Eben Moglen on freedom -- and the lack thereof -- in the cloud
I just listened to this (audio and video available from Hacker Public Radio).
It's all about rethinking our "relationship" with services such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and the like -- and what we can do about it to reclaim our freedom from a technological standpoint.
Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center talks about how there should be alternatives to ceding our rights and freedoms for "free" services -- and how free, open-source software can attack this problem with cheap hardware in the new Freedom Box project.
I'm still absorbing all of this and turning it over in my head, and I'll have more to say when that process is further along.
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the speech Eben gave at FOSDEM is a bit more recent. it's well done and highlights threats and plans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaIji_3xBE (part 1 of 3)
When I first heard this speech I knew I had to do something about what he's talking about. I've since install a server at home and I'm learning to host my own email server to get away from Gmail. I don't use Facebook. But I might try Diaspora if it can get going.
Great speech! It inspires people to action.
I've been using RoundCube for webmail with the mail accounts on my shared hosting account. They also offer Horde and SquirrelMail. I believe all of these are available for anybody to use on their home mail server.
It's a great way to have a webmail option without something like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.
Here is the text of that FOSDEM speech:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2011/fosdem/moglen-fosdem-keynote.html