7 ms·

Those who are privacy conscious must first take the step towards self-hosting. They are many interesting approaches that are trying to make self-hosting practic

by educar 10y ago

Those who are privacy conscious must first take the step towards self-hosting. They are many interesting approaches that are trying to make self-hosting practical. They make it trivial to run your own mail server, keep your contacts/calendar/files/notes. Why trust yet another mail/cloud company (yahoo, anyone?)? There are promising existing projects out there (like cloudron.io, sandstorm.io, yunohost). Go try them out today. The projects are open source and have issue trackers where you can contribute even if you are not a developer. Such solutions will empower the average person in the future.

anigbrowl 10y ago
Are you sure about this? 20 years ago I was running a then-novel Linux machine with my own email etc. etc. but eventually I stopped because on the whole it wasn't worth all the effort. I know perfectly well, from experience, that I could vastly increase my privacy (or reduce the huge volume of information that I choose or passively accept liability for sharing, eg by having a FB account and not logging out of it every time I go to another tab etc. etc.). But how much of my time do I want to spend on opsec? I don't want to be in a defensive posture for the rest of my life, hiding from bad actors and constantly worrying about some overlooked chink in my digital armor. Frankly, if the future is endless low-grade cyberwarfare I'd rather be on the offensive and steal other people's data for my own advantage than be endlessly upgrading my door locks.
- educar 10y ago
  Well, have you checked out the platforms I linked? This is the whole point of the self-hosting platforms. They don't want you to put in the effort any more than buying a phone. You install apps and leave the security to the platform. At this point, this is really about how good the platform gets in insulating the user. If you feel like an early adopter, go try those platforms.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    I will and I appreciate the effort and care you took to explain them. I guess I'm just jaded because I've been through so many cycles of 'this will automate your security needs' followed by 'every system can be gamed' a couple of years later - much as Phil Zimmerman commented The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier, and the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months. Nowadays I worry less about my privacy on the assumption that it's probably hopelessly compromised anyway, and more about being able to hold an unpopular position or opinion without official interference. For example I think it's far more important that gay people enjoy full civil rights, be able to marry etc. than they had better privacy tools that would allow them to remain in the closet indefinitely.
    - _tulpa 10y ago
      >For example I think it's far more important that gay people enjoy full civil rights, be able to marry etc. than they had better privacy tools that would allow them to remain in the closet indefinitely. That's like saying that having 100% uptime and zero failures is more important than having backups. Sure the former would be ideal but in reality that answer doesn't cut it. Sure civil rights and free speech and personal autonomy are ideal, but over here in the real world there are a lot of people who still have to hide to avoid bad stuff happening to them. I also don't think you can use 'automate' and 'security' like in the previous paragraph and expect good results.
      - notduncansmith 10y ago
        To clarify: many concepts that we today accept as part of the natural order of things would get you killed if discussed in earlier times. We don't know what things that could get you in trouble today will turn out to be facts taken for granted in future cultures, but in order for that evolution to take place, there must be a safe way to discuss unpopular (especially to the extent of being dangerous) ideas. If the people behind any great historical revolution had been unable to discuss their ideas safely, it's reasonable to assume it might never have happened.
    - educar 10y ago
schoen 10y ago
Self-hosting has a severe metadata tradeoff. Suppose that you and I each self-host a mail server. Now we e-mail each other to talk about how great decentralization is and how much we both hate wiretapping. With self-hosting and SMTP, there is now a very clear TCP metadata record showing how my home IP address connected on port 25 to your home IP address. Maybe the next day you write back, and there's another nice clear metadata record showing your address connecting to me. Now any ISP between us, and anyone who can tap the ISPs' cables, knows that you and I are corresponding. If we were both using Gmail, this metadata pattern would pretty much not appear at all: we would each make an HTTPS connection to Gmail and exchange a bunch of data, and while in principle my upload would be matched in size by your download, it would be extraordinarily noisy in many ways and hard to correlate in practice. On the other hand, Gmail would know everything about us. Having Gmail know everything about us is clearly terrible and not a good privacy solution. However, having all of the ISPs be able to learn our detailed correspondence patterns and relationships is also clearly terrible and not a good privacy solution. So, self-hosting being a clear privacy win for messaging will require a lot of technical improvements on the metadata front. It isn't a clear win in this respect today; it most likely depends on whether you see ISPs (and people who can compromise or coerce them) or Google (and people who can compromise or coerce them) as a bigger risk overall.
- germinalphrase 10y ago
  So be abandon the wires and build an alternative internet?
  - schoen 10y ago
    Pretty expensive, and governments won't be more reluctant to tap the undersea parts and try to compel people to help them tap third parties, right?
    - germinalphrase 10y ago
      Assuming there are undersea cables to tap, yes. Wouldn't this be a key element (for good or bad) of satellite/dirigible/balloon served internet - the ability to create a separate series of internet services?
kordless 10y ago
Public has its benefits. So does private. It's only when they work together that you get the optimal solution.
Silhouette 10y ago
They make it trivial to run your own mail server, keep your contacts/calendar/files/notes. Sadly, no, they don't. The lack of easily installed and good quality self-hosting options is probably the single biggest barrier to more people doing this. Most people don't use Google Mail because they're particularly fond of Google; they use it because it's convenient. Running a real mail server (an SMTP host), in contrast, is certainly not something for the faint-hearted. Running a mail store, with some sort of automatic fetching from an ISP or third party mail server and some sort of forwarding to send mail via that server, is a bit more practical for those who don't want a full-time job. Then you can provide things like IMAP or webmail access on top. Even so, it's still prohibitively difficult to actually get it set up and working reliably if you're not already a reasonably experienced system administrator, particularly if you don't have a dedicated machine to run it so you can't just install someone's turnkey package that assumes it can install or modify whatever it wants. If you believe this is not the case, I invite you to link to some instructions that could reasonably be followed even by someone who is generally technically competent (but not an expert sysadmin) so they could host their own mail, contacts and calendar locally instead of using something like Google Mail. I suggest that no such instructions currently exist.
- educar 10y ago
  For email, cloudron has a built-in email server (it's poorly advertised) - https://cloudron.io/get.html#selfhost https://cloudron.io/get.html#selfhost . You can then read up https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html#email https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html#email. Install rainloop for web ui. For contacts, calendar, just install the ownCloud or nextCloud app. On android, https://davdroid.bitfire.at/ https://davdroid.bitfire.at/ works great.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  > The lack of easily installed and good quality self-hosting options is probably the single biggest barrier to more people doing this. Ever heard of mail-in-a-box[1] ? [1]: https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
  - Silhouette 10y ago
wfunction 10y ago
If I self-host (as painful as that is), what happens when my internet goes down randomly (or my computer has to reboot, or whatever)? Should all incoming emails really be dropped with an‌ "oops, try again later" message to the sender? I sure as hell wouldn't want that. There are lots of hidden costs to self-hosting...
- holri 10y ago
  "oops, try again later" is not what is happening when your mail server reboots. Email uses asynchronous protocols.
  - wfunction 10y ago
    > "oops, try again later" is not what is happening when your mail server reboots. Email uses asynchronous protocols. Wha...? How do you think my server receives emails while it's rebooting?
    - metafunctor 10y ago
      The sending server will automatically try to deliver the email again for a few days. If the receiving server is occasionally down, there will be a delay, but if it's not down for very long (many days) the email will eventually be delivered.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  nobody says you have to self-host on your personal pc using your home connection.
  - wfunction 10y ago
    I thought that was the point, since you didn't trust other people not to be mining your data? If it's another person's machine then they could just read your emails...
    - 10y ago
bubblethink 10y ago
This is highly impractical, and possibly even detrimental to your privacy/security. For one, most people are simple not qualified for such an undertaking, but that's probably not the biggest problem. It's the people who may think that they are qualified and may follow your advice and self-host. Some exceptions aside, almost nobody should put anything up on the internet unless they've done it in some professional capacity before. It's a fallacy to think that an average Joe can push a button and replace Google by paying 10-20 bucks a month to a cloud provider. For most people, a better solution is to use services like signal or protonmail/tutanota (at least until end-to-end email matures, at which point other big players will support it too)
cJ0th 10y ago
This is not a solution to the real problem: social networks having in-depth knowledge about the whole population. By all means, I don't want to discourage anyone from self-hosting. The problem is: There will always be agents (private people or companies) who leak information about others (on purpose or because of a lack of concern) which allows shadow profiling of people who want to opt out. Furthermore, these agents don't necessarily grasp the dangers which the disclosure of their social network brings for them. What we need are stronger laws as to what social networks (and other services) are allowed to store. For instance, FB shouldn't be allowed to know anything about me without me consenting to it.

by educar 10y ago

anigbrowl 10y ago

Are you sure about this? 20 years ago I was running a then-novel Linux machine with my own email etc. etc. but eventually I stopped because on the whole it wasn't worth all the effort. I know perfectly well, from experience, that I could vastly increase my privacy (or reduce the huge volume of information that I choose or passively accept liability for sharing, eg by having a FB account and not logging out of it every time I go to another tab etc. etc.). But how much of my time do I want to spend on opsec? I don't want to be in a defensive posture for the rest of my life, hiding from bad actors and constantly worrying about some overlooked chink in my digital armor. Frankly, if the future is endless low-grade cyberwarfare I'd rather be on the offensive and steal other people's data for my own advantage than be endlessly upgrading my door locks.

educar 10y ago
Well, have you checked out the platforms I linked? This is the whole point of the self-hosting platforms. They don't want you to put in the effort any more than buying a phone. You install apps and leave the security to the platform. At this point, this is really about how good the platform gets in insulating the user. If you feel like an early adopter, go try those platforms.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  I will and I appreciate the effort and care you took to explain them. I guess I'm just jaded because I've been through so many cycles of 'this will automate your security needs' followed by 'every system can be gamed' a couple of years later - much as Phil Zimmerman commented The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier, and the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months. Nowadays I worry less about my privacy on the assumption that it's probably hopelessly compromised anyway, and more about being able to hold an unpopular position or opinion without official interference. For example I think it's far more important that gay people enjoy full civil rights, be able to marry etc. than they had better privacy tools that would allow them to remain in the closet indefinitely.
  - _tulpa 10y ago
    >For example I think it's far more important that gay people enjoy full civil rights, be able to marry etc. than they had better privacy tools that would allow them to remain in the closet indefinitely. That's like saying that having 100% uptime and zero failures is more important than having backups. Sure the former would be ideal but in reality that answer doesn't cut it. Sure civil rights and free speech and personal autonomy are ideal, but over here in the real world there are a lot of people who still have to hide to avoid bad stuff happening to them. I also don't think you can use 'automate' and 'security' like in the previous paragraph and expect good results.
    - notduncansmith 10y ago
      To clarify: many concepts that we today accept as part of the natural order of things would get you killed if discussed in earlier times. We don't know what things that could get you in trouble today will turn out to be facts taken for granted in future cultures, but in order for that evolution to take place, there must be a safe way to discuss unpopular (especially to the extent of being dangerous) ideas. If the people behind any great historical revolution had been unable to discuss their ideas safely, it's reasonable to assume it might never have happened.
  - educar 10y ago

schoen 10y ago

Self-hosting has a severe metadata tradeoff. Suppose that you and I each self-host a mail server. Now we e-mail each other to talk about how great decentralization is and how much we both hate wiretapping. With self-hosting and SMTP, there is now a very clear TCP metadata record showing how my home IP address connected on port 25 to your home IP address. Maybe the next day you write back, and there's another nice clear metadata record showing your address connecting to me. Now any ISP between us, and anyone who can tap the ISPs' cables, knows that you and I are corresponding. If we were both using Gmail, this metadata pattern would pretty much not appear at all: we would each make an HTTPS connection to Gmail and exchange a bunch of data, and while in principle my upload would be matched in size by your download, it would be extraordinarily noisy in many ways and hard to correlate in practice. On the other hand, Gmail would know everything about us. Having Gmail know everything about us is clearly terrible and not a good privacy solution. However, having all of the ISPs be able to learn our detailed correspondence patterns and relationships is also clearly terrible and not a good privacy solution. So, self-hosting being a clear privacy win for messaging will require a lot of technical improvements on the metadata front. It isn't a clear win in this respect today; it most likely depends on whether you see ISPs (and people who can compromise or coerce them) or Google (and people who can compromise or coerce them) as a bigger risk overall.

germinalphrase 10y ago
So be abandon the wires and build an alternative internet?
- schoen 10y ago
  Pretty expensive, and governments won't be more reluctant to tap the undersea parts and try to compel people to help them tap third parties, right?
  - germinalphrase 10y ago
    Assuming there are undersea cables to tap, yes. Wouldn't this be a key element (for good or bad) of satellite/dirigible/balloon served internet - the ability to create a separate series of internet services?

kordless 10y ago

Public has its benefits. So does private. It's only when they work together that you get the optimal solution.

Silhouette 10y ago

They make it trivial to run your own mail server, keep your contacts/calendar/files/notes. Sadly, no, they don't. The lack of easily installed and good quality self-hosting options is probably the single biggest barrier to more people doing this. Most people don't use Google Mail because they're particularly fond of Google; they use it because it's convenient. Running a real mail server (an SMTP host), in contrast, is certainly not something for the faint-hearted. Running a mail store, with some sort of automatic fetching from an ISP or third party mail server and some sort of forwarding to send mail via that server, is a bit more practical for those who don't want a full-time job. Then you can provide things like IMAP or webmail access on top. Even so, it's still prohibitively difficult to actually get it set up and working reliably if you're not already a reasonably experienced system administrator, particularly if you don't have a dedicated machine to run it so you can't just install someone's turnkey package that assumes it can install or modify whatever it wants. If you believe this is not the case, I invite you to link to some instructions that could reasonably be followed even by someone who is generally technically competent (but not an expert sysadmin) so they could host their own mail, contacts and calendar locally instead of using something like Google Mail. I suggest that no such instructions currently exist.

educar 10y ago
For email, cloudron has a built-in email server (it's poorly advertised) - https://cloudron.io/get.html#selfhost https://cloudron.io/get.html#selfhost . You can then read up https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html#email https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html#email. Install rainloop for web ui. For contacts, calendar, just install the ownCloud or nextCloud app. On android, https://davdroid.bitfire.at/ https://davdroid.bitfire.at/ works great.
bigbugbag 10y ago
> The lack of easily installed and good quality self-hosting options is probably the single biggest barrier to more people doing this. Ever heard of mail-in-a-box[1] ? [1]: https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
- Silhouette 10y ago

wfunction 10y ago

If I self-host (as painful as that is), what happens when my internet goes down randomly (or my computer has to reboot, or whatever)? Should all incoming emails really be dropped with an‌ "oops, try again later" message to the sender? I sure as hell wouldn't want that. There are lots of hidden costs to self-hosting...

holri 10y ago
"oops, try again later" is not what is happening when your mail server reboots. Email uses asynchronous protocols.
- wfunction 10y ago
  > "oops, try again later" is not what is happening when your mail server reboots. Email uses asynchronous protocols. Wha...? How do you think my server receives emails while it's rebooting?
  - metafunctor 10y ago
    The sending server will automatically try to deliver the email again for a few days. If the receiving server is occasionally down, there will be a delay, but if it's not down for very long (many days) the email will eventually be delivered.
bigbugbag 10y ago
nobody says you have to self-host on your personal pc using your home connection.
- wfunction 10y ago
  I thought that was the point, since you didn't trust other people not to be mining your data? If it's another person's machine then they could just read your emails...
  - 10y ago

bubblethink 10y ago

This is highly impractical, and possibly even detrimental to your privacy/security. For one, most people are simple not qualified for such an undertaking, but that's probably not the biggest problem. It's the people who may think that they are qualified and may follow your advice and self-host. Some exceptions aside, almost nobody should put anything up on the internet unless they've done it in some professional capacity before. It's a fallacy to think that an average Joe can push a button and replace Google by paying 10-20 bucks a month to a cloud provider. For most people, a better solution is to use services like signal or protonmail/tutanota (at least until end-to-end email matures, at which point other big players will support it too)

cJ0th 10y ago

This is not a solution to the real problem: social networks having in-depth knowledge about the whole population. By all means, I don't want to discourage anyone from self-hosting. The problem is: There will always be agents (private people or companies) who leak information about others (on purpose or because of a lack of concern) which allows shadow profiling of people who want to opt out. Furthermore, these agents don't necessarily grasp the dangers which the disclosure of their social network brings for them. What we need are stronger laws as to what social networks (and other services) are allowed to store. For instance, FB shouldn't be allowed to know anything about me without me consenting to it.