YunoHost and the Internet Cube
Solutions for DIY-ISP's and self-hosters
YunoHost is a free and open-source server distribution that provides a self-hosted alternative to commercial centralized services, and allows people to take back control over their data. Yunohost aims to make server administration accessible to the general public and ultimately make personal servers as common as desktop computers. Based on YunoHost, the Internet Cube project develops an affordable plug-and-play server that can be bought and easily deployed at home by the general public. In addition to its self-hosting capabilities, it provides a privacy-enhancing WiFi hotspot which protects its users from censorship and metadata leaks. And because it is low-power, it can be used even in remote and offline situations.
- The project's own website: https://yunohost.org
Why does this actually matter to end users?
If you upload a document to a service like Dropbox or Youtube, or collaborate with someone on a document through an online office application, your content probably ends up somewhere on the other end of the world. When you want to retrieve it, you will need to be online. For software and services to function properly, you need to be sufficiently well connected to the internet.
If you happen to be in an rural area where this is an issue, you might not be so lucky. But fortunately there is no need to create this dependency. You can also run software and services locally, meaning that you will always have access to them. The Internet Cube is an initiative to allow users to run services on a small device. It does not fully depend on always having internet connectivity to the outside. In fact, you can take it outdoors and operate it on a simple battery or solar panel - making it a portable and extremely resilient solution. In case of a disaster, the cloud will not be of much use to coordinate work and help bring everything back up. And as a bonus, your data and contents stays close to you - safe from nosy people, and under your immediate and full control. You can easily install additional open source software and services.
Run by Support Self-Hosting (association)
This project was funded through the NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825310.
