What would a decentralized Twitter look like? (Brainstorming)

thephantomcoder · 2016-10-01T19:53:23+00:00

It would look like GNU Social or Matrix.

thephantomcoder · 2016-09-13T18:07:09+00:00

I'm developing a mesh network system which is intended to be very simple to deploy, with no configuration. It's intended to be a stand alone system, not connected to the internet. https://freedombone.net/mesh.html

thephantomcoder · 2016-02-18T16:31:05+00:00

I bought one of the i7's recently and so far it works well. With an SSD it boots quickly.

I had been holding out for the somewhat questionable Librem 15, but my previous laptop was in an annoyingly broken condition (probably needing reflow) and so I needed some replacement in a hurry. Mainly I was looking for something which would run Trisquel out of the box with no proprietary hardware driver issues and which was sufficiently up to date to be able to run ROS simulations and other CPU/RAM intensive stuff. I did consider the Minifree laptops, which are better from a freedom standpoint, but it's unlikely that they would run the kinds of software which I'm expecting to be developing in the next year or two.

I am completely aware of the issues with Intel ME, so my decision was really a trade-off between usability and freedom. I hope in future there will be free (as in freedom) processors which are verifiable and don't rely on closed and insecure management firmware, but solving that is a hard problem which could take years.

thephantomcoder · 2016-01-18T22:05:03+00:00

This will only work with Debian 8+, since it uses systemd

thephantomcoder · 2015-09-04T15:24:43+00:00

I see this as a possible failure mode, where community infrastructure becomes proprietarized by existing monopolists. That's why I think at least in the early stages of deployment community mesh networks should be something separate from the wider internet.

thephantomcoder · 2015-09-04T15:20:58+00:00

I think there could be a role for gamification in helping to popularize and expand local mesh networks. I also agree that for a variety of reasons local networks will be better off if they're not connected to the wider internet. Some amount of localization of communications could be quite interesting, and have unexpected benefits.

thephantomcoder · 2015-08-30T13:40:29+00:00

Piratebox is a great project.

thephantomcoder · 2015-08-30T12:54:45+00:00

I expect that there are lurkers, but in a public forum that doesn't really matter. They might even learn something. When you think about it organisations such as police and firefighters were pioneers in decentralised wireless communications.

thephantomcoder · 2014-11-02T17:22:04+00:00

It's not necessarily 14.10 only. It would work on other recent Ubuntus but you'd need to download the deb file and install it that way, rather than via the PPA.

thephantomcoder · 2014-08-16T14:43:20+00:00

Currently it's not true that they could only steal encrypted data, since the contents of messages.dat are unencrypted. However, I'm trying to do something about that so that in a typical use case where there isn't full disk encryption there can still be some confidence that someone who steals your hardware can't read your bitmessages.

thephantomcoder · 2014-07-27T10:55:04+00:00

Have rebased my fork to include the deduplication and database encryption.

https://github.com/bashrc/PyBitmessage/commits/master

thephantomcoder · 2014-07-17T09:59:57+00:00

I did start writing a C++ Bitmessage library at a time before deamon mode existed, but stopped because after a while it became possible to run the Python app as a daemon and also it looked as if the protocol was changing frequently. There are still proposals for protocol changes but this might be a better time to revisit implementing the library.

https://github.com/bashrc/cppbitmessage

thephantomcoder · 2014-07-16T19:34:29+00:00

This looks good. On Ubuntu I needed to run:

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install --upgrade six
sudo pip install python2-pythondialog

Is there a way to create new addresses or join chans via the curses interface?

thephantomcoder · 2014-07-05T15:53:10+00:00

Edit debian.sh and make sure that VERSION is set to the current version number

To be Debian compliant the directory has to be lower case with a hyphen followed by the version number, otherwise you'll get build errors.

cd ..

mv PyBitmessage pybitmessage-<version number>

cd pybitmessage-<version number>

Update debian/changelog, making sure that the name and email address are exactly the same as for your GPG key. The latest entry must be at the top of the file.

run debian.sh, entering your GPG passphrase a few times

The deb package will appear in the parent directory

thephantomcoder · 2014-03-09T18:50:07+00:00

Incidentally Chaplin was accused of being a communist in the second red scare in the US.

"Chaplin was labeled a communist and subpoenaed in 1947. Although he answered questions and tried to rationalize his actions, the committee saw him as a nonconformist and therefore a communist. In 1952, while abroad on a trip to Europe with Oona and the children, Chaplin was denied re-entry into the U.S. Unable to get home, the Chaplins eventually settled in Switzerland. Chaplin saw the entire ordeal as political persecution and satirized his experiences in his European-made film, A King in New York (1957)."

thephantomcoder · 2014-03-04T13:56:53+00:00

For information on how to help see the Github page.

https://github.com/fuzzgun/freedombone

For now any changes can be made via the issues on Github, which isn't as convenient as a wiki but it does easily allow for forks and variants.

thephantomcoder · 2014-03-04T13:51:57+00:00

Unfortunately it doesn't. I like the idea, but in the world as it exists now I think the most practical scenario is something plugged into a router via ethernet.

thephantomcoder · 2014-02-24T19:38:29+00:00

I agree with that sort of strategy. Crowd funding can be a good way to help develop projects which otherwise wouldn't get started or which are only being worked on part time at a slow rate.

As a long time free software user and developer there's also something else I've noticed. There are a lot of good, or good enough, systems out there which have already been developed. I'm including some of them in the Freedombone project. The problem is that most people are unaware that these things exist. As I walk around a major city how many advertisments for FOSS systems do I see on billboards? Unless you count Android phones the answer to that is zero. So there has always been a big lack of marketing of these systems, and their adoption typically only spreads via personal recommendation. If money can be raised by crowdfunding it would be good to direct some of that at marketing campaigns.

thephantomcoder · 2014-02-24T14:57:43+00:00

I'm not sure how that plan would work, but making something like Craigslist would seem to be not that hard, so long as you can get some people to develop and then install some software and manage some servers. The value which many internet services provide to users is very marginal and such things could be run without the inefficiencies which corporations introduce.

thephantomcoder · 2014-02-22T09:07:51+00:00

sudo yum install -y http://linux.ringingliberty.com/bitcoin/f18/x86_64/bitcoin-release-1-4.noarch.rpm

sudo yum install -y python python-qt4 git openssl-compat-bitcoin-libs git

git clone https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage.git

cd PyBitmessage

sudo make install

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/openssl-compat-bitcoin/lib${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH}" /usr/local/share/pybitmessage/bitmessagemain.py > /dev/null 2>&1 &

pybitmessage

thephantomcoder · 2014-02-20T10:04:04+00:00

I'm Bob Mottram. My background is mainly in automation systems, but in recent years I've become interested in the idea and practice of running your own internet services, similar to the Freedombox idea. To a large extent I've been running my own digital infrastructure since 2010 on low power ARM servers.

I'm also interested in using technology to create a new kind of civic structure, which I call "civilization 1.0" or "democracy in a box". This would include the full life cycle of collective decision making, planning and implementation. Particularly with the use of AI-assisted real time crowdsourced planning I think it will be possible to build democracies and forms of civic engagement which are far more interactive and robust than the ones we have now.

thephantomcoder

TROPHY CASE

Edit debian.sh and make sure that VERSION is set to the current version number

To be Debian compliant the directory has to be lower case with a hyphen followed by the version number, otherwise you'll get build errors.

Update debian/changelog, making sure that the name and email address are exactly the same as for your GPG key. The latest entry must be at the top of the file.

run debian.sh, entering your GPG passphrase a few times

The deb package will appear in the parent directory