linuxcandyclone

All of us here have visited websites. Some more often than just once. Some too often. Often enough we have adapted to the website, or usually, make the website adapt to us. And we like it, or rather expect it. We respect and honor our preferences every time we visit that page, without having to change them each time we visit these sites. We want to it to remember our customizations, our preferences, so that before it loads on the screen it’s already formatted the way we like it.


The remembering our preferences is accomplished by what are known as cookies. Now cookies are are small fragments of textual data that store our preferences, and a lot more (such as log-in information, authentication, &c, so that we don’t have to key these in every time we log in). So the web-site loads in adherence to the contents of the cookie, therefore formatting itself in the desired way before it loads in the browser. Cookies are also sent back to the original web-site, so that your preferences can be synced across computers; so if you log-in to your account from another computer, say your work computer, then the web-site sends the cookies to your work computer, and your preferences are automatically adapted to that computer without you having to set the whole thing up again. As it appears, and in fact, it is intended to make life easier and more convenient.


But what misses the eye is that by letting the cookie remember your preferences, you’re actually letting the cookie, and the web-site, ultimately, get a tiny-glimpse of you. Now if that web-site happens to be something like Google or Facebook, two sites which together constitute a vast majority of most people’s online sessions, the cookies contain more than just a tiny glimpse of you; they now know a fair bit about you.


Given time, and as computers grow more powerful and smarter with each passing day, these websites amass a vast amount of data about you, and can accurately recreate a virtual persona of you. For instance, Google knows what you’ve been searching for- what brand of car you’ve been checking out for the last couple of weeks. Facebook knows about that girl whose account you’ve been checking on every now and then, it knows all your likes, your interests, your taste, everything. Now sure all all this is to make life easier for you. So when you Google car, then Honda pops up, because you’ve been checking it; you begin typing s-, and Sarah pops up, of all the people in your friend-list whose names begin with S, some above her, alphabetically-because she’s the girl you’ve been keeping tabs on for quite some time. Sure, this saves you the effort of checking out all the results that pop up in your Google search, or the effort of typing out the entire name. But this also indicates that the web-site knows a fair bit of you, and could possibly use this information against you.

Now the world isn’t really evil, and this isn’t just my opinion, but nonetheless, there’s a large number of people who’d disagree with me on this count. Fine by me, good-luck with you and your paranoia, but no, that doesn’t really work. There’s quite a sizable number of people who’re absolutely not comfortable with somebody else knowing so much about you, and their concerns cannot just be disregarded.

If nothing else, then Facebook has at least shown us a couple of things, in the present context: it has underlined the necessity for a network platform that allows us to connect and interact socially and the need for it to gather and process all the information-the very issue at the moment,to function efficiently. One clever solution would be to decentralize all the data, all the traits, the preferences, the likes, the dislikes, the tastes of the user in such a way that no body else could prospectively be able to access or exploit this information. Better still, keep all this information with you, or in a device that you’re in total control of. And that’s exactly what the Freedom Box is supposed to be.
At the very basic level, it’s a hand-held web server.



Now if you know anything about DIASPORA*, then simply put, the Freedom Box is your own tiny DIASPORA* pod. Except that its ambitious to do a lot more. Maybe include the functionality of something like Last.fm in it. And YouTube too. Not linked, but built into it. So it’ll be a part of a network where all your data will be on your Freedom Box. You will be in control of what is shared and what is not. And its all because it already physically exists on your server, it doesn’t have to be transferred onto some other third party’s device. So when you don’t want something to be online, just want to delete it, it’ll actually be deleted, rather than just deleting the link to it. And as on Facebook plus as on Last.FM plus as on YouTube, your Freedom Box, on one hand will decipher data from your interactions over the network, it can also make suggestions-in real-time.-of what you might like to do while you’re online. I mean, say you’re doing your regular stuff on Facebook, open in your browser, and listening to music, on say iTunes or Zune or Foobar2000, so you’re doing two different things, that involves running two programs on your computer-at least- and involving at least two computers (bear in mind if your computer is receiving data or accessing a web-site, then there also must be another computer sending the data or hosting the web-site. On the Freedom Box, the network is running in the background – its like an omnipotent process on your Box, maybe scavenging the network for something you’d like, maybe somebody you know. It could access your friends’ libraries and make suggestions. Maybe you’re usually a hard rock person, but at the moment you’re listening to classic rock, something you’re library isn’t very rich in, so it could maybe suggest a song from your friends library, maybe even stream it, which in my opinion would truly be Pod-casting. The same goes for your taste in everything that’s on your hard-disk that’s of similar nature, be it movies, eBooks, anything. And this would work, because you are not transferring your data to some another server, you’re running your own server, that has all the data. The other aspect of it, the connecting bit, some of which requires to collect data about you, that requires to have some sort of an idea about you and your persona, that is getting to know your preferences, or in a slightly more paranoid language, spying on you, for you, shouldn’t be an issue in this case, since its you, who’re commissioning the spy, and its you who the spy reports to and serves. Its like, you‘re not telling it; it is learning. And it’s yours. And how it does find friends for you? In a much-less invasive way. Yeah, it probably won’t have the capability to find friends with whom you share but not one mutual friend, which miraculously Facebook does, its super freaky how it does, but most of us would like it or rather have it that way, won’t we? And this intelligent “bot’, if I may call it that, or what is probably the Butler, as its original developers would like to call it, should be smart enough to figure some stuff out, like this guy is a close friend of mine, so I can share probably all my data, my statuses, &c with him; that guy isn’t particularly a close friend, but has very similar taste in music, so probably our music updates should reach other, and perhaps we could receive recommendations from each others libraries; or maybe that person is my Mom, so the photos of what I did with my girlfriend the other day should definitely not reach her. Stuff like that. It must decipher what our interactions mean, and account for them, and use reason and logic to make sense out of it. So basically, its truly networking your hard-disk, quite literally, except for say, software and that kind of stuff, and put it online. Within your control, of-course. You control who sees what, and you control, or own, what’s being made out of interpreting your interactions on the web.

So how exactly is this Freedom Box supposed to work? Well, to start with, its supposed to run Debian.

So what exactly is Debian? Its a Linux distro. So how’s it very different from the many others that exist? As its developers would like to call it, it’s the Mother of all Operating Systems. There are several distros available, but, at least comparing them to the major ones, like Ubuntu or Fedora, they’re all driven by companies. Companies have one motif: to earn money, even if it is on the pretext of selling and promoting free software. Debian, on the other hand, is a project, run by volunteers, who create it, not because Canonical or Red Hat is paying them, but because they’re simply very passionate about it.
I find the term ‘Mother’ particularly apt, because it has over two dozen distros that are direct derivatives, and that includes some half dozen *buntu distros (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, you get the draft). And even more so, in the following way.


Like a parent, Debian has no issues of other people and organizations reusing their code, repackaging their distro with a tiny fraction of their own polish. But in a scene not very uncommon in today’s capitalists driven world, once a newer distro has taken from Debian, it leaves Debian to fend for itself. Except that every six months or so, it comes back to collect a newer Lenny, or test build, polish it, and rebrand it under its own name, or maybe credit it somewhere hidden on its site, or maybe in its Wikipedia page, which honestly, not many really go through. Or it comes back every two years to get the stable, or the Squeeze build, polishes it again, and releases it as its long-term supported variant. I’m talking about Ubuntu here, by the way.


Its a matter of pride that Debian have so many distros that take from it, but naturally it expects something back it return. I mean not that it’s gone old and feeble; it’s still freaking robust, and heck, it drives Ubuntu! 80% of it is still the same. But what Debian developers would like, is rather than to have derivatives-which mean you take the code, and then walk away from Debian, its source, and deploy it-you work with with Debian, collaborate and work together in a singular direction, in what they call, which in my opinion is a very beautiful and most perfectly fitting word, blend. And hence, Debian pureblends.

So that’s a brief introduction of Debian, getting back to the Freedom Box, as mentioned before its supposed to run Debian. Not in a way that Debian is being developed to run this, no, no, no, its quite the other way around. This piece of hardware has been developed to enable a web-server run Debian. So its mostly porting Debian, into this dedicated server, with everything, the settings, the required databases, libraries, classes already in place, all ready to fired up. And again, there’s a world of possibilities, such as maybe integrate into a supremely awesome mobile telecommunication device, or maybe rope in cloud storage to make all data omnipotent, the possibilities are really endless. Of course, they are some glitches to be looked into, both on the software and the hardware ends; like for instance, for all its awesomeness, the Butler doesn’t exist – as of now; and hardware feasibility and adherence to the philosophy of free and open source it, since software could be free, hardware cannot possibly, without the manufacturer incurring massive losses; but nonetheless, hopefully, theoretically, a few glitches notwithstanding, this is in all a brilliant, and a very doable, very noble, and very possible and a very awesome project. In my opinion. Amen.

I’d like to attribute all that I just keyed in over two-thousand-odd word long, uh, rant – if I maybe permitted to call it that, ha ha!! – stuff, knowledge, idea, to Jonas Smedegaard, Debian Dev, from Denmark, for having delivered a brilliant, supremely amazing talk on Debian Pureblends and the Freedom Box; Raghavendra Selvan, who did an amazing job in making the talk a runaway-success; and everybody else who made it possible. =)

The story was submitted by Aditya Gautam a student at BMSIT pursuing his career in telecommunication engineering. The original post can be read here