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Big Dave Diode writes "A cool story about what happens when a bunch of bored nerds with a lot of wireless equipment takes a road trip. Intervehicle networking at 65 mph!"
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Very amusing.. I especially like the fact that one of the guys was required online by his employer, while on the trip. Does this mean he can write off all the costs etc to his employer and get them to pay for it all? Nice little scam!!
- Chuq
"It was hard to tell but I think Emacs came out as the better utility vehicle."
Absolutelty hilarious. I'll go and read the rest of it now...
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
http://review.lanwahn.at/php-cgi/gallery/view_albu m.php?set_albumName=autobahnwahn2002
here are some more pics from an highwaylan from austria (may not all of u understand german) but pictures say more than 1000words
Making a phone call from Pittsburgh to New York while both parties are coasting down I-70 in Illinois wasn't my idea of a smart move. I'd be more inclined to run into them to get their attention; it would have cost the same.
I guess this falls under "Everything I needed to know about driving I learned from Gran Turismo"...
slashdot!=valid HTML
So they had ot use talkd! AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
It's also amusing that they still bothered to use ssh between each other's machines. I say -- any cracker dude who figures out how to snoop on my 802.11b traffic at 85m/h deserves my respect and my passwords!
Says the RIAA: When you EQ, you're stealing bass!
using a cell phone would be too expensive... .. and we used a cell phone to get online!!!
..the result of Geeks with too much money (or stuff), too much spare time, and some hare brained scheme that they will make work.
god, it's beautiful.
mechanicos ergo cogito
I found myself considering a similar possibility while on a long car trip the other day. If EVERY CAR were fitted with a GPS and wireless repeater, it would be possible to build a wireless mesh that could cover the highways of most major cities. Put a land based, hard wired internet connected WAP every few miles, and you've got broadband wireless on the road! Why GPS? Two cars headed in opposite directions at 100+ KPH would not want to act as repeaters for each other, as the would only be within range of each other for a very short time. The GPS could determine which cars were best suited for the current direction fo travel, and detect when a car was leaving the "mesh" by watching for exiting on an offramp. The GPS could also be used to determine an optimal path for data to travel, so as not to hop to every single car before reaching a land-based connection, which would be expensive time-wise.
This probably wouldn't work very well in rural areas or at night when few cars are on the road, but could likely be effective near large cities. And of course, the idea could be expanded to individuals walking, ala Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" network.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Pity they didn't setup Voice over IP.
Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.
If they ever make this into a movie (goddam there should have been a video camera operator in each car too) the final scene would have been a closeup on the driver's smiling face at the Perl conference, with a voice over...
"Some called me lame, some called me cool, but they all called me geek."
Final theme music, roll credits.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
All was not lost, however, we resorted to remotely controlling Schwern's laptop to play random songs in the Passat and there was nothing they could do about it. I ssh'ed into my friends box acrossed the internet and did this, he got pretty pissed off
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
He wasn't "hacking while driving," he had a co-pilot. I don't see anything dangerous here.
"Meng rode with me in my Hyundai Tiburon acting as communications officer and uplink controller."
You can't use GPS data to decide how to form the network topology, because in order to echange the GPS data you will have to have the network already running.
Unfortunately, the amount of routing information that needs to be exhanged in ad-hoc networks increases exponentially with the size of the network and the rate of change in the network topology (mobility).
You're right in that utilizing location information could be used to optimize the routing protocol, and people are working on this, but it sill presents a formidable scalability problem.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Dave did his PhD thesis on the idea of routing packets between a bunch of wavelan cards moving all over the place. If you play up the military side of it (imagine every soldier/tank with wavelan, routing packets between them!) DARPA likes to fund this kind of stuff.
Anyways, the most fun was had when Dave and his colleagues rented a fleet of cars, put a wavelan equipped laptop in each one (since this was a while ago, they were using the original 2Mb wavelan, not this 802.11b stuff), and were driving all over Pittsburgh trying to see how well packets would get through between cars....
Granted CB or other no-license radio is cheaper, and easier. But it still would have been secure, high fidelity and fun.
:-).
VoIP would have spared them the jargon, too. No need to remember silliness like 'breaker one five' and 'ten four good buddy', as well as some of the more silly mutilations of common english words in a (mostly failed) effort to make them sound more official, or technical (an example of such is in the subject line
Course, if they were going 95 instead of 65, they would want to know where all the 'bears' are hiding...
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
.. but he said that using a cell phone while going down I-70 wouldn't be a smart idea. He made it sound like it wasn't safe... but apparently using IRC while driving is...
What, the fact that they publish interesting stories (some written by yours truly) and then have the temerity to link to books they sell...the whole article is thus an ad? Yeah, they sell a book on networking your car, using talkd, and driving to a perl conference...
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
What are you talking about? My phone provides internet connectivity (albeit at a fairly slow rate - like all cell phones in this country that I know of) that just uses the normal minutes. I've got nation-wide use and free long-distance, too. All you'd have to do is get a plan with a lot of minutes, and you're set for not *that* much money. One machine, NAT, and a Nextel phone (or Sprint, IIRC) would be fine for traveling use. Maybe with some diald magic thrown into the mix, as the connect doesn't take terribly long to come up.
The writer was very creative in his use of off-the-shelf equipment. His experiment is a good proof-of-concept.
Amateur (Ham) Radio Operators have been communicating via packet radio for something like twenty years. Since ham radios are used, the range is measured in miles rather than feet. The only drawback of that system is that the speed is limited to 1200 baud -- though higher baud rates are used on some of the higher bands. In fact, some hams use tcp/ip as their protocol (originally, packet radio used ax.25).
For more information, check out news:alt.ham-radio.packet.
Digital radio communication is actually much older than even packet radio. Technically, morse code is a digital medium. Somewhat later, baudot code was used, and hams communicated via RTTY (Radio Teletype). I'm not sure when the first RTTY station hit the air, but I suspect that it was in the 1940s or 1950s. Later, ASCII was used for RTTY, which had the advantage of lower-case letters and more characters.
Packet Radio became popular in the 1980s, and the innovative hams used it for emergency communications, bulliton boards, email, and vehicluar communication. Some attached GPS units to the TNCs (Terminal Node Controllers), so a central station could track several mobile units. This turned out to be very useful for "fox hunting" (searching for hidden transmitters), and the more serious searches for emergency locator beacons and for illegal transmitters.
The police have been using a form of packet radio for at least ten years, and probably for a whole lot longer (I saw one ten years ago). Rather than calling your license number into the dispacher, they can type it into the terminal and get a direct text reply.
The military also uses wireless digital communication. They used RTTY way back in the ancient times when I was serving (no, we didn't use flintlock rifles). I used to repair the encryption devices that secured the links.
The author expressed some doubt about securing a wireless link, but I am confident that any communication that the military is currently researching is well secured. They have been using crypto gear for a very long time. Rather than take a chance on being accused of divulging classified information, I will just suggest that you type "comsec crypto" into google and surf from there.
The point is that once you encrypt the data, you can send it over any channel you like without fear of eavesdroppers.
Incidentally, hacking the 802.11 box to produce more power is almost certainly illegal. The FCC takes a dim view of unlicenced people modifying type-accepted gear.
I haven't researched the issue, but I believe that a ham can legally modify an 802.11 box. I am quite sure that it is legal if the operating frequency is moved to one of the ham bands (I don't recall if it is already in a "shared" band). Doing so will create other issues that I won't bother to get into right now, though.
One final word of advice: Move the antenna OUTSIDE the vehicle. It'll work a whole lot better.
Let's see, WAP "281-bc2" is northbound while WAP "192-kee" is southbound... With some pretty advanced signal strength metering combined with directions (electronic interfaces to compasses are cheap, some cars already have them) might negate the need for GPS.
"When this baby hits 88 miles per hour...you're gonna see some serious shit."
or
"If we drop below 50mph the hub will explode!"
There's something to be said for elegance.
2 + iBooks with Airport cards - stow the base station hardware and the inverter and drive for 6 hours a day MAYBE needing the lighter direct power adapter outside of that. Stay within a dozen car lengths.
I'm wondering what made them leave the 19" CRT at home...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Because you can add a high-gain antenna to make it operate with distances greater than 40 feet.
Ever consider one of these for your project? There are lots more, but if you could hack one of the DISH/DirecTV dishes with Internet access that will gyroscopically keep it pointed at the bird, you might be on your way.
....Of course, multiplayer Q3 is out of the question. ;)
My highschool Shackleton spends about 1/2 a year on the road. We have iBooks with wireless. We drive big school busses across the country, where a lot of productive work could be done. So I put together a wireless fileserver consisting of an airport basestation, a quantum snap drive, and a 5 port 10/100 switch (for wired connections, backups, etc.). Attach that to a UPS and then to an invertor, and students could work on the server from any laptop with a wireless connection, no more worrying about which laptop they saved their files on.
It was originally a p90 with 48 megs of ram and a crossover cable to the basestation. I would have loved to use a SBC with a wireless card and a laptop drive for better size / power usage, but I didn't have the time for a custom hacked job, which I didn't want to have to support when I graduated.