I am pleased to announce our first FreedomBox software release. The FreedomBox 0.1 image is available here (.torrent) (sha512sum: 867f5bf462102daef82a34165017b9e67ed8e09116fe46edd67730541bbfb731083850ab5e28ee40bdbc5054cb64e4d0e46a201797f27e0b8f0d2881ef083b40).

This 0.1 version is primarily a developer release, which means that it focuses on architecture and infrastructure rather than finish work. The exception to this is privoxy-freedombox, the web proxy discussed in previous updates, which people can begin using right now to make their web browsing more secure and private and which will very soon be available on non-FreedomBox systems. More information on that tool at the end of this post.

What have we accomplished?

This first release completes a number of important milestones for the project.

• Full hardware support in Debian
          A big part of the vision for the FreedomBox project revolves around the "Boxs", tiny plug servers that are capable of running full size computing loads cheaply and with little use of electricity. In many respects these are wireless routers given the brains of a smart phone. If you want to change the software on a router or smart phone today you normally need to worry about bootloader images, custom roms, and a whole collection of specialized build and install tools. We wanted to the FreedomBox to move beyond this fragmented environment and, with the help of some embedded device experts, we have managed to make our development hardware  into a fully supported Debian platform. That means that anyone with a device can install Debian on it just like a laptop or desktop computer. This support is very important for ensuring that the work we do on the FreedomBox is as portable and reusable as possible.
• Basic software tools selected
          There is a lot of great free software out there to choose from and we put a lot of thought into which elements would be included in our basic tool kit. This includes the user interface system "plinth" that I outlined in a recent kickstarter update as well as basic cryptography tools like gpg and a one named "monkeysphere" that leverages gpg as an authentication tool. All of these are now bundled together and installed on the release image. This common working environment will simplify development going forward.
• Box-to-box communication design
          Some goals of the FreedomBox can be accomplished with one user and one FreedomBox but many, like helping someone route around repressive government firewalls, will require groups of people and groups of boxes working together. One of our greatest architectural challenges has been finding a way for boxes to communicate securely without so slowing down or breaking network access as to make the system unpleasant to use. We have now outlined and built the first version of our proposed solution: Freedom-buddy. Freedom-buddy uses the world class TOR network so that boxes can find each other regardless of location or restrictive firewall and then allows the boxes to negotiate secure direct connections to each other for actually sending large or time sensitive data. We believe this blended approach will be most effective at improving the security and usability of personal-server communications and all the services we plan to build into those servers.
• Web cleaning
          Our first service, a piece of software you can use today to start making your web browsing more secure and private, is called "privoxy-freedombox". This software combines the functionality of the Adblock Plus ad blocker, the Easy Privacy filtering list, and the HTTPS Everywhere website redirection plugin into a single piece of software to run on your FreedomBox. Combining these different plugins into software for your FreedomBox means that you can use them with almost any browser or mobile device using a standard web proxy connection. Because of our focus on building the FreedomBox as part of Debian this software will soon be available to anyone running a Debian system regardless of whether you are using our target DreamPlug hardware, a laptop, or a large rack server somewhere. As you read this packages should already be available in the Raspbian repositories, which is the optimized version of Debian used on the Raspberry Pi hardware. Hopefully we will get that onto the main Debian mirrors over the next month; if you are interested in building it for yourself in the meantime, the source is available from gitorious. As we build additional components for the FreedomBox we will continue to work on making them widely available.

What is next?

As you may have seen, our Project Lead, Bdale Garbee, is about to begin a well earned early retirement from his long time role as Open Source & Linux Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard. Over the coming month Bdale and the rest of the Foundation team will be putting together plans for the next stage of FreedomBox development and the road to a 1.0 release. News and updates will follow at freedomboxfoundation.org (rss).

After two weeks of editing and polishing it looks like our first kickstarter software release will not ship out with the rest of the rewards on the 31st. At the moment we are looking to release during the week of August 6th, which means software will hit the web just as most of you receive your tee-shirts. We will be announcing the release here as soon as it goes live and then immediately begin imaging the microSD cards and printing the commemorative CD's for shipment. That should take a week to complete so then everything in that final shipment will go out around the middle of August.

The last two weeks have been very busy ones for the FreedomBox development community. The two hackfests I mentioned in the previous email, at the annual Debian conference (DebCon) in Nicaragua and at before the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York, were well attended and very productive. I will cover the highlights here and anyone who is interested in more details, in particular about the activities at HOPE, should take a look at the most recent news at the freedomboxfoundation.org website. 

The biggest highlight is that we will have an initial developer release at the end of the month. We are working very hard over the weekend to figure out if we will have that internally with enough time to print the CD and microSD cards we will be shipping as part of the kickstarter rewards. Expect final word on that this coming Tuesday. 

Some major development effort went into clearing the way for that release, including:

• The DreamPlug hardware has now been fully integrated into the Debian free software distribution, which means that we can begin using Debian tools for updating and maintaining the FreedomBox image and that we will benefit from the whole community's security patching and bug fixing work, freeing us to focus on privacy tools and configurations that are of particular importance to us.
• Plinth, the web based configuration tool, is now connected to a general purpose configuration system, which gives us significant flexibility to integrate different software tools going forward.
• Freedom-buddy, our censorship and firewall resistant box-to-box communication tool, now has its first live service: OpenVPN. This is an important milestone both because it provides a live example of how other services can be configured to use the freedom-buddy infrastructure and because OpenVPN is a powerful privacy preserving tool at home and abroad.

Hi again everyone. It is past time for an update on a number of fronts and I am glad to say that we have some news to share.

Rewards

I want to start by saying that we have not forgotten any of our commitments to the community and to you for the pledges that got the foundation off the ground.

All the physical rewards, the stickers, tee-shirts, bags, and plug computers are completed and currently sitting in my office. We have two major development hackfests going on over the next week, one at the Debian community conference going on right now in Nicaragua and the other before next week's HOPE conference in New York.

By the end of next week we will be able to announce what software we will be shipping as the initial release and whether we can get that onto CD's and microSD cards in time for shipping with the rest of the rewards or will send it in a separate mailing. The Foundation will pay for any additional shipping costs in case a second mailing is required.

My apologies for the delay with shipping these rewards; we have delayed not to keep anything from you but because we are working to make this project a reality worthy of your support.

Development and updates

FreedomBox development, like development for most free software projects, happens in many places at once. Our project mailing list (http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/), community wiki, and the FreedomBox Foundations' website are the primary places where development progress, plans, and upcoming events are discussed. The mailing list and wiki in particular have received many thousands of messages and changes since the project began a year ago.

For any who are frustrated by lack of communication through Kickstarter's system, please accept my apologies and know that it is the result of having too many communication channels. We are still here and still working hard.

What we are working on can be broken down into four general areas:

1) Dealing with hardware.

We choose the DreamPlug from Global Scale as our initial development platform last year because of its flexibility and immediate availability on the market. A handful of contributors have devoted their time since then to building a completely free software image for this device that can use all its various features. Because the hardware industry moves so quickly, Bdale Garbee, the head of our technical advisory committee, built a more general purpose image building tool to make it easier to move between platforms. That tool is called freedom-maker and is available from the https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/code/ site.

2) Getting boxes to talk to each other

One of the biggest challenges faced by distributed services is making sure all the different elements can talk to each other. This was particularly challenging in the FreedomBox context because we want many different software tools, from email to chat to software phones, to be able to talk to each other without having to all be re-written to use the same protocol and to communicate securely using the best available encryption and anonymity-preserving tools. Our answer is a new tool called the Freedom-buddy, documented here and discussed here on the mailing list. This tool is built on the world class TOR network to enable individual FreedomBoxes in the world's most restricted location to find each other and decide on a secure way to communicate further.

3) Cleaning up web traffic

Web tracking, through advertising and the monitoring of un-encrypted network connections, is one of the largest and most pervasive forms of privacy invasions today. Free software web browsers like Firefox offer users tools like AdBlock Plus and HTTPS Everywhere to help push back against this web tracking, but not all devices allow you to choose your browser these days. So we built a web proxy you can run with any browser to get the functionality from both these tools. That too is available at the https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/code/ site.

4) Configuration soup

Combining software tools can be a little like building a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from several different kits. Getting the pieces to line up and keeping them that way as the system changes is a challenge, especially when one of your main goals is making all of this easy. To be as universal as possible we built our configuration management tool as a website that runs on your FreedomBox. That tool is called plinth and is designed for flexibility and simplicity. Plinth is the last item currently available at https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/code/.

Summing up

There are plenty of things yet to do before reaching all the goals set out in our project vision, some of which will be worked on in this week's North and South American hackfests, but we are making progress towards those goals and appreciate your continued support.

Initial release information will follow in two weeks and all the physical rewards will ship by the end of the month. Anyone who has not yet sent in a tee shirt size please do reply to the Kickstarter survey and anyone whose address will be different in the beginning of July from the one they sent in the survey, please message me with that updated information.

Sincerely,

Ian

Apparently everyone with a screen printer and access to the US postal system has been booked solid making end of year merchandise since before Thanksgiving. That means our printing needs are going to get pushed to the middle of January, unless someone in the kickstarter knows a quality tee shirt / bag printer. If you know who we should work with, please drop me a message. Either way the microSD card readers and stickers are in process and everything is on track for sending out in the next 4-6 weeks.