Project Loon: Google’s biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it's politics | Hacker News Reader

Project Loon: Google’s biggest obstacle isn’t technology, it's politics

gigaom.com

54 pointskfitchard35 comments

> How long before some unstable government seeking to wreck havoc on its world’s communications infrastructure starts shooting down Loon balloons overhead?

I suspect that the surface-to-air missiles capable of striking targets at that altitude are an order of magnitude more expensive than what it costs Google to replace balloons.

If Iran or North Korea starts shooting down balloons, I bet the US Government will be happy to quietly reimburse the replacement cost simply to deplete the supply of SAMs that could be shot at other things.

Project loon shouldn't be corporate-based, it should be grassroots.

Give out free plans to build balloon mesh network access points for less than $5-10, and let people of the world build their own.

BONUS POINTS: Implementation runs its own fully decentralized network that could eventually surpass Internet 1.0

It would be difficult to build a terrestrial mesh network of appreciable power even while plugged in to the wall for $5-10 per node, let alone one on a balloon in the stratosphere with no source of power, etc. The helium alone is over $2.50 per cubic meter (according to[1], others might know better, and maybe you could use hydrogen, but then there's problems with leakage and how long your balloon stays up). The balloons also work much better in places with no power nearby, or with such spread out infrastructure that you'll need much longer line of site than anything on the ground can provide.

But! Grassroots mesh networking is still very possible, and very important, especially as an internet alternative in places where internet access has been censored or shut down (or even just cell access has been shut down...which happens more than it should here in the US).

For anyone interested, the EFF just put out a plea for helping invalidate some bullshit patents on mesh networking to ensure that grassroot efforts to actually help people can move forward. More here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/mesh-networking-good-o...

Edit: just submitted the EFF story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5924690 weird that it hasn't been submitted before. I feel a bit like advocacy on HN has about the same motivations as what makes the top stories on crappy tech blogs these days...

[1] http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/mcs-...

If the mesh routers were cheap enough it would just come down to making lots of them and distributing them all over your local area. As a result, they wouldn't need to be that powerful. Attaching them to balloons is somewhat optional. Perhaps even better, hand them out for free to neighbours that can plug them in as well.

Linksys WRT54G from 2004-2005 used to be $60-70, and powerful enough to be flashed with better firmware. It's almost 10 years later (and sadly wrt54g has been heavily watered down). Perhaps we need a kickstarter to get cheap mesh network routers using 2004 tech, get costs down to $5/router somehow.

Approximately how many loons are required to give coverage to most of the world?

If the density of loons per 100 square kilometers isn't too high, mesh networking together with GPS should be sufficiently evolved at some point to make it a network very robust to attacks by government. It's also possible that the networks can discard GPS-assisted routing data before beaming that content back down to earth, ensuring that we won't even be able to determine the geographic origin of any packets.

I would imagine that one of the few things out there that may help us combat the balkanization of the internet and eavesdropping will be the ability to have extra national communications in the sky. I think the best thing would be to actually set up many of the loons as Tor exit nodes. If the price of hardware gets cheap enough the ease of putting these in the sky and not worrying about them will be awesome.

Google could still turn off the balloons above the hostile nations. Saying: we can give you cheap Internet if you want of nothing if you don't want.

If balloons have a camera, they would at least provide higher-definition data for Maps.

Loon balloons do not have cameras.

At the project loon launch event, I asked the google people about installing cameras. They stated that they had very clearly decided not to install cameras because they didn't want any issues to distract them from their stated goal of providing internet.

Since Loon will use radios, it will have to use spectrum, which is tightly regulated by the world’s governments.

Yes, but Google can just have the balloons turn off their radios when flying over a country with whom a spectrum agreement hasn't been reached.

Why not Satellites? Sounds like everything these balloons do.

Satellites are considerably more expensive, and have a lot more lag.

I am interested in the helium, considering it's a non-renewable resource with limited stocks. As I understand it (and I'm probably wrong) I thought one of the problems with high altitude balloons was that helium leaked more readily.

It's a fascinating project, and I'm really glad that there are companies like Google doing this kind of stuff.

Not enough satellite spectrum, high launch costs, not enough LEO slots, can't be deployed on short notice, requires larger antennae on the ground for high bandwidth. [1]

[1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130618-googl...

So Google can eavesdrop on everyone's communication globally and relay that to the US government. If I were a foreign government I would tell them to fuck off. There is no point in having a spy network of a corporation that belongs to another nation in your airspace. If they want to build such a network, open source the technology and let nations' own organizations that are under the democratic control of those nations build that technology.

The sad fact remains that many, maybe most people around the world are better off (sometimes a lot better off) having their Internet spied on by the US than having it spied on by their home government, or than not having Internet at all. The extra problem with having national Loon-a-like networks is that (as the OP says) apparently it goes against the grain of those stratospheric winds.

Enough with the "holier than thou" selective morality.

I'm not an American, you know. What do you consider untrue or unreasonable about my comment above?

You don't have to be an american to have selective bias. The idea that Americans (or any first world country) are less likely to do more harm by spying on their people comes from a belief that American government are morally superior. A dangerous type of thinking which leds to them going to a war under false pretense and killing 100s of thousands of people without and repercussions and very little legal or public scrutiny.

Can you imagine what would happen if China was involved in a "preemptive" war against any other nation and killed ~300,000 people?

But when "First world" government does it, "oh they had good intentions...", "they were less likely to do any harm.."

"comes from a belief that American government are morally superior"

Not necessarily. It may as well come from a belief that "first world" governments are better supervised by people, journalists and politicians, that legislative, judiciary and executive branches of government are actually independent, or that said country is far away and probably not interested as much in someone as his own government.

How unfounded and idealistic those beliefs are is a matter of discussion, but there are many possible reasons for preferring "first world" country as an entity controlling the flow of data. Compared to the alternatives, where corruption and nepotism are much more rampant, where the opposition is routinely persecuted by the government, where journalists are killed by special agents, where you can land in a prison for long years because you jokingly said something to your friend...

The part where you say that 3rd world countries would be "better off" being spied upon by the US, in return for obtaining free WiFi! And it's not even a free choice to make.

> And it's not even a free choice to make.

The citizens are free to remain unconnected. The countries are free to build their own infrastructure.

Perhaps the choice isn't "free" because the incentives are too compelling, but that says something in itself about the benefits (even if we just assume the hypothetical risk of spying is real, as you did).

I was referring to the fact they can't choose not to have the balloons float above their territories.

I do think the concept of Project Loon is amazing, though.

I'm assuming that the major risk with Loon is NSA "upstream collection" once you connect to it, and the danger of passive radio surveillance by Loon will be limited and/or duplicate capabilities which the US government already has. I could be certainly be wrong about that though.

Google does not belong to the US government.

If they can compel them to do anything they like, does the technicality of ownership really matter?

I used to trust Google but I don't trust any government, sure as hell not the most megalomaniacal and power hungry one on the entire planet. By extension the rational perspective to take in light of recent revelations is to treat all entities subject to US law as if they were the US government proper. A people who are not permitted to dissent from their government are effectively indistinguishable from it.

Concerning stuff.

Google is a legal entity that is effectively recognized as a person under the USG, not the other way around. Many cities are also incorperated. Are those cities not legally apart and under the influence of the USG since they are incorperated?

Yes, you're right. But actually, in practice, it and other US companies are the US government's bitches. All to be ridden via proxies known as FISA/FBI/CIA/NSA/PRISM or other acronyms we don't even know yet.

There is some truth to that, but Google is a bitch in every country it operates. For example Canada, UK, Russia and China. In HK (nation that Snowden praised) you actually get censored Google.

I am shocked people are down-voting a matter of fact statement. Sorry about that.

Loons aren't eavesdroppers. They only operate on very specific spectra in order to ensure high bandwidth.

They transmit on very specific frequencies, but they could have wide-band receivers on board, listening to whatever is interesting to the operators (filtering has to be applied because the downlink is limited).

Why would Google want to "eavesdrop on everyone's communication globally and relay that to the US government"? What possible business benefit could that have?

Uh, vs any other possible ISP that would provide internet access? Or is it better just to not provide access at all?

Luckily strong encryption tools are built into every browser out there by default that prevents the ISP from seeing what you're doing on the web beyond the domain you are connecting to, and there are tools like Tor that can protect you even from logging of that.

Meanwhile, how will a nation build an internet providing balloon only for itself when the wind carries those balloons around the entire planet? And the very point of the project is to provide internet where there is currently none, meaning "organizations that are under the democratic control of those nations" (making the huge assumption that any particular country we're talking about is a democracy) haven't found it economically feasible and/or desirable to provide internet in these places.

What a golden example of a "middlebrow" dismissal.

IIRC those balloons stay in place, thanks to being able to change altitudes. When the wind start to blow in an undesirable direction or is too strong, the balloon can just get to the lower or higher place, where the wind is just right. That's exactly what normal balloons do and it seems to work.

Because of that I think that giving the balloons to the countries is perfectly possible - just hand them the remote for the ones above their heads.

That's what I thought at first as well (the animation shows going in one direction and then rising and moving in the opposite, after all), though it seemed really optimistic that you could have enough control from different layers of wind to stay around one spot. Layers of wind move in different directions, but not often diametrically opposed (at least not near to each other vertically), and overall winds in the stratosphere move largely west to east. It seems more likely that you could do some steering with the different layers, but not anything approaching staying still. More like change your latitude very slowly. IANAMeteorologist, though.

Check out the "how loon works" video, it seems to back that up (the source article quotes it as well): http://www.google.com/loon/how/ at around 2:55

from the transcript:

> "Now we have some ability to steer in general, however, in the stratosphere, most of the time the winds actually flow from west to east. Because the winds generally circulate this way, we typically will have bands of our balloons that will be around the world at different latitudes. So if the balloons are circling around the bottom half of the world, eventually the balloon that's over South Africa will pass over South America."

Google biggest problem is that they are not above the law of foreign countries that want to protect themself against NSA puppets.

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