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Linuxcare Founders Go Wireless
LinuxCare founders Dave Sifry, Art Tyde and Dave LaDuke have started their second company: Sputnik. Basically, they have an ISO you can download that will turn a laptop with an 802.11b card into a wireless gateway. They also wrote a user-authentication scheme that reroutes all traffic to the gateway until the user logs in via a web form. This should sound familiar to people who stay in broadband capable hotels a lot. Using this authentication technique, the software allows you to choose who can and cannot use your gateway, and in you'll be able to charge strangers for access (with Sputnik handling the billing). This will likely get some isps a wee bit upset. NewsForge has an article detailing what they are doing. Update: Turns out the authentication wasn't written by Sputnik, my bad. They use NoCatAuth
Disclaimer: I've known these guys for a long time and am pals with them, so I waited until someone else (in this case Grant at NewsForge and the NYT) put something up independently about them before linking to them.
Sputnik didn't write the 'captive portal' authentication system. It's a GPL'd program called
NoCat. http://www.nocat.net/
OK, while I think this is some cool technology and is Linksys Done Right (tm), I have to ask...
In this post-dot-com era, where's the business model?
How do they expect to make money? LOTS of open-source software companies are making PLENTY of money these days, right?
Kudos to them for putting together what seems to be a really nice product -- I just wouldn't expect to get rich at this one.
Linuxcare -- the Clemens fastball down the middle...
Sputnik -- The breaking ball down and out that the Babe himself couldn't hit.
So where's strike 3 coming from?
--NBVB
Even with Ricochet coming back, this seems like a much better idea if it catches on. Granted, if there are no gateways, nobody can use it, but it'd be a lot faster than Ricochet and (it seems) based off actual usage, not monthly fees. It seems there's a lot of potential for abuse here, but I'd definately like to check this out, it seems like a good way to make a little extra cash (though I'm curious if there's a way to block out abusive users, I don't need any m4d h4x0rz cracking machines through my IP.) This will also probably violate a lot of ISPs ToSes, but who cares, most of us are violating them anyway. :)
I don't know if the ISPs will be pissed off or not. This seems like a fairly straight business deal. Running it from CD makes me wonder how customizable it'll be. They're planning to make money by charging roamers to connect, while letting their partners (w/ fat pipes) connect for free.
If anything, it should make the consumer broadband ISPs happy, since it restricts unauthorized use.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
From the article I get the impression it seems like one could mistake this for one of those affiliate "scams." Let me get this straight, I set up a wireless node, and then I get paid for my bandwidth, or I can connect to other wireless sputnik nodes? Only problem with that is that my (and your) broadband providers aren't going to be to keen on the idea of me being a reseller of bandwidth, when I originally signed up as an end home consumer for DSL. I'm not harping on the hardware and code, that seems all nice and nifty, but the idea of reselling your bandwidth probably will not go over too well.
Personally, I'm sick of the fact that I have two choices for getting broadband into my house: the Cable Monopoly and the Telephone Monopoly. What incentive do I have to follow their "User Agreements" when both of them are in violation of numerous antitrust laws? None. Look at Verizon: they beat every last CLEC to death, and now they've introduced legislation to "deregulate" the broadband market, which means "exercise monopoly power over".
So, now we have a tool. A way for one person to subscribe for DSL or Cable Modem service and share their connection with the entire neighborhood, who can provide kickbacks in the form of cash. With a properly configured distribution of this package, it's entirely possible to make your routing/NAT'ing of your neighbors traffic completely undetectable.
How's that for sticking it to the man? Illegal monopolies: This Is Your Wakeup Call!
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
..somone sniffing the network either captures your 'login' session, or simple takes over your 802.11 session?
don't get me wrong, this is a good thing in many ways, but 802.11 is suck a leaky system that ANYTHING based on it has an inherent problem, short of limiting all connections to authenticated ssh or ipsec connections.
802.11a/b/x is simple broken, and NO 'standard' ip connection routed over it can improve this, hwich is unfortunate, it's ONLY safe if you use a suitable encryption/authentication layer on top of it.
of course, the number of people who realise just how public all internet data is seems to be a very small number, let alone the number of people who realise that email is in effect a public forum, and should NOT be used to forward their credit card numbers.
the part about a simple setup for an 802.11 gateway is a good thing, it can be a pain to set up under linux, but hardly a revolutionary step.
Wake up dude. Your missing the boat. We don't need ISPs anymore.
www.freenetworks.org
How is it unsafe? It's encryption technology. It's used to hide things. How can this 'be made safe?'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
it can fit of course in 48 megs. it's not like it's windows...
all this is is a nice installer for a linux install, and NoCatAuth http://nocat.org which is a GPL program. so they'd damn well better be giving out source...
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
that's a bridge-based way to look at it. imagine if all the routers were configured to route all the packets to the registration machine? Non-trivial with a typical hardware-based router
feature set (except for very high-end Cisco), but for a software-based device like this, pretty easy to categorize web traffic and forward/rewrite all internal http packets (or even just all IP traffic, pretty much stonewalling you in with little CPU effort expended). Then when you register on the page it sends some lovely token enabling routing from your IP and briding from your MAC.
i hope it fails.
here's why:
i am part of a free wireless community already, i founded one in my town. we, unlike sputnik are working with ISP's to work out what would be acceptable with them. so that we save money, and they make just as much, but most likely on less tech support costs.
sputnik isn't making any such attempts. they say at the bottom, please observe your isp's rules. bullshit, they're encouraging you to share your @home cable connection, which isn't allowed.
in doing this, they are going to make isp's lock down against connection sharing, and when any honest community wireless group aproaches them, they will already have a bad taste in their mouth.
another thing is, they are trying fairly hard to hide the fact that all their software is, is an installer for linux and NoCatAuth. (http://nocat.org), which is a GPL application for authentication.
so, here's to sputnik crashing and burning as fast as possible before they make all of us geeks out here trying to use our laptops in the park look like a bunch of swindling criminals like sputnik are.
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
Wake up dude. Your missing the boat. We don't need ISPs anymore.
That's true if your traffic is local to your neighbourhood.
If you want to route traffic through more than your neighbourhood, though, you're going to run into problems. If the area you're routing traffic in is more than a few hops wide, you'll either be spending most of your bandwidth routing other peoples' messages, or you'll have to set up dedicated high-bandwidth links to let long routes bypass most users' nodes. Now if you have a network of these links... you have something that looks a lot like the existing backbone.
If you have a backbone to maintain, you have to charge for use of the backbone to amortize building and maintenance costs. This gives you a multi-level system where the people running the backbone sell bandwidth to people who locally redistribute the bandwidth.
Which looks a lot like the current system of multiple levels of ISPs.
ISPs exist for a reason. If you try to do away with them, you'll just end up having to reinvent them.
Not really a big deal when you consider that there is *no* way for them to know this is occuring... [...] None. Zip. Zilch. ZeRo.
Unless they just sniff packet headers and notice that you're web surfing while you're playing Quake. Kind of difficult to do that with only two hands and one pair of eyes.
Or unless they notice that you're viewing dozens of web pages per second.
Either way, they'd have a hard time *proving* you're up to something, but they can jerk your connection around under any number of pretenses on their end. If this becomes a big problem, believe me, they'll start squashing people who try this.
...but I can get a wireless gateway cheaper than a laptop...
...selling access probably violates my contract with my ISP...
...It sounds great for hotels wanting to buy a prepackaged deal, but most go through commercial ISPs...
I'm not really sure what market they're trying to corner here... They're not planning on profitting from this are they?
No offense guys, cool idea and all, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
I wish they supported more than just the lame Intersil Prism II cards. I have two lucent/orinico, and a cisco aironet :( I was all set to download, but then I read the requirements.
Here's hoping that more coverage will come. Its all there in the kernel and/or pcmcia-cs.
Linuxcare Founders Go Wireless I knew they were smart and all, but it's cool that they found a way to turn completely wireless. They must save a ton on airfare and bus tickets!
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Today's Top Deals
What's all this about world domination and secure networks?
Note that the computer system you pick to host your Sputnik Gateway will boot and operate entirely from CD-ROM, and must be solely dedicated to functioning as a Sputnik Gateway
If I wanted to use my $2000 laptop (or $500 desktop) as a $200 wireless hub, couldn't I just download linux and set up some firewall rules? Where's the interesting new functionality here?
Why don't I just throw a web login on a can of cheez-whiz and make my own start-up! I'll encrypt it all with 4096 bit encryption and call it secur-a-whiz. Sure you'll have to plug it in to your laptop to use it, but it'll make millions, I swear!
All the changes that we made are distributed on the ISO. We don't screw around with Open Source licensing, God knows we've been there, and we play by the rules.
It's in the compressed filesystem in lxcr-bbc-2_0.cloop in the root directory of the ISO/CD.
/tmp/myloopfs /tmp/fs /tmp/myloopfs /tmp/fs
/tmp/fs
To get to it, do the following:
extract_compressed_fs lxcr-bbc-2_0.cloop >
mkdir
mount -o loop
The filesystem will be all there in
Enjoy.
We'll put things up in a tarball (and we're working on debs and rpms as well) as soon as we get our developer site up, should be before the end of the month.
Thanks! We're looking for folks to help us in this effort as well - and we have a serious offer to any developer who helps out:
If you contribute code (a patch, a new feature, etc.) that goes into the standard release of the Sputnik Gateway, you get free roaming for life. (Whichever is shorter, yours or ours)
Join up on the developer list, which is what we've got until the full-blown developer site is finished.
For quite some time a trend has been worrying me.That trend is the internet turning into tv .I have always believed that How this phenomenon would occur is through a massive centralisation of isps.How I believed this centralisation would happen was through people like aol/time warner and sony who would start selling large chunks of there content ,(movies games tv/whatever),bundeled .I also believed that to compete the small isps would have to buy the rights to the content of big content companies and accept all of the strings that these content companies should choose to attach and hence that the internet would be controlled by about 5 ,(probably less),big isps.
.Also the whole concept of selling off ones bandwith to to help pay for the connection appeals to me ,as it stands over here in ireland monthly net connections for dsl are way way to much for me to afford and the prospect of selling on some of the bandwith which I would not be using is very appealing to me, If something like this existed over here i would support it.
.All in all thow I am very interested to see how this goes.It reminds me in some ways of a co-op only for bandwith.
with net access and offered exclusively to there customers and that this would lead over time to people thinking about the internet along the same lines as tv and not as something new
This story makes me a little more optimistic that the whole internet wiil = tv phenomenon does not have to happen.I also think that this would if adapted by alot of people make the internet alot harder to control and more competitive in terms of pricing
The only doughts I have about all of this is that
a),it will not make money and b) eventualy some big company will take over and subvert the whole thing to its own ends
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won't work with wireless for security. someone who wants on the network can just take over someone elses MAC address that they sniffed. they can even be polite and wait until the original user goes offline before using it to be less likely that the original user would detect anything.
OK, so, *when* it gets hacked, *when* it breaks, *when* it's down, *when* your laptop craps out, *when* Murphy comes to town...
Who's stuck with the tech support?
For that matter, who's stuck with the 'level 1' support issues?
I owned/ran an ISP for 4 years (sold out, blah blah)... the myriad of non-related tech calls are amazing... UFie Greg's life isn't that too far off the the real thing...
So, who gets that call? I've got a family and a day job, and a night job already... seems to me someone is missing a large factor here.
Ever Onward, Forward Bound
LANRoamer is a GPL'ed system that has been doing this for a while. We gave presentations on it at Bay Area Wireless User Group and Sbay.org back in June, I believe, before even the NoCat project started.
If you're into "bazaar" style software development, one thing you should note is that LANRoamer does network booting and upgrade reboots. So, if you contribute a useful feature to LANRoamer, it can be widely deployed quickly (based on our stability labels and the stability level each gateway owner has selected). Also, in addition to free accounts and revenue sharing to our access point providers, we also offer free courtesy accounts for people who run open access points (not just during a free beta), partly in an effort to thank the developers and "evangelists", but also to get them involved.
Anyhow, here is the software, including the latest LANRoamer network boot floppy or CD-ROM.
The network boot floppy currently requires that the first ethernet card be compatible with 3COM 3c59x, 8139too, Ether Express Pro 100, NE2000 PCI cards, Via Rhine, Tulip cards and PC-Net PCMCIA ethernet (the 802.11 card or the ethernet connection to your access point can be just about any card that Linux supports). Unlike NoKat (the last time I checked), LANRoamer can work behind firewalls, including NAT routers, even ones that distribute IP addresses that LANRoamer would otherwise use. Once your gateway is up, client machines can obtain addresses from your wireless gateway by DHCP and are taken to an SSL-based login page when they try to go anywhere on the web until they log in.
just because todays wireless technology only supports a handful of users at a time (say 20 to 30 comfortably) it doesn't mean that tomorrow, we won't have standards that can route wirelessly and support gigabits of traffic at a time, enough for global internet wirelessly.
I'm afraid there are hard limits on how much you'll ever be able to route with a (broadcast) wireless scheme.
The window of frequencies you can use is limited. Above a certain frequency range, your signal will be blocked by things like rain or fog (and of course, walls and windows). This limit is probably in the 10-20 GHz range. No amount of technological development will change this - it's a physical limit.
This places an upper limit on the bandwidth that any given "cell" (broadcast region) can support (no matter how many base stations you put in that cell).
Divide the bandwidth available per cell by the bandwidth a user wants, and you have the maximum number of users per cell. This means your cell must be small enough to have *only* that number of users in it.
This ends up being about 100 people/cell, if they each want 100 kbytes/second access and your broadcasting can handle 100 Gbit (20 GHz of spectrum at 10 bits/Hz with half the bandwidth upstream and half the bandwidth downstream).
This gives a maximum cell size of maybe a hundred metres or so.
When you start to route traffic, things get _much_ worse. If the area you're trying to cover is only a kilometre wide (part of a city's core), the average path length will be on the order of 5-8 hops. If you're distributing *only* through broadcast wireless, your bandwidth use goes up by a factor of 5-8 on average, because you have that many more repeated messages flying through the mesh.
So either everyone gets 10 kbytes/sec, or you shrink your cells, which makes the number of hops needed larger, which means that even *more* of the traffic you're routing is other peoples' messages in flight...
Summary: You need high-capacity point-to-point links. You're not getting around this.
And fiber's a whole lot more reliable than microwave for this (no rain), and can carry a whole lot more (gain-bandwidth product for erbium-doped fiber is in the 100-gigahertz range if I remember correctly, and maximum theoretical limit for optical communication is around 1 petahertz).
Microwave is especially bad for between-city communication, as your range is limited by atmospheric quality and curvature of the earth (and you still need a big expensive tower, which means you still have the ISP problem).
Having read the part about using a laptop as an 802.11b gateway, I immediate thought about the technical possibility of reselling the overpriced broadband they sell at hotels. The target market for resold broadband is not the hotel you stay in, it's the hotel on the other side of the street whose windows are a direct shot from your window. Even better if the hotel across the street lacks broadband. Now, all they need is a freeware client that people can download to search for "renegade ISPs".
What would stop someone from setting up a bunch of these things concealed in suspended ceilings and remotely controllable, offering service all over a metropolitan area just by staying in various hotel rooms and leaving behind some cleverly concealed hardware?
Maybe you haven't noticed, but all of the other stuff you mentioned doesn't form a solution. They're providing the software to tie it all together in a nice, easy to implement solution. There's plenty of $$ to be made out there selling such solutions.
The unsig!
I don't see it as a good news/bad news thing at all!
The people who are motivated to freely give away some of their bandwidth for the good of the community won't suddenly say "Oh darn, now I have to charge for it because this new wireless gateway is designed around a fee structure! There goes my idea for a freenet!" They'll just use other tools to get the job done. It's much easier to offer free access than to find ways of limiting access to paying customers.
This venture simply makes controlled wireless access more feasible (at a reasonable price), and gives more people a new option to share part of their bandwidth while charging for it.
This can't be a bad thing at all. Worst case: It ends up being a rather unpopular thing.
Much more realistic case: It doesn't have massive impact on the industry, but coffee houses and hotels start to catch on, and some of them make good use of it. So do a few enterprising individuals.
Things like sharing connections and the ability to run servers without having to worry about being cut off are a good reason to spend the extra money for a business-grade DSL connection. Sure it costs more, but for a lot of Slashdot readers the extra cost wouldn't be that much of an issue.
fencepost
just a little off
LANRoamer and NoCatAuth appear to have started around the same time.
The two people who started NoCat gave a talk at the Bay Area Wireless User Group about a week after they started development, and I talked to them there. They (or at least one of them) said that they knew about LANRoamer when they started but thought that the LANRoamer back end was proprietary (we had publicly released it as free software by that time, but there was a period of about two weeks from when we announced LANRoamer to when we decided to free the back end, so I understand how they got that impression).