundation.org but the site was not responding.
Either I need to turn in my geek card, or more likely, someone needs to turn in their web content editor card.
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Hey man, is that Freedom Box? (Score:2)
Well turn it up, man!
Sorry, I'm just having flashbacks of the Freedom Rock [youtube.com] commercial.
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I know your just kidding but that actually would be a pretty good marketing slogan for them. I wonder if they would run afoul of Ramco or whoever it was selling Freedom Rock...
Seems like it would appeal to the older, potentially less tech savvy folks they are targeting with Freedom Box.
Ok... What does it DO? (Score:3)
I skimmed through all these pages and there isn't a single sentence describing what it does in order to accomplish it's goals.
Ok, great, it wants to have distributed social networking, email, yadda yadda.
Is it using Diaspora for the social networking aspects? Maybe it's using leftover magic beans?
I'm not even going to waste my time downloading this thing if they can't even say how they're planning on achieving those goals.