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.

Comments

Re:Why can't this be applied to mobile devices?

[TheMeld]

I think the real problem with this would be the amount of traffic needed to negotiate the dynamic routing paths, especially considering the possible range. Also, TCP can only handle 30 hops. That would make this rather diffcult to implement well without lots of fixed access points.

The only way to make the dynamic routing work well that I can think of would be to not really publish routes, but rather have a way to discover other routing nodes in your vicinity, and incorporate gps, so you know roughly where your destination is and each routing node routes to the closest adjacent node to the destination. That would certainly be inefficient, tho.

ahh...security?

[drDugan]

I am no expert here, but I've HEARD all sorts of nasty things about the insecure nature of 802.11b networks. If it does become popular to have free networks of wireless access, doesn't security become even more of an issue? I imagine lots of hackers watching all the traffic siphoned through their antennas. Can anyone comment?