Jonas Smedegaard holds in his hand a box that's no larger than a power adapter and much lighter than an average laptop charger. A Danish technologist and a well-known Debian developer, Mr. Smedegaard is a hero of sorts in the world of free software, and no less than an idol to the students he's meeting at various tech conferences, lectures and workshops being held this week in the city.
Besides being among the key developers involved for over a decade in the evolution of Debian, the Free Linux distribution, his ‘stardom' has a lot to do with the year-old collaborative project that he is part of: the FreedomBox. With its promise to decentralise information and power by simply taking online interactions off the cloud and the centralised servers owned by corporations, the FreedomBox has been one of the most-talked-about projects in recent times.
Still very much in its development stages, Mr. Smedegaard carries a small prototype of what the box will be. His eyes light up when he talks about the possibilities of a perfect world where the Internet would be a conglomeration of personalised nodes, where power structures and hierarchies cease to exist. The actual product, software stacks and all, he says, will take at least a year to complete. However, the hardware part of the plug (akin to a mini-server) is nearly ready and is currently being manufactured by GlobalScale, a hardware company.
The Box runs on an ARM chip (however, it is not tied to this chipset) and has a 512 MB RAM. Though it will provide for internal storage, he explains that the way he sees it, users can simply add on external hard drives for storage memory. The device will run on the Debian Operating System, customised to provide privacy tools with an extremely simple user interface. This is the part that Mr. Smedegaard works on.
The technologist, who identifies himself as an “idealist and Internet architect” on his visiting card, got on to this ambitious project after he heard a lecture by academic, hacktivist and lawyer Eben Moglen, who propounded the simple yet powerful idea of the FreedomBox. A personal plug-in server, stacked with software applications that provide privacy and security, he envisaged, would ‘free' the online experience and restore anonymity online. It would enable people to have conversations online that are safe, secure, and the controls for which are located in your own homes. Priceless? Mr. Smedegaard agrees.
The FreedomBox is nothing but an Internet server, he says. This means you reach it exactly the same way you would connect to a service located in, say, California. “So you do not physically connect your devices to the box. Instead, you connect the box to the Internet, and then connect your (other) devices to the Web where they locate the box as they would any other Web service.”
The ‘look and feel' of the services, or the interface itself, Mr. Smedegaard feels, is critical.
One possible design, he explains, could look like Facebook or any popular email service interface. “You would then type your FreedomBox address, login and password, and then have access to mail, chat, storage, etc. Like Facebook and Gmail, there could be specialised apps providing an alternate interface more suitable for the small screens on phones.” Another possible design, he explains, could be “native” services for mail or chat (many services already provide native access to email and chat).
Currently, the price of a FreedomBox is around $163. This, Mr. Smedegaard and the brains behind the Box, are confident it will come down significantly.
The tools for most of this already exist, points out Mr. Smedegaard. “It's not about inventing tools but about delivering what we have, and what we know can decentralise the system in a way that non-geeks can use.”
He feels very strongly about this: “As geeks, we do not realise that the world out there (of non-technical users) is not going to learn the interfaces we are familiar with. The interface has to be simple.” He believes it isn't that people want to give all their information to private companies, it's just that they don't know any other way, he says. “The FreedomBox will give them the way out.”
