Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

No offense to the "reddit meshnet project", but the last I checked (this could have changed) what they're proposing isn't possible with the team that they have right now.

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.

From what I heard in the IRC group when I was hanging out, the group is mostly made up of people who think it's a nice idea but have absolutely no idea what they're doing.

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.

I've taken it upon myself to shit on anything that hasn't been already implemented.

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.

I would say don't even try, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.A.T.M.A.N. is a better bet. OSLR will never work at the kind of scale that this project is aiming at. It's meant for networks on the order of hundreds of 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.

The problem we are definitely running into is that as a crowdsourced project, we have a lot of people who don't know what they're talking about. However, we have a small subset that do (myself not included, I'm more aiming to get the ball rolling than anything) and have been hard at work on the project. There is a lot more noise than signal right now, but that will change as a more solid technological platform for local mesh networks arises. Once we have a basic platform we will begin to address issues such as the addressing and other scaling issues.

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.

What about an native implementation of Freenet? Currently Freenet is an overlay network, on top of the Internet, but from my limited knowledge of Freenet, it doesn't have to be that way.

Freenet, i2p and Tor are good examples of what we are trying to do, but they are not quite what we want. Our end goal intent is a completely separate network with it own infrastructure.

What I meant by a native implementation is one with no underlying infrastructure. Freenet (protocol) would be running directly on the hardware. Set up a mesh of (media agnostic) point-to-point links and use the Freenet protocol to route traffic and turn them into a network. A big caveat is that Freenet might not scale as required.

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.

I think the ultimate goal should still be maximum decentralization. Even if there will be some "super nodes", they should still be as decentralized as possible, and without being tied to some corporation or Government. Otherwise, what's the point in even doing this.

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.

who is going to administer the address space?

How about IPv6 geographic addresses? http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hain-ipv6-geo-addr-02

Why "completely separate"?

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 applaud the picking something that matters and swinging for the fences, instead of yet another "Foursquare for pets" like a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be doing these days...

I've spent time on mesh networks for disaster recovery efforts, I consider myself fairly technical when it comes to wireless networks, and it's a damn hard problem to solve. Even with some great gear, things drop off the network all the time, electricity fluctuations cause issues, mobile devices forget what signal they are connected to.. but I applaud this effort at Reddit because it brings the idea into consciousness - the fact is that we need better kinds of Meraki/Ubiquti-type hardware and maybe some of these people will sit down and solve some of the hard problems (reading more of this thread shows that yes, there are problem solvers involved, I wish everyone the most success).

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.

At this point, it really is a collection of hobbyists who want to help but can't offer much, however every day we acquire one or two more skilled, dedicated engineers/techs to help. IRC user Tanuki is currently running a meshnet project in Australia with 150 users over 200 KM. He was just offered satellite time for distant sites!

Over 200K what?

Sorry, over 200 kilometers. I should have put km.

So is this like a true mesh network, or just a traditional wireless network. If it's a mesh network, do nodes have multiple point-to-point links. I assume they would over the larger than a few km distances you're talking about.

We are in the early planning phase, but our intent is a true mesh.

Hybrid network is fine for now, and maybe even desirable to get it off the ground and make it usable for most people. Just try making it work as well as possible with what technologies we have now, and as they improve in the next decade or so, it should become easier to achieve a true mesh network.

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

Hit the nail on the head. There are a ton of very enthusiastic people there who collectively have very little technical knowledge.

Well it is just the start, one of the whole points of the sub-reddit is to create awareness for some more tech minded people to get involved.

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.

http://www.awmn.net/

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...

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