How to Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet | Hacker News Reader

How to Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet

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72 pointsSandman36 comments

My advice is: If Egypt is anything to go by, use the same tech as the government.

While all other internet connected devices started to go down - the Blackberries stayed up.

Blackberry doesn't have some magical powers to connect to the internet. It's just an average GSM/3G device. Do you have evidence to suggest authorities were filtering out non-Blackberry 3G traffic?

Yes...everyone thought I was MAD for researching autonomous solar-powered UAV data relay stations but now who's mad eh?

...seriously it's like the poor-mans communication satellite...

Have you written about this somewhere? It's an intriguing idea that I'd like to read about. Did you go so far as to explore the technical issues? I recently got into UAVs because of http://diydrones.com/ and their ArduCopter http://code.google.com/p/arducopter/

Well, in the United States at least, it is illegal to operate a drone unless you: A) have direct line of sight with the drone and B) can manually take over the drone at any time. This means you would need to have someone watching each drone unless you can successfully hide its operation from the government, which could be difficult since its mission is to relay electromagnetic signals back down to earth.

good point, but i think the original intent is to transmit information if the government began to censor the net. Therefore, you can imagine _anything_ you do is going to inhibit the free flow of information, therefore you're just as sensible to go ahead and and run some nice drones. :)

Bingo.

There are multiple mission scenarios and our intention is to support as many as are practical.

Weather balloons?

Wouldn't it be an order of magnitude easier to make a simple gas powered balloon? You could hook it up with an altitude sensor and make sure it doesn't drift away.

Simpler yes, but where does the gas come from?

how do you make sure it doesn't drift away?

unless you combine the plane and the balloon into the zeppelin...

I wouldn't think you could provide enough power via solar to make up for the weight of the panels. What's the expected life on these?

NASA has flown a few prototype solar powered UAVs. See wikipedia for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Pathfinder

I think this was on HN the other day actually:

http://www.defencetalk.com/zephyr-solar-powered-uav-soars-to...

They should have mentioned FidoNet(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet): email, file transfer, newsgroups -- over telephone.

When I was in secondary school, I participated in Fidonet via floppy disk. My friend who had a modem would transfer messages from fidonet to floppy disk and back, and bring it to me each day.

FidoNet over WiFi nodes that only activate intermittently on a varying schedule would be very hard for the authorities to track down. Just use a strong stream cipher to produce the schedule.

Sorry for downvoting, I literally fat fingered the arrows on my phone.

What about a BBS for dial-up?

As former Sysop, I agree!

Remember: a Fax/Modem is a must. Not just to send/receive faxes, but in case you have to dial out because your router is down.

Floppy disk drives? Not needed.

Very cool. I've been thinking about something like this (asynchronous message transfer) lately. I would want to use good public key crypto for message signing and encryption. If it was built as a pass-the-note game (with points, achievements, etc...) that ran on phones and could talk to other phones via bluetooth and wifi, I could see it getting pretty popular in schools. The protocol should also support transfer via thumb drive (dead drop) and internet (if available).

I used to run all of my email via UUCP (over tcp mostly, but when I moved across country twelve or so years ago, I switched to dialup).

You get file distribution, usenet, routing, email and it's not hard to layer other services on top of it.

You can run a mailing list on a loosely connected machine without a TCP/IP stack if you wanted to.

They should have mentioned FidoNet

If you want to, you can mention it - the article is a wiki, anybody can edit it. But, you do need to have a registered account.

It's worth pointing out that 'broadcasting' is specifically prohibited by ham (amateur radio) licenses and so Wired's advice to 'broadcast' would be breaking the license. Clearly, if you are in a country that's disintegrating you might not care.

Most non-hams don't seem to be aware of the distinction between "transmit" and "broadcast" (transmit to the general public, no reply expected). There are likely to be other legal issues involved anyway (e.g. restrictions on handling international third-party traffic: I cannot legally receive a message from an Egyptian ham to pass on to a non-ham recipient).

This discussion also reminds me that I ought to get PSKmail set up.

This discussion reminded me that I really should get a US ham license. (I have a Swedish one but the reciprocity is only one year at a time which makes it a pita.) I can probably pass the technician exam just on common sense (judging from the online test exams) so it wouldn't hurt.

This seems like a fine line. You can talk to an Egyptian ham about what's going on and then decide yourself to pass on the information.

Also, how does the prohibition on passing third-party messages mesh with packet radio equipment? Am I not allowed to send email over packet? I thought that was one of the main uses back in the 90s.

You can talk to an Egyptian ham about what's going on and then decide yourself to pass on the information.

As I understand it, this is acceptable. The FCC defines third-party communication as: "A message from the control operator (first party) of an amateur station to another amateur station control operator (second party) on behalf of another person (third party)." If there's no particular person for whom the message is intended, it would just be something I heard on the radio.

Also, how does the prohibition on passing third-party messages mesh with packet radio equipment? Am I not allowed to send email over packet? I thought that was one of the main uses back in the 90s.

For domestic traffic (with no encryption, pecuniary interest, etc.), email over packet should be fine.

On a local level (which is on par with this whole open insurgency thing), opening up your WiFi and using Bonjour services (and why not some kind of custom landing page) seems like a brilliant idea. Big plus: it doesn't require a computer degree so that's something that can spread easily, and cover a wide range.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it amazing to have all the elements at hand and already working, and never having thought of this

IP-over-carrier-pigeon.

Of course that can be easily thwarted by government agents with shotguns, so maybe multiply redundant routes?

I'm not completely familiar with these yet but to have them separate from mega-corporate networks would be great:

+ http://www.villagetelco.org

+ http://openbts.sourceforge.net

OpenBTS Egypt - http://openbts-egypt.org/blog

I wonder how easy it would be to improvise a "software" modem using the mike and headphones. Should give around 1k, plus compression... much better then nothing.

If there's any way to directly connect phones (mobile or landlines) to a computer without any wiring it would be even better. Come to think of it, could't one make an android or iphone app for this?

IF government will shutdown even Internet, will it keep land-line phones online?

You can start from linmodem project: http://bellard.org/linmodem.html , it may allow to create 9600 connection on 1GHz processor.

Of course, phones have built-in DSP processor, but each phone model has it own DSP. Some OpenGL chips are able to do FFT using vDSP (e.g. iPhone4), so it can be used to accelerate soft modem.

I really like how easy it is to set up an ad-hoc network using Mac OS X. If the government shuts off the internet Apple computers would probably be foremost in the creation of a private ad-hoc internet.

Unfortunately, the range of a single computer is very limited, and an ad-hoc wifi network requires that all computers be in range of one another. What you would really need to do is create a mesh network, where each host relays messages to other hosts within range. This way, you can communicate with hosts that aren't within direct range of your wireless radio.

Has any of this been used for natural disasters where the internet (but not necessarily telephone or power) went down?

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