On a related note, consider the implications of someone dropping a box like this somewhere where there's open (say, municipal) Wi-Fi and 5 V from solar power or the mains to feed it. NAT on the free Wi-Fi network could be circumvented through Freenet or a TOR hidden service. The attacker would then get an instant remote base of operations not traceable to him personally via billing or otherwise and a webcam to look over whatever. Unless he's caught by security cameras, of course.

I'm not sure it's a better solution for actual (black hat) hackers than paying for a VPS with a prepaid gift card or bitcoin (unless they need the webcam) but there's certainly some spy-movie appeal to it.

While you're totally correct - and these plug computer type systems do get used for penetration tests at least, it's important to realize that Eben et al. don't make the hardware or cause it to happen - the project is to about making a privacy enhancing distro to run on one.

> On a related note, consider the implications of someone dropping a box like this somewhere where there's open (say, municipal) Wi-Fi and 5 V from solar power or the mains to feed it.

Last year I did a talk at BlackHat EU on abusing MiFi hotspots to do this, only using the hotspot to attack the wifi network and tunnelling back over 3G to an out of band C2. I've got a lot further since then and have working PoCs that can do this.

They're ugly, but they work and work well.

The original vision by Eben Moglen was to use "increasingly cheap ARM, $50-$100 devices that plug into the wall and are not much bigger than an AC adapter." Almost certainly referring to the Sheevaplug. But the reference platform for Freedombox is now a $160+ device with built-in wifi to replace my existing router. If we were going to go that direction I wish it would have used a cheap wifi router with OpenWRT as you have mentioned.

If smartphones ever actually live up to the promise of being a pocket computer, in addition to their mission-critical enterprise gaming and network-locked NSA-friendly voice applications, everyone will already own the hardware for a freedom-hotspot. The phone-as-an-appliance concept has to be burned to its carbon atoms first though, and anti-competitive markets are the worst.

I know what you mean.

I would have certainly liked something less expensive to play with too, but this $160 thing has two USB ports and an eSATA port which will definitely make things somewhat more interesting -- my SheevaPlug has been struggling to keep up with the USB disk access... I also saw that there is Gig ethernet on this "devkit"-yellow-thing. I am almost convinced of getting one, but I will sleep on it just to make sure this is not just an empty geeko-consumerism moment.

In the end I have to agree. The Sheevaplug was simply not powerful enough for the vision. I hope that we can find something that can drop in price to make this possible.