SAFE-WRT Open Source Router

The following article on DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato should make what I have to say next pretty self-explanatory.

The article describes itself as being about: “Consumer routers are all shipped with great hardware, but with limited functions. For many, these limitations are a great source of constant irritation. In such cases, third-party firmware solutions become the only option. This post will compare the three main custom firmware: DD-WRT vs OpenWRT vs Tomato”

So why not take advantage of these existing technologies and create SAFE-WRT from their code?

Besides not re-inventing the wheel, this would allow for the creation of SAFE-WRT applications for the SAFE-WRT Router, while also being cross-compatible with existing DD-WRT / OpenWRT / Tomato applications.

This would be of insane benefit to both regular SafeNet users and vault owning farmers, alike! Though no one would be required to have a SAFE-WRT Router, those who choose to have one would experience euphoric levels of awesome!

It would also makes it A LOT EASIER to tunnel other protocols THOUGH SafeNet with a router operating system that is ALREADY DESIGNED to do exactly this kind of stuff!

Plus, the better more advanced routers tend to have things such as a built in 32GB+ SSHD with USB3 and LAN expansion for local and network partitions. Imaging “adding more space to a SafeNet vault” being as easy as just logging into the router and telling it where the drive or network share can be found?

Imagine being able to enable support for things such as Tor, I2P, RetroShare (and the list goes on) and only needing ONE CONTROL PANEL to MANAGE IT ALL?! No more needing to go to 12 different places / applications with 12 different settings screens and 12 different logins and lions and tigers and bears, oh my?!

Plus – even though anyone would be able to pre-load this onto a router themselves, MAIDSAFE as a company could make some extra bling by creating physical SAFE-WRT routers and selling them, online!

I mean, the possibilities are endless here, folks. So please do consider it.

-Dave

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Why? You can offer your own wrt repository (the same way you would create a repo for eg ubuntu), no need to build a “SAFE-WRT”. Or much simpler: add the safe vault to the official wrt repo.

You can do that right now, just install the app and the appropriate gui packages for your wrt router.

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Well yes it would inevitably start exactly as you just described and it would be logical to first simply just make SafeNet Applications for OpenWRT, DD-WRT and Tomato. Eventually however as SafeNet evolves, it might need to have its own variant on this. If DD-WRT alone was sufficient enough for everyone’s needs, then why do OpenWRT and Tomato exist? Obviously someone wanted to do things a little differently that required the split off. Well, SafeNet wants to do a lot of things a lot differently, and in revolutionary ways. Hence why I personally feel a SAFE-WRT would be inevitable. You’re right, it wouldn’t need to start out that way, but I feel it would inevitably end up that way. Just as the existence of Tomato and OpenWRT along side of DD-WRT, was inevitable. Just as Ubuntu (and others) being created from Debian, was inevitable (as opposed to Debian having no descendants). Change and expansion are inevitable. So just as Debian gave birth to Ubuntu and Ubuntu has given birth to other things – it is inevitable that if SafeNet decides to make DD-WRT, OpenWRT and Tomato apps, that SAFE-WRT will eventually exist.

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I also want to make what I feel is a relevant side reference. Though I plan on making this a whole other post of its own at some point: SafeNet will inevitably have proxy / vpn / gateway style sorts of applications to allow other things to flow into it, through it, and out of it – safely and securely.

For example:

The ability to be able to access the regular internet (http, https, etc) through SafeNet thus allowing SafeNet to act as a proxy-vpn of sorts. This way, you have thousands of SafeNet nodes all taking tiny little pieces of one file on one “regular internet site”, pushing it through SafeNet and delivering it to you. This would make it so that regular internet sites would be unable to track you and spy on you.

The ability for IPFS, TOR, I2P and others to be able to TUNNEL THROUGH and BE CONTAINED WITHIN SafeNet. This would be very advantageous to any network doing this. As it stands, TOR and I2P websites work like any other sites, in the sense that a centralized server holding the data delivers that data to the people requesting it. If *.onion and *.i2p sites could exist on the SafeNet Vault System – this would be advantageous to those networks because it would eliminate the need for centralized content delivery, and it would be advantageous for SafeNet because any TOR or I2P Node that wanted to provide this capability would also need to be a part of SafeNet.

The reason I mention these things in regards to this topic is because as it stands, DD-WRT would allow SafeNet Apps and Tor / I2P Apps to RUN ALONG SIDE EACH OTHER which is all well and fine for now. However, as things integrate as per the before mentioned, it will be important for Tor, I2P, etc to run INSIDE of SafeNet, not merely “along side it”. So yes DD-WRT does great things with handling http and https and tor and i2p and all of that – but once it gets to the point where all of this stuff needs to be run INSIDE of SafeNet and handled BY SafeNet, well – at that point it just makes more sense to have a SAFE-WRT in which SafeNet is the core that runs it all.

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Thoughts?