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POPSDecentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You
A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it. Almost anyone could have one of these tiny servers. Once everyone is getting them, they will cost $29. The missing ingredients are software packages, which are available at no cost but have to be made easy to use. Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.” With tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material. A group of developers working in a free OS called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software.
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POPSInterview: Eben Moglen - Freedom vs. The Cloud Log
Glyn Moody writes "Here's a problem for free software: most social networks are built using it, yet through their constant monitoring of users they do little to promote freedom. Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and the legal brains behind several versions of the GNU GPL, thinks that the]free software world needs to fix this with a major new hardware+software project. 'The most attractive hardware is the ultra-small, ARM-based, plug it into the wall, wall-wart server. Such an object can be sold to people at a very low one-time price, and brought home and plugged into an electrical outlet and plugged into a wall jack for the Ethernet, and you're done. It comes up, it gets configured through your Web browser on whatever machine you want to have in the apartment with it, and it goes and fetches all your social networking data from all the social networking applications, closing all your accounts. It backs itself up in an encrypted way
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