SuperBox

Groups that work together especially in global communities, where people meet once in a while and collaborate. The box should provide a local wireless Mesh network. The box hasn't been built yet, except as a single beta implementation.

The box will run sandstorm, and probably also requires tor to prevent authorities from using the ip address to track the boxs location.

Sandstorm

Sandstorm allows simple installation of different open source apps/grains on a server. Sandstorm provides single-click installation of many different apps. Each "grain" is a separate instance of the app (eg etherpad) which runs in an isolated container, and thus is completely isolated from other grains.

Thoughts

Issues/Challenges:

• Hardware hurdle. Getting people to buy hardware can be a barrier to adoption. Possibly having a virtual machine version is worth it
• Challenge of sandstorm is that it can only listen to one domain
• Security challenge of encryption
• Cost
  • Raspberry pi's/Chip/
• How stable is the sandstorm ecosystem?
• How do you get updates out there (securely on low bandwidth)
• Privacy vs Public

Ideas/Thoughts

• Persistence vs non-persistence.
  • Tails server would allow non-persistent collaboration
  • Perhaps there's a way to the collaboration tool be ephemeral as you run it, and then choose to persist specific version.
• Health checks
  • Remote monitoring
• built-in keypad for entering a password/pincode
• Durress passwords, plausible deniability encryption
• A sandstorm app would include the latest version of sandstorm and a number of scripts
  • perhaps having a superbox sandstorm app for mgmt would be worth doing

Questions

• Why is this better than having a hosted system in a "safe" location.
  • Even in safe countries machines get impounded
  • Internet shutdown exists
  • Not going through the national firewall can be dangerous in itself

Apps

• etherpad
• mediawiki
• owncloud

Home: Market Segment

• Who is this for
  • Dissidents, activists (globally), small groups who meet locally
  • Usable but can be run by a fairly non-technical audience

What it isn't

• A panacea for really targeted individuals (not for edward snowden)

What needs to be done

• Automated updates of sandstorm and OS?
• Automated backup with minimal configuration
• Routing all network connectivity through tor?
• Reverse-proxy
• Superbox app for sandstorm

Use Cases

• Dissidents, activists (globally), small groups who meet locally
• Analogy. These are activists who routinely jump off cliffs, and sometimes they sometimes get badly hurt. Superbox is a bungee cord. It's still dangerous but a lot better than the alternative.

Cost

• This could be supercheap by using raspberry pi, but could also scale to biiger hardware such as IntelNUC

Alternatives to superbox

• Piratebox
• Librarybox
• Freedombox - private cloud with calendaring and document sharing etc
• ArchOS
• others?
  • cryptpad