Comment by stabilo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stabilo | Hacker News Reader

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"Unfortunately..."

Can you be more specific? Irrespective of this project and its goals, I agree with the installation approach.

What is the impassable step?

Purchasing a RPi?

Using a program to copy an image to an SD Card? What if SD Cards with the image pre-installed were also available?

The RPi stays on unless someone unplugs it, so I trust that no one is going to claim "always on" is an issue. It does not even have a reset button like most consumer routers.

Setting up consumer routers involves plugging into a local network so I cannot imagine that is an issue either.

So what is it?

This image is a whopping 1GB and there is no link to source code. Without source code this is all but worthless. However I agree 100% with the distribution and installation method.

All computers, including routers, should boot from removable media. And users should get to choose what OS they run. Control. Who has it? Users have very little and what they have is continually being eroded.

If users want more control over what internet companies are allowed to do, then this is the way forward.

What do others think?

The author of this project notes, "Freenet is stillborn."

I agree. And it's pretty obvious the reason why is that Freenet presents itself as a web server. Any privacy project packaged as a web app is doomed. The local web app is a shitty interface. If Freenet had an interface more like Bittorrent, its fate may have been different.

There is a market for appliances sporting web interfaces, but that's only because it's the cheapest way to have a graphical interface that's cross platform. Only technical people use such things, and even they have to want the benefits of the appliance pretty badly to put up with the hassle of deployment. The average consumer will never touch that crap, and I don't blame them.

You mention consumer routers. Yes, those are appliances with web interfaces. But the benefit of deploying one is ACCESS TO THE INTERNET! That's a pretty compelling reason. Even if LookingGlass was sold pre-configured like a router, it's not even close to compelling enough to gain traction.

Besides how inconvenient the web appliance is to use, it's also pretty weak from a security perspective. You want to have all the encryption happening as close to the endpoints as possible. To reduce attack surface it's also best that the architecture is as simple as possible, with minimal dependencies. The LookingGlass approach follows neither of those best practices. The project even recommends deployment behind a firewall.

I don't want to shit on LookingGlass here. I haven't looked too hard at it and I support any experimentation with new protocol ideas in this space.

It's just that to be successful it needs to be natively written for every platform, especially the mobile ones. Making the core implementation portable by using C or C++ is acceptable. Just getting it going on Linux and asking users to run a server - especially a physical server - is totally not.

These are good points. I feel the same way as another poster who commented that the maintainer is going after the raspberry pi crowd so during this nascent phase only the techie "masses" are going to use such a thing. Frankly, I see a lot of issues with this project but if the fundamentals were solid I could imagine overlooking them to bring it closer to the broader community space. I suppose if I were a Chinese dissident I might have a compelling reason to go for a turn-key solution but previous commenters nailed it that this thing requires too much trust to be more than an experiment. If I were to run it on a pi I'd be prepared to ditch the pi and attach it only to some open wi-fi network.

Well, I never said anything about web interfaces. I do not like them. If the system is preconfigured, then no interface is required. "The best interface is no interface."

If there needs to be configuration while the system is running, then I prefer SSH or serial console. The images I use on my RPi are configured with an sshd listening on a loopback interface.

My analogy to consumer routers was only to remind readers that consumers plug these computers (routers) into their networks all by themselves without any assistance. This makes any argument that consumers cannot plug things into their network hard for me to believe.

Setting up those crappy routers is another issue unrelated to my comment. I don't know how consumers get it done, but they do. I find web interfaces annoying and unnecessary but I know many users love them. Again, this has nothing to do with my comment, which concerns preconfigured images and booting from external media (as on the RPi).

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