Editing Ends and Means (section)

===Initiatives===
Peer-to-peer, decentralized, and distributed systems have been the topic of much research and development in recent years. What follows is an examination of some initiatives that have emerged in the problem space, and the ways in which those initiatives complement one another.

====Federated Social Web====
In the past few years, many initiatives have emerged that aim to build a social web built on open standards, where a federation of servers, rather than a single behemoth, stores user profiles. Notable efforts include [[GNU Social]], [[Friendika]], [[Buddycloud]] and [[Diaspora]]. Not all of these projects are interoperable as yet, but they are increasingly converging on a set of standards.

[[OStatus]] and [[XMPP]] have emerged as viable protocols in the space of status sharing and message passing. All of the networks mentioned above employ some combination of these two platforms.

Of note, however, is that ''all'' of the federated social platforms mentioned above, regardless of other design parameters, are intended to run on a ''server''. The ideas motivating these efforts are good ones: to encourage decentralization of infrastructure, and help people take some control of their own data. Yet, existing solutions have not accomplished this outcome, because the barriers to entry and technical knowledge required to operate today's servers are prohibitively high. Thus the need for [[FreedomNode|nodal computers]] to take part in the federated social web.

====Nodal Computers====
Eben Moglen's vision of a low-power, headless home home server that ''just works'' has spread like a shockwave through the freedom-loving computing community. The ramifications of the idea are clear - it would allow ordinary users to own their data, secure their communications, and maintain their privacy.


There are number of large, outstanding challenges in the effort to create a home server that's easy to use. While the community has been more-or-less able to converge on elements of the server backend, little progress has been made in the way of a user interface, or in provisions for high fault-tolerance and reliability. If the FreedomBox project is successful, there is no telling the importance of the role that these boxes will come to play in their owner's lives. To achieve the goal of widespread adoption, it is of critical importance that the box be able to run continuously, without major interruption, for years on end. It will need to be securely and automatically backed up, so that a system failure doesn't represent the loss of one's entire social graph and media archive.


These problems are challenging, but by no means impossible. Like any product or project, the FreedomBox will take years to reach maturity. As the nodal platform crystalizes and the userbase grows, it is time to begin exploring what freedom-enabling systems could be constructed using the no-fuss, always-on home server as a building block. 


It is not enough to settle for communications that are encrypted, but peer-to-peer on the logical level only. The advent of the nodal computer represents an opportunity to change the nature of our communications in a more fundamental way. Yet, in order to do so, we will need a naming system that is decentralized, and mesh networking technology that makes configuring a node as easy as turning it on.

====Distributed Social Networks====

There are also social initiatives which operate in a more P2P-oriented style with all social computation and modeling happening in a software running on the user's device itself. [http://socialswarm.net Social Swarm], a working group of the German digital rights foundation FoeBuD, is researching such solutions as they bear the very favorable feature of enabling end-to-end encryption between all communication members, leaving no unencrypted data on server nodes. In contrast to the ''federated social web'', this solution would require no installation of nodal computers in people's homes.

====Distributed Global Names====

There is a classic problem in network theory, commonly referred to as [[Zooko's Triangle]]. It states that, at best, a name can have two of the three following characteristics: secure, distributed, and meaningful to humans. Names that are globally unique and not controlled by a central authority generally end up being ugly strings of bits, such as IP addresses or [[|Tor|.onion addresses]].

 
The existing solution to this problem is the widespread use of names that are secure and meaningful, but controlled by a central authority. This system is called the [[Domain Name System]], or DNS, and is ultimately under the auspices of the United States Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration - the [[NTIA]].


Yet, there is something new on the horizon, predicated upon a relatively new technology that is just reaching production-level maturity. The [[Distributed Hash Table]] is a mechanism for storing a set of key-value pairs across many separate machines. By itself, it does not solve the problem of Zooko's Triangle, but were it to be coupled with a mechanisms for [[Pet Names|pet-naming]] and [[access control]], it could form the basis of a human-usable, globally distributed naming system. Such a naming system would help devices such as the FreedomBox find one another, regardless of ISP policy. It would also allow for seamless integration between material and logical forms of peer-to-peer communication. 

====Wireless Mesh====
Wireless mesh networks, as mentioned before, are networks where nodes are connected to one another horizontally and redundantly. Mesh nodes can connect to one or more of their peers, and not just to an upstream hub. Wireless mesh networking enables local communications without the need for a paid Internet Service Provider. Mesh technology has come a long way, but still has some severe limitations: there is no user-space utility for easy construction and management of mesh networks, and those mesh networks that do exist are used almost exclusively as means of accessing the Internet. 


At present, there are two leading algorithms in the arena of mesh routing - [[Optimized Link State Routing]], and the [[Better Approach to Mobile Ad Hoc Networking]]. These protocols have been employed and applied by a number of community networks and research groups - notably [[FreiFunk]], [[FunkFeuer]], The [[Serval Project]], The [[Village Telco]], The [[Commotion Project]], and [[Project Byzantium]].


Optimized Link State Routing, or OLSR, is widely utilized. It has been deployed by community networks such as Austria's FunkFeuer to great effect. Though recent iterations have decreased CPU usage, and improved throughput, OLSR's primary drawback is heavy CPU usage, especially in discovering and repairing routes.


The Better Approach to Mobile Ad Hoc Networking, or BATMAN, emerged from the German FreiFunk community. Its latest iteration, BATMAN Advanced, works at a lower level of the network stack than other mesh implementations, and has now been incorporated into the mailine linux kernel. It has been utilized by The Village Telco, in the creation of their turnkey mesh router, the Mesh Potato, and by the Serval project in the creation of the Batphone Android application. Batphone allows the user to engage in mesh-based telephony using ordinary phone numbers.


Other significant mesh networking initiatives include The Commotion Project and Project Byzantium, both based in Washington, DC. The Commotion Project is an effort to integrate and standardize the use of existing mesh technologies on a variety of hardware platforms, and is part of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative. Byzantium is being developed by a group of enthusiasts from HacDC, with the aim of building a Linux LiveCD that supports materially peer-to-peer versions of various network applications (web, telephony, chat) for use in emergency situations.


Wireless mesh technology has progressed over the course of the last decade to the point that it can be reliably deployed in production environments. Still, such deployments must be carefully planned and administered. The key outstanding challenge is to make it easy for anyone to build and run such a network, and to do so in such a way that users are encouraged to take advantage of the opportunity to route traffic locally. This could be accomplished by integrating mesh technologies into a nodal platform that includes sufficient radio hardware.