Out in the Open: The Tiny Box That Lets You Take Your Data Back From Google

The National Security Agency is scanning your email. Google and Facebook are hoarding your personal data. And online advertisers are selling your shopping habits to the highest bidder.

Today, more than ever, people are thinking about how to opt out of this madness without quitting the internet entirely. The obvious answer is to host your own web apps on your own computer server. And thanks to the burgeoning Indie Web Movement, theres no shortage of open source alternatives to popular services like Google Calendar, Facebooks photo albums, or Dropboxs file sharing. The problem is that setting up and managing your own server is a pain in the neckat least for the average consumer.

For open source developer Johannes Ernst, what the world really needs is a simple device that anyone can use to take their data back from the wilds of the internet. So he designed the Indie Box, a personal web server preloaded with open source software that lets you run your own web services from your home networkand run them with relative ease. Any system administrator will tell you that setting up a server is just the first step. Maintaining it is the other big problem. Indie Box seeks to simplify both, with an option to fully automate all updates and maintenance tasks, from operating system patches to routine database migrations.

Image: The Indie Box Project

Plus, Ernst says, other developers will be free to build their own products atop Indie Box. Its not supposed to be one product from one company, he explains. Its supposed to be a platform for lots of people to innovate on.

The first Indie Box will run off an Intel Atom processor, 2GB of RAM, and two 1TB hard drives that mirror each other to help protect your data. Software will include ownCloud, which offers a calendar, address book, and Dropbox-style file sharing; the photo album apps mediagoblin and Trovebox; and the e-mail client Mailpile. For now, it wont include an e-mail server since spam filters make it so hard to run one from home.

Eventually, he wants Indie Box to act as a hub for devices on the Internet of Things.

Theres also an app store that will let you add more tools. Although all apps in the store must be open source, developers will have the option of selling them for a fee, giving them the chance to actually make money from their projects. What we find is that users have no problem paying if they dont have to maintain the software, Ernst says.

Eventually, he wants Indie Box to act as a hub for devices on the Internet of Things. He personally runs many devices that send data to a server across the internet, which then notifies him of something that happened on the device sitting just a few feet away from him. Theres something wrong with that architecture, he says. Im much more comfortable with having my thermostat communicating with a computer in my house over my own Wi-Fi than going through Google.

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Out in the Open: The Tiny Box That Lets You Take Your Data Back From Google