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DIY: Building A Wireless Freenet
techmuse writes: "Moshe Bar has an excellent article at Byte describing how he designed a wireless freenet for his community, and convinced his neighbors to participate. Most importantly, the freenet has resulted in new forms of interaction and strengthened social ties within his own local community (the inverse of what happens on the wider Internet)." And since consumer-grade wireless access points are now cheaper than a large hard drive, this sort of guide is especially welcome.
consumer-grade wireless access points are now cheaper than a large hard drive
Where are you buying them that cheap? I just bought a 40 GB for $100, I have yet to see an access point anywhere near that.
The problem was with everyone not wanting to pay. It would have been T-1 access to every home for about 70 dollars per month. Every home built out there would have a 24 port hub and CAT 5 wiring as part of the house.
I have also wondered why this has not caught on, considering hotels and dorm rooms at schools have this technology implemented just fine.
Click here or here.
I always thought one way to roll out the mobile internet is to create a freenet like network between all the mobile nodes. Every device acts as a node for the network and can route data to nearby nodes.
For argument sake, lets say that each device can transmit up to 100ft. You however want to connect to a node that is 200ft. away. Luckly there is a node in between you that can route the information between you. Lets say you want to connect to someone miles away, well the same rules apply, just keep hoping until you find the host. Certain internet access points would be established too to keep wireless trafic to a minimum (for less hops) as well as routing traffic to nodes outside of your range.
This would take some pretty fancy routing but I think it would be possible. If these nodes were added to every device that can use them (cell phones, pdas, radios, etc) then the network will quickly form. It may not be as ideal as other wireless network topolgies, but it is better than nothing at all, like we have right now!
Wow, this is a great idea. But the application I'd really like to see is a T3 (or better) being pretty much standard coming into eavery big apartment building, or city block. Using wireless could save so much on infrastructure costs that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect high-speed internet to be cheap and accessible almost universally. Between this and sub-$700 PCs, we could have most of the population online very soon... and maybe an ubiquity of online communication would make everyone's life better.
Or maybe I'm just a geek.
telekon
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
This is exactly what we want to see -- hobbyists helping hobbyists. It might not make money, but it's a valuable contribution to the community, both real-world and virtual.
True, not everyone has the expertise available to set up several servers/firewalls/NAT boxes, and this could well be the major challenge facing Open Source. Someone should put together a wireless_net.rpm 'For Idiots' or similar, then finally things will start to change.
Local networks are probably going to be the wave of the future as costs decrease and several-PC homes start to become more common. Experiments like this, pushing forward the mass application of such technology, should be happening everywhere.
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The greatest thing about the BBS days (other than TradeWars and OOII) was that you were connecting to people nearby. Though you never met face-to-face, it was still nice to know that they were in the same area. I would love to find a local web site in my area that was focused exclusively on my neighborhood. Alas, I can find none. We don't need a wireless freenet, we just need better focused sites. People say we're anti-social, but computers have ALWAYS been about connecting people to people!
If my cable company found out about this somehow, they would pull by connection so fast, half our house would go with the wall plate. Then of course I'd be stuck because there's not a terrific variety of reliable vendors to choose from in our neck of the woods. So it would have to be low-key, somehow.
Besides, more than a few people would likely saturate the upstream on almost any cable modem and many DSL's. Any words of wisdom for those of us with 10 Mbit pipes running into our house?
How about, for example, a peer-peer setup with multiple cable modem gateways splitting the load?
Would that work with multiple base stations?
I want to setup a wireless network similar to this, but I wouldn't get my bandwidth for free so I'd have to charge a small fee to cover the cost of the T-1 or T-3 line. The main problem I saw was distance, sure I could put up a powerful antenna on my home, but what about everyones wireless cards? I figured I could transmit to them, but I figured their little antennas wouldn't be able to transmit to me unless I also put up a powerful antenna on each home.
Does anyone have some ideas about how I could do this? The chaining of access points sounds like a good idea, but there is the routing issue if one goes down, not to mention to cost factor of having one in every home, maybe one every couple of homes to keep a fairly tight network. Could someone point me to a good resource that describes how I could setup a network like this and make it work well? What about FCC regulations on doing this type of thing? Ideally, in the future, I'd like to provide a wireless type service to my whole town, are there any regulations for using a standard wireless network for profit like that?
I have so many questions about this type of network setup so if you want to e-mail me the answers and maybe we could talk off-slashdot, that'd be great too. My e-mail is pretty easy to figure out since there is no JeffSketch.com domain.
Thanks in advance.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
how attractive would a free wireless access be in a small downtown to techies? i live in a small city on the oregon coast, and economically, it is pretty much rock bottom. timber is on its way out, and many people have to look elsewere for work (big cities like portland and seattle). now i realize there needs to be other forms of economic enticement, but would freewireless access in a (empty) downtown area help attract people from crowded cities? you can bring your laptop and pda to the local cafe, and work while enjoying the ocean breeze.
i realize it's a crazy idea, but i would like to take my pda out where ever i am, and be able to stay connected.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
From the article:
[quote]
The final aspect is the one of trust towards me. Since all traffic goes through my servers, and all e-mail is stored in my computers, etc. the Freenet members need to trust me. If they just slightly mistrust me, they would start using conventional dial-up connections to send more intimate or secret messages. This shows again the limited application scope of Freenets.
[/quote]
Why don't they worry about this kind of stuff with their own ISP?? "I connect to AOL because I want someone I don't know reading my e-mail."
Granted, it's a bit more embarassing when the guy down the street reads your love letter to Celine Dion, but why not balk when it's Earthlink, the FBI, or anybody freakin' else. Hey, I presonally would rather know who is reading my mail, so I can walk down the street and give him a PHP tutorial. (Pretty Humongous Pain)
But the reality that this should bring home to everyone, is this: Do you trust your upstream providers?? (Say at least as much as the Post Office?)
~Hammy (The unbeliever)
"When a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is attacked, which people are innocent again??"
Ahem, would you care to back this up? I know someone who was afraid to leave the house for a long time. After talking with people on the internet, he began to feel less disconnected from the world and began to venture out into the world again. I had long thought of the internet as something that kept people behind closed doors, but now I'm not so sure. I'd like to see some evidence before I'll believe the kind of sweeping factoids that the person who posted this article just made.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Glubco had plans for a device that consisted of the magnetron out of an old
microwave and the flyback transformer from an old television.
This produced a very cool device which was used to nuke almost anything they could get their hands on, but for some reason they no longer have any details for it (probably safety issues, liability etc.). They used to have a railgun as well, but now they only have their Tesla Coil, I still gotta get the time and funds to build one of those suckers.
Glubco can be found here:
http://www.glubco.com/weaponry/
Yeah, thats my $0.02 worth.
I have 384kbit bandwidth both ways on my DSL line whereas most people have 768down/128up connections. Sometimes I wish I had that extra 384kbit inbound. What is the liklihood that a mesh with 5 gateways (using different ISPs) distributed over 20 nodes could provide on-average much better bandwidth to the entire network?
Is it a dream or a reality that a Global Independent Wireless Network is possible? What I mean is:
But I'm not knowledgable about this kind of thing. Is it possible? How long would it take? What is your opinion of it? But if it happens, it sounds like one of the engineering feats of the century.
From the article:
--
The bridging configuration of base stations allows you to turn encryption from 40 bit up to 128 bit, although this will surely slow down the bandwidth a little. In some countries, like France, encryption is not permitted except for ridiculously small keys
--
Can someone explains how much it would affect the
bandwith going from 40 to 128 bits ?
How often is a session key generated with 802.11b
and what is the smallest packet size anyway ?
By the way, encryption is totally permitted in
France since more than one year and, contrarly
to U.S., there is little chance of going back
to heavy regulated crypto. Use 256 bits
private key if you want.
This is not entirely related, but imagine lots of wireless freenets connecting each other - if they are big enough (many, many cities connected, some even running their servers on it) they can engage in a *peering* agreement with a big ISP, therefore actually getting a free connection to the "other part of the internet" :-)