Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

Since there are lots of hobbies that sometimes overlap with community service I'd love to see a club that focuses on being prepared to reestablish intra-community communication in case the Internet goes down. Yes, it'd be great if everyone was self hosting, using distributed services and involved in a mesh network now, but without motivation it won't happen. So this club could focus on developing the resources that a few individuals in a community could use to set these things up after the network is already down. They could have offline caches of Wikipedia and Openstreetmaps, copies of firmware, apps and instructions for attaching consumer routers and other Wi-Fi devices to a mesh network, systems for registering people with a locally functioning email address, etc. User friendly portals could be made that provide the basic instructions for people who stumble on a mesh network access point with their otherwise disconnected smartphones.

All of the tech exists in some form or another, but if it were well packaged, it's not hard to see there being a sufficient distribution of members to get people connected easily.

The amateur radio community already has the technical know-how and disaster readiness to do most of that, and I'd be willing to bet there's enough overlap between them and the meshnet crowd to take care of the rest.

A good friend of mine has been into ham radio since he was a young guy, and this is definitely true. In fact a lot of people in that community play a role in plans for a disaster that would knock out other communications, integrated with some local, and state governments. I'm not sure about the federal level, but I'd guess it's integrated there too.

And there are a lot of them, and at this point if you're into ham radio, it's for the love and you tend to be pretty proficient.

combined with a project like this:

http://icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry...

and you've basically got the web ;p

at least a one way communication network form

KG6YHQ here. It's doable, but if the wired net becomes unusable and you have to rely wholly on the RF spectrum, bandwidth would be stupendously tiny. Forget about sending anything else but, basically, text-based messages.

Perhaps in an event like that a decision would be made to temporarily open up the spectrum, but even then there are only so many of us, only so many transceivers out there.

I feel the HAM net would be more useful after a natural catastrophe, where the infrastructure would be destroyed physically. Which is exactly what a lot of us are preparing for.

Wouldn't SDRs be a lot more useful for creating higher-bandwidth wireless networks in the sort of disaster where the FCC opens up other frequency ranges?

The amateur radio regulation regime and common ham radios work well for small numbers of small messages sent around in a well-regulated way, without the government initiating a frequency band jubilee. But beyond that, HAM radios are limited, even if they're modded, and the cheap SDRs are even cheaper than baofeng handhelds, so where does that leave amateur radio in a real frequency free-for-all? I think what would matter is, as mentioned above, availability of SDRs, and secondly, parties of people tracking down transmitters that are messing up the ad-hoc sdr wireless nets.

Sure, but everything has to be ready, prepared and exercised before anything happens. Whatever plan you may conceive, you have to do plenty of test runs in advance. After it happens, it's chaos, it's too late to start new initiatives.

And there are caveats anyway.

For local connections, some kind of WiFi mesh might still be the best option.

For long distance, I don't think you can currently use anything but proper HAM equipment, and fairly large power at that. For a reliable connection, especially at good bandwidth, you need lots of power and a good antenna. But if you blow standards out of the water, and start pumping out huge bandwidths at huge powers, you run again into a tragedy of commons - you're taking up large chunks of spectrum over entire continents.

There is no free lunch.

As a fellow ham, I have to say: guys, guys... it's ham, not HAM. Other than that I totally agree with you.

The (VHF and UHF) ham bands will send data a few tens of kilometers with good messaging bandwidth. Here in Seattle there's a Monday-night digital net through a repeater on the Columbia tower where folks send text messages and some (slow) photos on 444.55 MHz. Typical speeds are like 9600 baud.

As you mention, when you go down to the HF bands like 20m you can transmit and receive around the world, but there's far less bandwidth. The tragedy of the commons is right on.

I've operated PSK31 (which runs at 31 baud) worldwide on 20m and it's pretty much a chatroom. You can get a lot said with that, but you certainly won't be browsing the web.

It would be cool to play around with connecting 2.4 GHz local wifi meshnets with ham repeaters at ranges of say 50 km. Then you'd have nice fast local communication with reasonable long distance. .

There's also the issue of the dubious legality of using encryption over eg HAMNET. Modern internet without encryption simply isn't modern internet.

The legality of encryption on ham isn't dubious, it's explicitly not allowed.

I don't know if there's any legal precedent or official policy regarding digital signatures; I would guess that they're probably okay because they don't obscure the meaning of the communication and anyone can verify them against the sender's public key (assuming that the public keys are published somewhere).

Communication with no privacy but with cryptographically secure signatures might be acceptable for emergency situations. It's unfortunate that ham rules are sufficiently restrictive that most of the tools we use on a day-to-day basis wouldn't be legal to use without substantial modification. But then again, we wouldn't want people trying to log into Facebook/Youtube/Reddit etc.. when the network runs at like 1200 baud (if it's packet radio on the 2 meter or 70 cm bands) or maybe in the low mbps (if it's over some kind of 802.11 b/g/whatever mesh network operating under part 97 rules).

Fortunately, while part 15 rules are pretty restrictive about power, they're less strict about antenna gain, so it's at least theoretically possible to make multi-mile connections without having to operate under ham rules. Building a large network out of point-to-point links with directional antennas, though, would be pretty difficult and laborious even in a non-disaster situation, so realistically I think the best local disaster communications option at the moment is to just use APRS and analog voice over 2 meters and accept that 1980's technology that sort of works is better than a modern internet experience that requires a lot of infrastructure that isn't working or available.

My understanding is that it's a little bit more grey than that. Modification of signals with an intent to obscure the content of the transmission is explicitly forbidden. But obfuscation for other reasons is not expressly forbidden. So there's a question of "is this incidentally encrypted, or intentionally encrypted", which is (again, from my understanding, which is very limited) why I'm calling it dubious and not simply "forbidden".

"Perhaps in an event like that a decision would be made to temporarily open up the spectrum"

Or, depending on who shut it down, you may have to deal with jamming.

Could the spectrum be opened up "unoficially"? i.e. Is there a "switch"the govt would need to throw or is it more that you cannot use the spectrum for fear of prosecution, so with no govt you could just decide to use the available spectrum?

Forget about sending anything else but, basically, text-based messages.

What's the downside?

No one wants to go back to the age of ascii porn.

The amateur radio community can't use encryption and, for the most part, is happy about this restriction.

A zero-privacy internet might be better than nothing, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

but its only relevant in the disaster-recovery situation anyhow; should be quite decent for that use. And otherwise, you have regular Internet access, and its hardly realistic a small hacker community can do anything to replace it.

This guy in Spain created his own internet infrastructure: https://backchannel.com/forget-comcast-heres-the-diy-approac... It's been running successfully for years and has grown quite a bit.

There should be a term for "overprepping for disaster because it's so exciting to think about".

"Preppers" ?

engineering?

You mean, like this guy?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese...

The man lived through a tsunami in the area, that was hardly a matter of exciting thoughts, but a desperate desire to prevent a predictable tragedy. By contrast people prepping for the end of days in whatever form, often nuclear, strike me as mad.

If there's a nuclear war, I want to be in the hypocenter of the first detonation, because we're not climbing out of that hole as a species in any meaningful way. I suppose that reality is why so many have turned to fantasies of a worldwide EMP of some exotic type which is at least survivable in their imagination.

Me? I've read my history, if civilization comes tumbling down, my plan is to eat a gun. Meanwhile I'll live my life without terror, and plan only for disasters that can reasonably be managed without dedicating my limited lifespan to it.

Agreed, if civilization does come tumbling down. However, as far as I could read, for it to survive a nuclear exchange is quite possible, even probable.

Blasts themselves seem relatively harmless, beyond the hundereds of millions they just outright kill that is, radiation we're just characteristically paranoid about, but can actually deal with at least in many remaining areas, and the main issue at debate is whether a nuclear winter of substantial duration would be formed or not. Which depends on the scope of the fires, so flammability of urban environments and the like. We can't pretend to know a real answer, but its certainly possible.

And then there's the issue of whether the south hemisphere could avoid that fate even in such a case, due to weather patterns, provided there's no detonations there (as there are no weapons there).

Now that doesn't seem substantially different from any large-scale warfare civilization easily survived previously, like world war II; urban devastation and millions of dead. Hardly a civilization-ending event.

It depends on if we're talking about Pakistan and India dusting each other, or the US and Russia pulling the trigger. In the former case it's as uncertain as you said, but in the latter to be honest, we're done. Huge areas will be utterly toxic, and there will be infrastructure or meaningful leadership to let anyone know where those are.

So I grant you that something a bit less hopeful and dramatic than 'Mad Max' is more than possible, but only as part of a long slide into the end of our species.

While "Humans" would almost certainly survive (for a while), the odds of any given human (i.e. you or me) surviving are pretty poor. At best you'd be looking at generations of struggle and misery, and then what? Our way of life came to pass by a number of factors including the ready availability of coal. That's... not coming back either. Resources that don't' require extreme mining are generally depleted already, from fossil fuels to various metals.

The various steps that brought us up from mud huts don't necessarily work for another round.

hah, mostly very good points

IDK, for one I'm not even sure a major exchange is as deadly as here supposed (much depends on who else joins the party I guess); sure lots of land on some continents at least is badly irradiated, but a majority is not quite as bad, and most of radiation degrades quickly, some simple measures help, and besides not everyone needs to survive every year After Launch anyhow, and non-extreme radiation doses kill only statistically. Much depends on - as you say, on how much of state command structure is able to survive and organize the remains, and that could easily vary from state to state on the planet.

I lived through a minor war in my youth, with the frontline maybe 2km at its closest approach and regular shelling for IDK couple of years. It was a remarkably well-ordered affair, considering. Fact half the GDP evaporated and rest was put under direct government command for war and other logistical purposes didn't really constitute a panic collapse of societal order or anything like that, and return to some kind of (low budget) normality quite quick. Kinda remarkable in retrospect, in how badly we react to small upsets, like a high-single digit GDP loss in a recession, yet tolerate such major disasters...

If the number of people directly killed is on the order of a few hundered million, thats not a substantial part of the humankind, so it may not be too different -- to people living in places too boring to have been hit by a nuke and not too close downwind from something interesting, ofc.

Guess it becomes worse if all the players hit all the other players, and no further advances in reducing nuclear inventories are made before it hits etc.

But again, yeah, a societal collapse is certainly a kill-myself kind of event for me too, because as you say - we're never gonna rebuild if we fall to that point. I'm just more sanguine about nukes being lobbed about not necessarily causing this I guess.

Serious question: what if you're enslaved by aliens before you can gun?

Then... I'd be enslaved in your hypothetical, and by definition would have no choices I could make.

I recently discovered a startup called Endless that appears to be working on the content/caching side of this problem. They're for-profit but seem to have good intentions between releasing their OS as open source and creating affordable hardware targeted at emerging markets.

https://endlessm.com/

I'm definitely interested in such an idea. I might have to check around the MPLS area to see who's doing any sort of DIY electronics and other such meetups here.

There are educational projects that focus on providing the benefits of the internet to communities that have poor or no connectivity, like: http://internet-in-a-box.org/

While internet failure mitigation isn't an explicit goal of such projects, their resources might make a good starting point.

things along those lines are already happening in oakland and a number of other cities across the country.

https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh

Seconded. Definitely look into meshnets. There's one in Red Hook (brooklyn) that's been up and running for a long time.

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