Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

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I get my Internet through CZFree, a non-profit community mesh network that covers Prague. The legal structure is the same as a non-profit private club. Members can vote for administrators. A membership fee pays for those who put the large expensive multi-directional Ubiquity routers on their roofs and also for a number of symmetric high bandwidth tier 1 fiber-optic connections throughout the city. Anyone can join the network and contribute by putting a multi-directional antenna on their roof. Or they can simply become clients to the network by using a directional antenna pointed at a multi-directional antenna.

Overall, the speed is much faster than with commercial Internet, and the bandwidth is symmetrical.

In my opinion, this is a good example of the two faces of the left. One person forms a union and tries to bully their employer into giving them better conditions, or petitions the state to create laws which will benefit them. The other face of the left creates co-ops and gives the corporate world the finger.

I personally believe that the second approach is superior to the first, and rather than trying to twist Comcast's arm into being nice, Americans should focus on building community networks, at least in the cities where such a thing is possible.

Corporations have twisted community politics to make such things very difficult. In my community, a municipal fiber optic network was built throughout the area but lobbying and politics made it nearly impossible to finish, so there are very few homes connected.

So to maintain net neutrality we have to fix democracy first? Makes sense, as that would fix more than NN. The irony is, we need the internet (sans the cats photos and Kardashians) to do that.

The best way to fix democracy is to adopt the Singapore system and raise politicians salaries so the people can collectively outbid the corporations for power. Trying to say politicians should be indifferent to money is like saying communism works, but was just never implemented properly.

I up-voted you for the interesting opinion, however, I strongly disagree with you. Why would well paid politicians be less corrupt. Is there some kind of maximum amount of money that a person can gather? In Czechia politicians are extremely well paid, and we have a "founding myth" that states that a "well paid judge cannot be bribed". This has been conclusively proven to not be the case.

Singapore is surrounded by far more corrupt countries yet has one of the least corrupt governments in the world according to Transparency International. A head of a ministry there can earn more than 3 million dollars. They also have one of the most efficient, as a percentage of GDP vs health outcomes, healthcare systems in the world. Think of all the subsidies that go to corporations from the government. If they just paid 1/10th of those subsidies to politicians that regulate them, they'd cut out the middleman and save taxpayers a lot of money due to greater competition and more efficiency among the businesses and industries they oversee. Political rivals would have a huge incentive to point out corruption so they could get their job. If they were expecting to benefit from the corruption, they would instead attack on unrelated issues in order to preserve the corruption cash cow.

> Singapore is surrounded by far more corrupt countries

It's funny you say because I have my favorite counter-example from one of those surrounding countries. I was in Thailand when Thaksin Shinawatra with his ThaiRakThai party was first elected into power. Many people I spoke to had voted for him because "he's the richest man in Thailand, he doesn't need any more money so he cannot be corrupted!". Fast-Forward five years and he changed laws that allowed him to sell a larger share of his own company as well as evade paying taxes for the sale. He was ousted by the military for being too corrupt for Thailand!

He wasn't being paid by the government though. His government salary was probably trivial compared to his other sources of income.

So do we need to pay the US President billions?

If there was a "pay $10 billion to get a law" corruption system in the US, all the big companies would spend that money. Nothing is more valuable

We don't need to reward politicians for not being terrible. Having a strong independent judiciary is good enough.

Sure, in the US there's super PACs and whatnot, but when the bribery is explicit enough, politicians go to jail.

"Sure, in the US there's super PACs and whatnot, but when the bribery is explicit enough, politicians go to jail."

Most of them are not that stupid. Why risk jail when there are countless ways to be compensated and not get caught.

Sure I agree with you. But that still leaves a pretty big hole in the system.

Here's a thought: give people the right to vote for the public execution of their immediate representatives.

If you represent people faithfully you prosper, if not you get a foot shorter.

Interestingly, many people (including Trump) said the same thing about Trump in the States. He's so independently wealthy, he can finance his entire campaign himself and not be controlled by anyone because he doesn't owe them anything. Turns out that couldn't be further from the truth.

True or not. What we've learned is its not a positive either. Someone with no strings attached will act as such. That is, unteathered.

What magnitudes are you taking about? The Czech Republic has much lower wages and costs of living than its developed European neighbors. Are the judges paid well-for-Czechia, or well-for-Germany? And are the bribes large by Czech standards or German ones?

Well, the average top male manager in CZ in 2015 made 67 769 CZK monthy [1] or $3,080USD.

The average person in parliament in 2016 made around 100 000 CZK or $4,545USD. The head of parliament made 200 000 CZK or $9,091USD a month.[2]

The judges are paid by years on the bench. A judge started with 78 500CZK a month and after 18 years on the bench made 104 900CZK in 2015. And the judges also get money on the side for all sorts of things, so you can think of their pay as being like "spending money", their basic living expenses are already paid by the state. It's not an extreme amount of money, but it is generally true that politicians and judges are the best paid professions in the country. [3]

[1] http://www.statistikaamy.cz/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Hol%C...

[2] https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/423136-poslanci-si-pristi-rok-...

[3] http://www.ceska-justice.cz/blog/ustavni-soud-o-platech-soud...

Larry Lessig backs both net neutrality and democracy. See his plan for restoring democracy to the United States: https://youtu.be/PJy8vTu66tE

The main points are:

1) Citizen funded campaigns

2) Equal representation (ie, Proportional Representation)

3) Equal freedom to vote

I would like to see a combination of:

* Objective civil service exam which establishes competency in the position the person is applying for

* Once a person demonstrates basic competency, they can be entered into a pool and the final candidate chosen using sortition : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

* The selected person can only serve in that position once

* The person will be well compensated above average

Sortition seems to be a good idea, however it still puzzles me how the Athenians managed to sentence poor Socrates to death (with all their clever notions) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_(Plato)

Also i wonder there were any other trials in Athens similar to the trial of Socrates.

Corporate lobbying is essentially bribery and should be illegal. Any attempt at corporate lobbying needs to be backed up by mandatory double digit jail sentences for the CEO and anyone else complicit in order for any law banning it to be effective. We're a long way from that becoming a reality.

Yes. But those who make the laws are the direct beneficiaries of the system. The odds of them changing - especially at the disconnect Federal level - are about as good as a cat barking.

I'm not yet sure of the solution. I do know our collective belief in barking cats doesn't help.

We need more competition. What we have now are two parties that act as one. Candidates outside that cartel are squashed. Sure we get to vote, but for what? Another cookie cutter?

We need more and better choice.

It would be interesting to go the other way: a politician must give up all property upon entering office, is given a stipend during service, and then is given a reasonably generous "retirement" package upon leaving. Assume obvious loopholes have been accounted for.

That's the Tibet model. I've thought that it might be a good one, especially if made more democratic and if the burden of theocracy was removed. However, it shouldn't be taken to the extreme of the Janeist model where the monk/leaders deprive themselves of all personal comfort. I've tried doing that myself, and I now know that my thinking is far more rational when I'm well fed and warm.

What we need is a undercover police unit, that is allowed to inpersonate any cooperate persona and trying to bribe politicians. If caught in the act- the career of both sides end instantly.

We have that. The problem is the bribery is much more subtle, much more institutionalized.

Look at Obama. He got $400,000 to speak on Wall Street. That was for one day. His salary as POTUS for a year isn't that much.

I'm not picking on Obama. He's just the example. The point is no one cared that it happened. Why? Because both parties, as well as The Fourth Estate are complicit in the scam.

Luckily, the internet itself has provided us with the means for knowing how to get the message out the the masses. For example, consider the following:

This is an important message about "Net Neutrality". The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation wishes to support the fight for "Net Neutrality". If you forward this message, either through social media platforms or email, my friends at Microsoft will track the message and I will send you USD $100 (ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS) by post. Originally the internet, through the DARPA (Domestic Animal Recreational Photo Archive) project, was created to share amusing pictures of cute animals; primarily cats. Later, Senator Al Gore reinvented the internet to be a series of "tubes". Not only did this slow the growth of global climate change, but it also allowed the introduction of services such as YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Tinder. Unfortunately, the telephone and cable industry are not content to simply charge you for access to the internet, they also want to charge for access to content that they don't even own. "Net Neutrality" will ensure the continued freedom to get free and unfettered access to cat pictures and news about the Kardashians. Please join me in sending a strong message to congress about the importance of "Net Neutrality". And remember that to be eligible for your USD $100 (ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS), you must forward this message via social media or email within the next 3 days. Regards, Bill.

Do you need the internet? So far, all successful, country wide, democratic movements in the history of humankind have happened off-line.

The internet actually stifles dissent. People are just keyboard warriors.

In the days of MLK if they had internet everyone would have just retweeted #marchonwashington.

If true, it seems unlikely that marches and protests in recent days would be reaching record numbers. As it stands, the largest ever American march was the Women's March earlier this year. Other notable marches include the March for Science, the March for Women's Lives, the Armenian March for Justice, etc.

Sure, the internet allows armchair protestors the luxury of 'protesting' from home, but it's also a great tool for raising awareness, organizing, and it could be argued that even some amount of armchair protesting is beneficial, as it at least makes the cause visible to those who might not have seen it otherwise.

Let's face it, it would have been very hard to get the ~4 million protestors to march in DC without the internet.

>The internet actually stifles dissent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...

"According to some experts, the initial excitement over the role of social media in political processes in the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East has diminished. As Ekaterina Stepanova argues in her study concerning the role of information and communications technologies in the Arab Spring, social networks largely contributed to political and social mobilization but didn’t play a decisive and independent role in it. Instead, social media acted as a catalyst for revolution, as in the case of Egypt, where the existing gap between the ruling elite and the rest of the population would eventually have resulted in some kind of uprising."

That said, Malcolm Gladwell agrees with you -- that the low-risk protesting that social media provides is also basically without reward [1]

[1]:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-m...

I think social media, and the internet in general, is a great venting tool. Something like the gladiatorial games in ancient Rome.

Not that I blame people. I don't want to get shot at by a police sniper either. Things have to get really bad before folks rise up.

How many more successful, country wide, democratic movements would there have been in the history of humanity if there had been a means of communication and coordination as effective as the internet?

"Need" is distinct from "makes far, far easier and likely". It can be done without the internet, obviously, but the circumstances in which it can be done are undoubtedly far more rare.

For coordinating, I’ll grant the internet +10. For effectively and meaningfully communicating, it gets -100. The state of public discourse is abysmal, and the modes of internet communication do not substantially improve this. Sure, you can use the internet to get a group of tiki torch-wielding people into the same area pretty easily. But there’s no substance or depth of consideration in the public sphere. Everyone immediately opts for vitriol, vilification, and rage-stoking simplistic phrasing to make everything black and white. It’s far more satisfying to the masses, it seems, to absolve themselves of the responsibility to recognize and grapple with nuance.

Well, the Arab Spring, at the time, was seen as the emergence of the internet in the world of democratic revolution. Now we know it was a total failure. Not a single country came out better. Perhaps that is just a coincidence, but I think that it is possible that the speed and shallowness of the communication actually played a big role in the failure of the revolutions. Real, stable, democratic social structures cannot form in such a short time.

There are more forces required than the call-to-arms for a revolution to end in a net success for the people initiating it.

I think it's unfair to task 'the internet' with the entire task of establishing a fair government.

The communications channel succeeded. The call-to-arms was heard. The failure wasn't with the use of the internet, it was with everything that went on after dissent began.

People expected 'internet = democracy' and overburdened the whole concept. Free and wide communications is just a stepping stone, one of many, that edges a governing body into fair-practice.

If your political enemy has the internet, and you don't, you lose.

We did the same thing here in CHA. Luckily, we won the battle of lobbying and politics—and even a court case against Comcast. We fibered up the whole county. Sadly, telcos then lobbied for legislation to prevent expanding outside our service area, and they won. Now our legislators have given Comcast & AT&T $45M what our municipal broadband could do at zero cost to taxpayers. It’s ridiculous.

What laws exist against a 5ghz ubiquity mesh network? I know that such laws can be challenging. Here, there was a proposed law to charge money for the use of that wireless band. The law was very unpopular however, and was not passed. But I can understand that happening.

What laws exist against a 5ghz ubiquity mesh network?

That easy: make you liable for what people do on your network. Make it hard to register as an official network provider that would forfeit some of the liability.

https://qz.com/694618/why-is-it-impossible-to-find-free-wi-f...

(AFAIR, in Germany there are some changes now, but it's a good example how Internet sharing is made difficult for anyone without a large legal department.)

I'm not sure what to say to this. I don't think that these challenges make my opinion wrong or invalid. They make me sad, and I'd like to fight against such challenges. But from an idealistic point of view, I don't think that they raise a fundamental problem with my belief in "community networks", merely a legal one which might be able to be fixed through protest and civil-disobedience, and all else failing, revolution (I guess you have to leave revolution on the table, despite the bad results revolutions have had in recent years, if democracy in your country really doesn't work at all).

Mesh networking is cool, but it doesn't scale without at least some cable connected nodes routing the traffic. And those will be impacted by network neutrality.

On an unrelated note, incredibly shady things are currently being done by US corporations in regards to the 5GHz unlicensed spectrum being used for commercial LTE [1]. This is obviously a very slippery slope and would need strong regulation from the FCC. However, the FCC just approved it for live use in February (Pai got into office in January).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_in_unlicensed_spectrum

Would be curious to get your opinion on this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IyFEYEcHJyA&ab_channel=Althea

We've added a price metric, route verification and low overhead payments to babel. You guys probably don't need it because you have a business structure in place, but it could allow for more anarchic, decentralized mesh "ISPs"

> One person forms a union and tries to bully their employer into giving them better conditions

Oh come one

I take it you take issue with my writing "one person" because you think it is usually multiple people? If so, I agree with you. That is simply poorly written. I should have written "a group of people". Sorry.

He's clearly talking about your characterization of unions as "bullying".

I think it’s pretty obvious that that is not the issue with what you wrote.

You don't like the idea that unions try to bully their employers into having better salaries and work conditions? Would you prefer the word "pressure" to "bully"?

Bully is defined as someone in a position of power harming or intimidating someone weaker. Unions are a reaction to the power imbalance of the employer/employee relationship, and at best make that equal. Characterising what Unions do as bullying is nonsense.

Of course, it is becoming common for people in positions of privilege to complain that others demanding equality are bullying them by expecting the same rights they get to enjoy, so it isn't surprising.

I understood it to mean what wikipedia says it means: "Bullying is the use of force, threat, or coercion to abuse, intimidate, or aggressively dominate others." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying

Look, I'm not on the side of the employers and against the unions. I just find the whole conflict to be "heading no where". Because it doesn't fundamentally change the relationship, it just pushes back against the power disbalance.

The literal next sentence in your link:

> One essential prerequisite is the perception, by the bully or by others, of an imbalance of social or physical power, which distinguishes bullying from conflict.

The word "bully" does seem to imply that the unions have all the power in the disagreement, which is rarely the case

Employers "bully" their employees all the time to lower their salaries and work conditions under threat of unemployment. It's only fair that employees would union to balance things a little bit in the other direction.

I'd love to set something like this up in Waterloo (Canada). How do you deal with things like child porn or pirated content?

I'm not an admin, just a user. However, this is the Czech Republic, so such things aren't the end of the world here. I'm sure the police would investigate child porn in much the same way they would with any other ISP, by investigating the user...

I want to setup something like this where I live as well. So the nodes are connected via 802.11s? Who provides the internet access? I'm guessing a few users still need access to the local ISP?

While this isn't the exact same setup, might want to read this for more context on mesh network ISPs https://www.wired.com/2016/07/forget-comcast-heres-the-diy-a....

See my comment above.

I'm also very interested in CZFree. Is there anywhere I can read up more on the technical setup ? I couldn't find anything in English. I'm specifically interested in what kind of connection to the 'main internet' you guys use.

Here is a map of the network topology. Open up the legend on the right http://mapa.czfree.net/#lat=50.05831104094459&lng=14.4759189...

The mesh network is then connected to NFX fiber lines in some places. https://www.nfx.cz/

NFX is then connected to the main fiber backbones for the Czech Republic, NIX: https://www.nix.cz/cs

You can read about the exact connection information on page 3 here: https://www.nix.cz/en/file/NIX_PROVOZNI_RAD_EN

Edit: I also posted the map here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15376982, so "maybe" there will be more discussion on the technical side of it.

Through what gateway do the various nodes in your mesh network connect to the Internet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com