On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 11:51 PM, Michael Rogers <[email protected]> wrote: > On 08/07/12 23:41, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson wrote: > > Not quite - unlike scenario two, the user would get a subdomain from > the PageKite provider, rather than using her own domain. And unlike > scenario four, the user would generate a certificate for the subdomain > and have it signed by a CA, rather than using someone else's wildcard > cert.
I don't think most CAs are willing do that. I would love to be proven wrong though. There are multiple issues here though - subdomains may be free, but they do tie your identity to whoever provided you with it and make you depend on their DNS infrastructure. Top level domains at least have formal procedures and rules in place for handling transfers from one registrar to another. That's why this wasn't considered as a scenario. One way to look at the scenarios I provided was from the point of view of independence. Scenarios One and Two give the user at least a theoretical possibility of independence, where they can move from network to network and provider to provider. This is very important IMO, but unfortunately places a burden on the user to register and manage his own identity (domain & cert) himself. Scenarios Three, Four and to a lesser degree, Five, introduce dependencies of various types which give more convenience to the user in the short term but may not really be compatible with the long-term vision of something like a FreedomBox. I think of them as training wheels. :-) (When presented this way, I actually see it as a benefit for the training wheels to be somewhat clunky and obviously imperfect. If your training wheels let you go 30kph, you may never take them off...) There are many other dimensions to this, but I feel this one is really fundamental and many of the others depend on it. Being able to switch service providers is in some ways a freedom which presupposes many of the others; privacy, anonymity, security - they don't do much for you if your provider cuts you off. -- Bjarni R. Einarsson Founder, lead developer of PageKite. Make localhost servers visible to the world: https://pagekite.net/ _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
