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Re: [GNUnet-developers] [Freedombox-discuss] [gnu-prog-discuss] MediaGob


From: Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson
Subject: Re: [GNUnet-developers] [Freedombox-discuss] [gnu-prog-discuss] MediaGoblin, now an official GNU project :)
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2011 09:52:57 +0000

Hey Luke,

On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <address@hidden> wrote:

 btw i can't tell if ostatus has built-in firewall-busting (like the
gnunet infrastructure does).  one of the key reasons why all of these
"federation" projects (e.g. sipwitch) are technically unsuccessful is
because they don't have proper firewall-busting built-in. 

I strongly agree that assuming everyone has a public, unfiltered IP address is a huge mistake if people want to aim for mass adoption and provide realistic alternatives to the stuff "in the cloud".

  gnunet is the only free software infrastructure that we have that has
been designed - somewhat accidentally - to deal with this.

This isn't exactly true - so please forgive me for jumping in and promoting my own project now... :-)

Although the implementation is completely different, PageKite (http://pagekite.org/) is designed to solve exactly this problem - to let people run publicly visible servers on machines that do not have unfiltered and/or public IP addresses. It's free software (AGPLv3) with the backing of my tiny startup company in Iceland. (After a chat with RMS we are considering whether we should make it an official GNU project as well, but haven't really come to a conclusion yet.)

Instead of attempting to provide strong anonymity like GNUnet, I2P and Tor, PageKite's goal is to be backwards compatible with today's browsers and today's servers, letting people use the tools and standards they are already familiar with.  (If people want backwards compatibility and strong anonymity at the same time, it is possible to use Tor and PageKite together, at the cost of performance.)

In my opinion, if you want people to gradually migrate to more privacy friendly alternatives than Facebook and Google, then this backwards compatibility is critical - I can't demand that everyone who wants to visit my photo albums install a GNU VPN client or an IPv6 tunnel; my photo album has to work with the web browser and Internet connection they have already.

I gave a talk about PageKite at RMLL this summer, and just got the slides and video up and running last week: http://pagekite.net/slides/rmll2011/

--
Bjarni R. Einarsson
Founder, lead developer of PageKite.

Make localhost servers visible to the world: http://pagekite.net/

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