22

I think KDE should use its position as the "non-corporate"(not driven by companies) FOSS desktop and really facilitate secure data sharing among users.

I believe the devs should look at http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ which is a serverless encrypted decentralised commmunication platform. It already uses Qt and could be integrated into KDE quite easily (guestimation on my part .
You have to exchange keys with your friends and then you are good to go.

If it was integrated into all apps I could just share folders from within Dolphin/Konqi, share my music lib in Amarok. Share certain picture from within Digikam, sends encrypted messages, invite people to work on documents in KOffice etc. in a secure way.

I think to do it in a secure encrypted manner is really really important. I also think the reliance on mostly open-desktop.org servers gives KDE a central point of failure and raises privacy concerns.

Retroshare could also offer Facebook functionality (http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/forum ... f=11&t=563).
In my humble opinion sharing is an important part of FOSS/the community and it deserves better integration.

I know this would be KDE only for now, but I think it is a great area to be pioneers.

Interesting solution

It would be better to use ZeroConf for that as OSX understands it.

pembo13 wrote:It would be better to use ZeroConf for that as OSX understands it.

Zeroconf for the whole internet? I don't think that would work. You need a DHT(distributed hash table) for that, which retroshare uses. And OSX will probably never have something similar, so why care for OSX?? Is zeroconf even encrypted?

planetkde has a blog post related to this, coincidentally: a p2p desktop.

im the author of this blogpost. although the idea for foss to build a decentralized network (aka a p2p cloud or sth similar) seems to be widespread, my proposal imo still is a bit different.

what i think is really important is to try to succede current social networking (face book, myspace, studivz, ...) which is stupidly set on top of a simple http client-server connection and needs to get all interfaces rewritten in html.

BUT the integration has to be better. this means that one has to deliver a cleaner and better integrated interface than these browser apps. retroshare rather looks like a nineties app (btw it does not connect with me and crashes after every restart [works only on first loading] here).

so im proposing a service framework for the freedesktop like dbus/hal which allows to communicate on a a p2p layer easily and connect to people directly, no matter what type of information is exchanged. think rather of a p2p like network stack on top of ip/tcp which overcomes their shortcommings.

by default tcp/ip is not really p2p friendly when nats/fws are in the game. so one has to actually build a network communications layer on top which allows filtering and configuring the network traffic on the application layer. one port to the outside world would be enough to then do the rest on application layer for this service.

nat->proxy->lan

simply doing a upnp forward to all clients is a bit of a problem for large nat sits imo.

requirements:

a) trying to autoconfigure portforwarding and establishing the infrastructure by default on system start. broadcast for an existing proxy, if not get authoritive, try to upnp the proxy to an external port, ask the user to add the port to port forwarding. the advantage of a proxy would be to only need to forward one port to one proxy + the proxy would be able to run on modern routers themselve, allowing to cache data for offline users.

b) allow generally every connection type (instant-messaging, almost instant-messaging (mail with push-function), filesharing (fotos,whiteboard,friendslist))

c) make it a default for foss apps so it gets deeply integrated by default. (not done by approaches like retroshare). retroshare btw looks really retro, is not planned to be a system service with an api for general desktop apps... (it is a nice project though).

i have already had a look at the xmpp specification as it is done as good basis for messaging exchange... (think of a stripped down jabber server maybe)
we could also simply use the existing jabber network, but retroshare is even more decentralized, ...

olpc seems to have done that right with their mesh networking. maybe someone could investigate further and post tech details here?

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Welcome_to ... _Labs_wiki

cheers,
whilo

I really think with all the NSA **** happening KDE should take a second look at this.

Should not be anything fancy.

Just use existing protocols like SFTP, SSH, IRC etc with existing encryption algorithms from OTG and PGP.

All what should be required is to get an IP and then a password for connection and finally a encryption fingerprint for checking.
The client side can do then a contact listing and session history etc.

It really should be so damn simple like in TeamViewer remote desktop but ID is the IP. Of course NAT is a devil in these situations again why ID works well but requires again a server. We already have SSH, TALK, SCREEN programs what can get to do needed but having a very simple encrypted direct connection would be awesome.

And I have years talked about we need to get a easy setup for users to get PGP available to users for filemanaging and email. It should not require such researching and setting up efforts as it is now.

On LAN zeroconf is the way to go and it should be very easy to just right click a directory in Dolphin and select "Share (with password)" and it would pop-up in LAN.