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Comment by moreentropy | Hacker News Reader

The problem can't just be solved by simply pointing people to (random?) open source software.

We still need servers as rendezvous points, and we can't expect everybody to run their own services. Properly setting up a mail server is hard.

So, everybody who can should run XMPP and/or SIP servers and hand out accounts to their friends. Both telephony/messaging protocols have inherent capabilities for federating with other people's servers similar to what email does. And with OTR and ZRTP we have real end-to-end encryption without relying on (broken) SSL certificates.

The technology is ready, now it's time to make it usable. Let's help people to move their lives back out of the cloud.

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> We still need servers as rendezvous points, and we can't expect everybody to run their own services. Properly setting up a mail server is hard.

What could be done about this? Running a server on someone else's platform makes you more vulnerable and ISP port blocking can be an impediment to running a server at home. So I start thinking about relatively inexpensive dedicated microservers with integrated solid state storage. Power consumption optimized single board solutions that could just be shoved into a rack and that someone could build hosting plans around. I don't know if anyone has tried to do that.

How far could we go in terms of protecting the microserver from the hosting provider and anyone that may try to pressure them for client data? Maybe provide a bare bones executive that allows them to get it up on the network and from there the client can connect and instruct it to install (from the hosting provider's repository or some other repository) pre-built images that are hardened and optimized for the services they want to run and which would include easy to use provisioning tools to help with post install config? Maybe it could run with fully encrypted storage and the executive could provide the hosting provider with an interface to backup that strongly encrypted storage? Thereby allowing for backups which could be restored by the hosting provider (in the case of a hardware failure for example) but without them having access to the OS and data stored on it?

very good points. check out guardianproject.info ... their whole mission is exactly this.

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