A nice idea for the gps

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

On Thursday 16 November 2006 23:48, Richard Franks wrote:
> But for me Security is not about Secrecy, it's about Control. If I can
> easily and reliably opt-in or out of a system like this, then why not?

I say it should somehow integrate with XMPP (Jabber). Anything that pushes 
adoption of Jabber over $proprietaryProtocol is good ;).

> Going a little off-topic - say Bob writes a GPS application which does
> something similar to that idea, where would it be downloaded from? His
> own server? OpenMoko.org/com?

I think there needs to be a process by which software can get into the 
repository. There's certainly some security implications that need to be 
taken care of...


> Say furthermore that he wrote a little web-app so that you could
> customise the behaviour for different friends or locations, would that
> have to be on his own server too, or could we have a known
> secure/trusted server to do that from?

If he needs a webapp, I say he should provide his own webhosting as he will 
know best what features it needs. You can't possibly support all of the 
hundreds of webapp frameworks that are out there today and maintaining a 
shared server and ensure it's secure is /very/ hard. Trust me, I've been 
professional webserver admin for years ;)

> For example, if I order my phone and it's gonna take 2-3 weeks for
> shipping, or it's just out of charge... it'd be awesome to have the
> ability to queue installation and configuration options for a variety of
> third-party applications, all in one place -- if there was a
> standardised application-layer option mechanism (in XML?), then this
> could be both powerful and easy.

Write a a shell script and queue the ipkg commands there? Having a full blown 
queue seems somewhat over the top to me... If you can't wait hacking 
something for a few days, you could still try to load the firmware in an 
emulator. That by any means would be more useful than to write "dry" 
configfiles...