BSDCan2016 - v1.1.24a

BSDCan 2016
The Technical BSD Conference

Speakers
Ike Eichorn
Schedule
Day Talks #1 - 10 June - 2016-06-10
Room DMS 1140
Start time 14:45
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 657
Event type Lecture
Track Security
Language used for presentation English

Dodging Raindrops: Escaping the Public Cloud

A User Story of De-Google-ication Using FreeBSD and Other Open Source Software

A retrospective look at the author's efforts to De-Google-ify and remove dependence on third parties to host personal data. How the author runs a personal infrastructure that handles everything including email out of a home server on consumer hardware will be discussed. Rationale for the move, what technologies were deployed, and how they were employed will be discussed.

Privacy. It is hard to achieve a measure of privacy today. The rise of the smartphone and multiple device usage have made the 'cloud' or simply server-side storage more appealing than ever before. Yet most people don't have a home server, they use a third party like Google or Dropbox to store critical and often private data. And while the economics of using third party services are very compelling, there is a hidden cost, privacy.

In the wake of the Snowdon revelations, and given the current state of law and politics, the wisdom of using third party providers is in doubt. And it is not just privacy that make their use concerning. EULAs typically indemnify providers against almost everything that can go wrong and give providers unreasonable rights to use the data they store. And what if the provider decides to discontinue a service, or goes bankrupt, what happens to your data then?

This talk describes how a user with limited resources was able to nearly entirely replace his usage of Google and Dropbox with self-hosted open source solutions. The key to making it work, FreeBSD. The setup of a home server on a consumer PC to provide personal website hosting, file serving, email, and several other services is described. There will be a discussion of what was hard to do, what was easy, and where things can be improved.