FreedomBox 0.1 released

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/news/FreedomBox_version_0.1_Released/index.en.html

FreedomBox Version 0.1 Released

I am pleased to announce our first FreedomBox software release. The
FreedomBox 0.1 image is available here (.torrent) (sha512sum:
867f5bf462102daef82a34165017b9e67ed8e09116fe46edd67730541bbfb731083850ab5e28ee40bdbc5054cb64e4d0e46a201797f27e0b8f0d2881ef083b40).

This 0.1 version is primarily a developer release, which means that it
focuses on architecture and infrastructure rather than finish work. The
exception to this is privoxy-freedombox, the web proxy discussed in previous
updates, which people can begin using right now to make their web browsing
more secure and private and which will very soon be available on
non-FreedomBox systems. More information on that tool at the end of this
post.

What have we accomplished? This first release completes a number of important
milestones for the project.

Full hardware support in Debian 

A big part of the vision for the FreedomBox project revolves around the
"Boxs", tiny plug servers that are capable of running full size computing
loads cheaply and with little use of electricity.  In many respects these are
wireless routers given the brains of a smart phone. If you want to change the
software on a router or smart phone today you normally need to worry about
bootloader images, custom roms, and a whole collection of specialized build
and install tools. We wanted to the FreedomBox to move beyond this fragmented
environment and, with the help of some embedded device experts, we have
managed to make our development hardware into a fully supported Debian
platform. That means that anyone with a device can install Debian on it just
like a laptop or desktop computer.  This support is very important for
ensuring that the work we do on the FreedomBox is as portable and reusable as
possible.

Basic software tools selected 

There is a lot of great free software out there to choose from and we put a
lot of thought into which elements would be included in our basic tool kit.
This includes the user interface system "plinth" that I outlined in a recent
kickstarter update as well as basic cryptography tools like gpg and a one
named "monkeysphere" that leverages gpg as an authentication tool. All of
these are now bundled together and installed on the release image. This
common working environment will simplify development going forward.

Box-to-box communication design 

Some goals of the FreedomBox can be accomplished with one user and one
FreedomBox but many, like helping someone route around repressive government
firewalls, will require groups of people and groups of boxes working
together. One of our greatest architectural challenges has been finding a way
for boxes to communicate securely without so slowing down or breaking network
access as to make the system unpleasant to use. We have now outlined and
built the first version of our proposed solution: Freedom-buddy.
Freedom-buddy uses the world class TOR network so that boxes can find each
other regardless of location or restrictive firewall and then allows the
boxes to negotiate secure direct connections to each other for actually
sending large or time sensitive data. We believe this blended approach will
be most effective at improving the security and usability of personal-server
communications and all the services we plan to build into those servers.

Web cleaning 

Our first service, a piece of software you can use today to start making your
web browsing more secure and private, is called "privoxy-freedombox". This
software combines the functionality of the Adblock Plus ad blocker, the Easy
Privacy filtering list, and the (HTTPS
Everywhere](https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere) website redirection plugin
into a single piece of software to run on your FreedomBox. Combining these
different plugins into software for your FreedomBox means that you can use
them with almost any browser or mobile device using a standard web proxy
connection. Because of our focus on building the FreedomBox as part of Debian
this software will soon be available to anyone running a Debian system
regardless of whether you are using our target DreamPlug hardware, a laptop,
or a large rack server somewhere. As you read this packages should already be
available in the Raspbian repositories, which is the optimized version of
Debian used on the Raspberry Pi hardware. Hopefully we will get that onto the
main Debian mirrors over the next month; if you are interested in building it
for yourself in the meantime, the source is available from gitorious. As we
build additional components for the FreedomBox we will continue to work on
making them widely available.

What is next? 

As you may have seen, our Project Lead, Bdale Garbee, is about to begin a
well earned early retirement from his long time role as Open Source & Linux
Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard. Over the coming month Bdale and the
rest of the Foundation team will be putting together plans for the next stage
of FreedomBox development and the road to a 1.0 release. News and updates
will follow at freedomboxfoundation.org (rss).