Shadow Web

As revoluções nos países árabes e os movimentos de contestação e ocupação na Europa e América do Norte, demonstraram a importância da internet como meio de mobilização. O que acelerou o desenvolvimento de várias iniciativas inter-governamentais com o objectivo de erguer mecanismos de censura na internet, sob o pretexto da proteção dos direitos de autor. Torna-se por isso fundamental começar a construir um sistema de comunicação paralelo à internet, uma sua sombra, mais resistente a quaisquer tentativas para controlar o fluxo de informação. É isso que é descrito neste interessante artigo:

"(...)FreedomBox is not tied to the form of any specific gadget. Rather it’s a stack of code that can go into the increasing number of networked CPUs that are piling up in our homes and lives, like “dust bunnies under people’s couches,” as Moglen puts it. All of these can become the infrastructure of an Internet that “rebalances privacy” and restores the vision of “a decentralized network of peers.” There are IP addresses in television set-top boxes, in refrigerators—any of these, Moglen says, could be a FreedomBox. And it is not just about decentralizing the infrastructure. It is about decentralizing data, too. For Moglen, for example, the concentration of user data in cloud services such as Facebook and Google is just as much a threat to privacy and freedom of expression as the concentration of traffic in ISPs. To counteract this trend, FreedomBox will be optimized to run alternative social networks such as Diaspora that store your personal data on your machine, sharing it only with the people you choose via peer-to-peer networks. 

Still, the key element in the project, Moglen says, is “the political will that is being displayed by a generation of young people who, because of their dependence on social networking, are increasingly aware of their and other people’s vulnerability online.” It is this earnestness he is counting on to motivate, in part, the many coders who are contributing labor to the project.(...)"