Othernet: A multi-media broadcast to small, portable receivers | Hacker News Reader

Othernet: A multi-media broadcast to small, portable receivers

othernet.is

63 pointstlrobinson14 comments

What we need is a P2P radio mesh on the ground.

Satellites are not a sustainable decentralized way of building Internet 2.0.

Unfortunately bandwidth is going to suffer and distance latency will be proportional to the number of hops; so services will be sparse and local, think async. walkie-talkie SMS for request/response communication.

You have to imagine a continental google search taking days if not weeks, and probably be expensive in some other tangible way to avoid spam.

The issue is not tech, it's regulatory. Even now the free bands have anti-encryption rules.

Human laws (unlike natural laws) only exist if you can and do enforce them over a very long time, and that requires energy we don't have; which is the major reason to develop another internet in the first place.

Privacy is only a concern on the internet we have today, the main problem being the whole "free" thing; IP addresses are "free" until they run out, domain names are "free" until you sell them to the "mafia". That spam in your inbox is also "free".

How interesting that today's human money is another arbitrary thing humans have invented for their own purpose!

Also nobody has ever invented anything useful by being legal.

Which free bands? Ham bands? Or ISM bands? Because it seems like nobody cares about any anti-encryption rules on 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

Iirc it is only the amateur radio bands. ISM and other bands permit ciphering.

You're close to 90% correct. Title 47 Part 15 covers what is normally referred to as the ISM bands and as long as you're operating under those rules (power limitations, frequencies, and interference) then you can absolutely use any encryption or protocol you like. Amateur licenses are not allowed to use encryption for the purpose of obscuring the message, and even the type of transmissions are restricted within those bands (some aren't allowed to be data, the protocol has to be published, must be using certain modulations on certain frequencies, etc).

Those frequencies are not exclusively licensed to ISM; Even some amateur radio bands overlap with bits of the ISM spectrum.

If you're operating under your HAM license even in the ISM band and within the other requirements you're in violation and subject to penalties. Though if you've met all the other requirements you can just claim you're operating under part 15 and be all set.

That "for the purpose of obscuring the message" part of the amateur requirements is rather interesting and some people have been playing with it, though there hasn't been any official yay/nay on what that exactly means from the FCC and AFAIK it's never been tested in court.

Theoretically if you broadcast an AES key then transmit 10 minutes of data encrypted with that AES key, you haven't encrypted with the purpose of obscuring as you've published the key with the transmission. Probably doesn't do much good in practice but there is a bunch of "edge cases" that may be interesting.

Also worth considering: more space "junk," more obstacles to ground-based space observation.[1] Space has become the easy way. We need to consider terrestrial options first.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/22/not-cool-tel...

space junk? like the road junk that distributes food around cities? its infrastructure

One of the folks from Othernet helped me understand what they are doing here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21759819

Having be in a place with Internet.org, which was implemented for mobile phone users.

Users didn't know they had it, and didn't care when told they had it. Wikipedia was useless to them. So was the weather. So was everything else the NGO's made for it. It was an ugly ghost town, people just didn't want it and NGO's couldn't make anything not crap even with their expensive grants.

The only thing users used and loved was Facebook. It was a big thing in their lives. (Video and multimedia wasn't free)

Satellite radio would be why you'd look at this but it would have to beat local stations.

No one wants to listen how to grow crops or about elections they want to hear from the latest Bollywood actors

Is all of the software and all of the hardware used to implement Othernet open source, and well-documented?

If not, then what parts are not?

Interestingly, their hardware is fully capable of transmission as well as reception; two or more OuterNet devices can be configured to communicate wirelessly over frequencies of the user’s choice (subject to local regulation, of course). (And though I assume it’s obvious, I’m going to point out that in this mode communication is not intermediated by satellite but ordinary point-to-point.)

https://youtu.be/KPsQn06TM4M

For those confused, this was previously known as Outernet.

"Our satellite broadcast is currently available in much of North America at 20kbps and Europe at 10kbps. We broadcast from SES-2 and Astra 3B."

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