Much attention has been drawn to the arkOS project, and not so much the project itself but the idea it represents. The project is the brainchild of Jacob Cook, a young programmer from Montreal who tired of the loss of autonomy that supposed to depend on cloud of another service provider, and especially irritated by the closure of Google Reader.

He decided to design a simple home server that anyone can installed on a Raspberry Pi, connected to a port on your router, and use it to store files, calendars, contacts, email, small personal site or blog, etc. With Cook’s arkOS, you can create private server in your own home and run all of those essential services without the need of anyone else cloud services.

“Google, while it is a great service that has done wonderful things for the Web, is showing some troubling signs,” Cook told in an interview to VentureBeat. “Their shutdown of Google Reader earlier this year means that none of the services [we] rely upon are sacrosanct if they are not profitable enough for them.”

The idea of a personal server at home is obviously not new, but it’s require an in-depth technical knowledge to configure it. The idea of Cook is to design a simple methodology where anyone can easily install a private server, host the essential services with a simple way to configure any services.

Run under CitizenWeb Project, the organization responsible for the project, Cook has started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to develop its Linux server distribution for small computer Raspberry Pi further. His plan is to raise $45,000 in the next 23 days. The project already collected $15,827 in pledges from over 325 backers.

arkOS user should be able to operate with typical web and cloud services regardless of service providers such as Dropbox, Google and others on your own Raspberry Pi. The configuration tool Genesis is intended to make necessary trips to the command line, so that even non-Linux users can easily set up and use arkOS.

The project is still in an early stage of development. Currently, one can thus operate blogs and websites with WordPress, use HTML and PHP, and with ownCloud, synchronize files, contacts and appointments, and manage the system firewall and internally generate SSL certificates.

In addition to a service independent operating system, the revelations about the NSA be able to stick its nose in everything you do online helped the developer to create the arkOS Linux distribution system.

“The idea that the NSA and its global counterparts can have nearly free reign in the networks of these large companies makes users a target,” Cook said. “Moving users out into self-hosted nodes makes sense from this perspective: It makes wholesale data collection many times more difficult. And when coupled with proper cryptography and secure setups by design, it makes NSA-style snooping practically impossible.”

Cook also wants to improve the configuration tool Genesis and integrate additional services into arkOS. On the agenda are the CardDAV and CalDAV server radicals, a mail server, a social networking software (Diaspora Pump.IO, StatusNet or Tent), an XMPP server, gateway integration and the possibility of Genesis out to register a domain. Cook also working on a backup and a DynDNS service for arkOS users.