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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.
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!!!
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!
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....
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.