In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam
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There are a couple of problems:
1) They don't have a solid hardware platform to work on, and the feeling I've gotten from talking to some of the people on /r/darknetplan is that they really don't have the proper understanding of wireless tech to make something like this happen. People are proposing cheap commodity wifi gear for this.
While it's certainly possible to do a very high density area with that, it's certainly not feasible to cover an area like a city, at least not without a considerable investment, and an understanding that network performance is going to be abysmal. (And at that point, just use ham radio...)
(Something like what they're proposing might work in an office, not so much in a neighborhood).
So is a problem, but hypothetically you could just toss hardware at it until it went away.
2) It's the addressing, stupid. http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/m2nd5/its_the_a...
I am definitely the last person to discourage people from "doing it wrong" (http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/ - http://thingist.com/t/item/19766/ - http://thingist.com/t/item/21434/), but people running this, prepare yourselves for the reality that you could fail.
My prediction is this movement fails flat on its face, as the people with the knowhow to develop the new protocols for this network are uninterested in joining a mass of lemmings who are more interested about what the project is going to be called than if it will work.
Here's a fun issue: security and stability in BGP. As we've seen many, many times over BGP is a completely insecure protocol with persistant problems with blackhole and cyclical routes. Many people inside IRC have proposed BGP as the routing mechanism for the mesh network, but have no proposals on how to deal with a completely decentralized network of high latency connections.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLSR
That's my current proposal for routing protocol. How it works at scale, I have no fucking idea, but I'll manually write the redistribution if I have to at the aggregation nodes.
Also, you still need an addressing system. I was mentioning one of a hundred different problems that I've yet to see one person in the organization qualified to solve. If Van Jacobsen announced tomorrow he was building a worldwide mesh network I'd drop everything else and start contributing, but until then I see a lot of people flailing around and going nowhere.
Take a look at Super Wifi for example, which should allow for greater distance between points: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Wi-Fi
Wi-fi 802.11ac should also help with that bandwidth problem, offering speeds up to 1 Gbps: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20030964-264.html
So I guess my final point is that we ARE working on a hardware platform and then we will work to make this accessible to the average person on /r/darknetplan . There are hurdles, there are idiots, but we are working on it and I don't think it is safe to call the project failed until we've had a chance to actually try.
One problem you are going to face if you stick to an IP based network is: who is going to administer the address space? The same is true of any centralised function. In the "glory" days of community WiFi networks, most fell by the wayside because of this issue.
The ultimate goal should be a close to 100% P2P "Internet". All of that may not be possible within this decade, but maybe in the future. For example the hardest part to decentralize this will be when trying to link 2 continents to each other through a true mesh network. But again, I think future technology will solve this. Until then, the best strategy is to build ultra-local mesh networks, then larger local ones, then city-wide, state-wide, and so on. Grow it gradually, like any movement.
How about IPv6 geographic addresses? http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hain-ipv6-geo-addr-02
The internet is a patchwork of networks. Why not just add more networks to that patchwork.
Adding more networks to the internet, with more links between them, managed by a greater diversity of organizations and individuals, is what will make the internet harder for anybody to control.
It's been said that "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". What's needed, I think, is more available routes.
I'd also like to point out one thing: in the time I've spent thinking about how to get the mainstream to care enough to consider dropping their telco lines I've arrived at the conclusion that the core issue for that final push will be apps. We need true, decentralised apps (maybe like what Diaspora was intending to achieve, for example). Don't think you can build the infrastructure and people will come. You need the apps and a reason to get traction from non-technical people who couldn't care less if the government was reading their kitten emails.
On a side note, it is very possible for city wide 100km + coverage by a grassroots movement.
The AWMN ( Athens Greece) can support well over 10k users with 1120 nodes and 110km (approx) of coverage.
ps. On side note during a google search for the above, it looks like the military is already rolling this stuff out on the battlefield, http://online.barrons.com/article/PR-CO-20111110-908833.html...
Summary: Throughput of a mesh asymptotically approaches 1/7th of the non-mesh link rate. This is using the 802.11 MAC, but recent softMAC chipsets could be run in a more mesh-optimized psuedo-802.11 protocol (that has not been invented yet AFIAK), so you might get performance as good as 1/4th.
http://mapa.czfree.net/#lat=50.025828752356176&lng=14.73...;
CZ used to have 66% (200k in 2006) of all wireless end users in the EU
But... we (democratic republic countries) already have governmental structures that allow for changing laws. Let's just organize and change the laws.
Aside from the industry-paid demagogues' rhetoric of 'STEALING' on the internet, we have to objectively think about this problem. We, the public, define the laws. We define what 'stealing' is. If a majority of the population is violating the so-called law, and it's hard to identify the specific victims of the law or even particular damages, then it's probably not a useful law anymore. Instead of jumping into a subversive massive campaign to overthrow the existing system, let's just use the tools that have been created to deal with these types of situations.
The simple fact is that the Internet and digital content has dramatically changed the way that intellectual property works, and the laws haven't kept up.
Would we build all sorts of back-channel technological methods to use these patents anyway so that we may avoid jail and fines? Or, would we simply say, "hey - sorry the idea of 100 year patents just doesn't make sense any more. We're changing the law."
It seems to me it's the (possibility of) technological circumvention itself which renders the laws outdated. If that's true, then the laws will always lag behind to the point of absurdity (as appears to be the case now).
Suing grandmothers, software patents, suing farmers downwind of the pollen of patented plants, etc. Where's the hope of changing those laws which are backed by multi-billion-dollar industries until lobbyists and campaign contributions are banished from our law-making process?
Fixing that problem isn't impossible. There are a significant precedents where people have forced governments to act against corporate interests (eg, the environmental movement).
Even things like the Tea Party show that the major US parties can be co-opted by people power. Yes, the Tea Party has mostly been co-opted itself, but look how many entrenched players that removed in such a short period of time. I'd suggest that is a reasonable model to study for anyone interested in creating a pro-consumer political movement.
Same goes for improving the technology. Making the internet more resistant to censorship, throttling and monitoring by design, is a very worthy goal.
However, I don't know how well it can be combined with a mesh network, especially one that wants to piggy back on the normal Internet, since this protocol is meant for a stand alone network. But perhaps it can be modified for that. It would probably be best to talk to the creator of the protocol about it directly and ask for his help.
Reddit will love it.
Rushkoff and others think it's just a matter of time... I remain skeptical.
How many of the groups members have worked in telecommunications and understand how antennae work, how signal broadcasting and processing works, how OTA protocols are implemented, etc?
You can't build the kind of robustness that we enjoy today out of commodity hardware. If you want a decentralized darknet, you'll probably have to dust off that 56k modem and get used to using fidonet again.
And that's not needed either. The purpose is communicating with each other in cases that the government brought down or is heavily filtering the internet (like happens in Egypt, Libia, etc), or in case of a disaster. It doesn't have to be as fast, or robust as the internet. 56k is plenty enough if you just want to send messages or small photos.
And in places no internet connectivity exists at all, it's better than nothing. We're just very, very spoiled.
Who knows, by building such a network you might in the process prove that there's more value to an internet than simply as a new channel over which to sell branded entertainment and disseminate advertising. You might also show just how much can be done over a 56k link with a little creativity.
Surely there is room for improvement here?
While I agree SOPA is a terrible idea, internet censorship and having a central controlling organization (Or group of organizations) isn't such a bad thing. Look at Deep Web, it seems, to me, to be primarily used for illegal operations (drugs trade, child pornography and other nastys). The way I see it, this effort would be much better applied to resolving the issues we have with the current internet, reducing centralization and reliance on ISPs rather than "to shit with the working system lets start again".
And that's not even touching the technical aspects, the internet as we know it still isn't anywhere near perfect (IPV4 as an example). Are they expecting this to happen overnight? Some of the greatest minds of the last few generations have worked to make the internet what it is now, if university's are "experimenting" with this stuff it's clearly a long way from a realistic option.
That being said, wireless technologies are always improving. I'm sure the military already have some similar mesh based network (all be it on a smaller scale) far more advanced than anything we've seen (Assuming this since the majority of technological advances in communication originated from or were improved by the military). It's by no means a worthless project but I think the idea that in 6/12 months you can buy a box that gives you access to an un-modorated, unfiltered, private internet is a little ridiculous
There seems to be a big decentralization movement in recent times (bitcoins!) but even as a person against the extremes of SOPA, I can at least appreciate the securities and benefits of a "traditional" governing body, no matter how ridiculous some members of government are--I'm just speaking as a not so tech savvy person, but to me one of the biggest psychological hurdles for a project like this is giving control to a group of people I am unfamiliar with--there is some sense of a rapport (even if there is some lack of trust) with the traditional government (just like with banks as I allude to bitcoins) that to me is a big obstacle for the meshnet growing to a degree where it becomes a true meshnet.
Either way, I love the hustle, and admire the project immensely.
So yeah, random people on reddit probably aren't going to come up with this anywhere close to as fast as a small team with just the right skills.
Making and selling a great piece of idiot-proof hardware that does this sounds like a decent startup idea. And now that I've thought about it this much, I'm guessing there must already be some startups selling such a thing (anyone have firsthand knowledge?).
What reddit brings to the table is a large number of interested participants. If a couple of those people live within range of me, the idea suddenly becomes one I might consider buying and plugging in now, today.
So for that reason, I like this reddit group.
One idea: a $5 laser pointer can be modulated at well over 100 Mbit/s. Everyone in an urban area who can see one side of a building can bounce laser beams off of it. (Data recovery and collision resolution are left as exercises...)
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain?
In my student dorm, we used that to connect to the University network (which was a km or two across ...)
We would not get any internet by foggy weather :)
Actually, that was always something funny to say ... "We have internet by laser" then people would go "wow" ... and then you say "and it doesn't work when there is fog" and then suddenly, all the "wow" goes away :D
If the goal is to connect peer to peer with a small group of people you know in person and can trust, I see great potential. People congregate in small groups. Facebook friends, Skype contacts, etc. The advantage here is that third parties like Facebook, Microsoft and a gazillion advertisers are not involved. If it's small like that, it's doable as an overlay without using wireless as long as at least one person has a reachable IP and can act as the keeper of everyone else's address info.
If the goal is to create some sort of www replacement that must scale to global internet sizes, where any stranger can connect, and where kids are allowed to do all the things they're not allowed to do legally on the www, I see big problems.
While our "vision" of the absolute end goal sounds slightly more like the second, our actual goals are to produce the first. This is a much more realistic plan than our vision, and is what the project really aims to do. The vision just aims to bring everyone together about a set of issues that have been very much discussed in recent times.
How in the seven hells is this a problem of the network protocol? Or any other technology, really? I seriously don't want to take this offtopic, but what you are describing is a problem of the parents/guardians first and foremost, and has absolutely nada to do with the technology we are discussing.
Appeals to emotion like this and the sad truth that they work so well are the exact reason we need decentralized, censorship-resistant networks in the first place. To put it polemically: No, I don't want to "think of the children" because that's the job of their goddamn parents.
If Skype, a peer to peer network that uses a proprietary protocol and third party servers (neither of which is a prerequisite for a peer to peer network), was used primarily for file sharing over encrypted links, they would have some "big problems", as in "heavily funded lobbyists and plaintiffs", to deal with. These are the same "big problems" that are the driving force behind SOPA and consequently the same ones that have injected some steam into this reddit "think tank". SOPA has some interesting language where it refers to "or any successor protocol". Perhaps the next revision, or the next bill of this nature, will include language that refers to "any internetwork", present or future.
How a peer to peer network is used and who uses it does make a difference in terms of its acceptance and survival, even if in theory it shouldn't.
http://m.zdnet.com/blog/networking/freedom-box-freeing-the-i...