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5 Cool Wireless Reseach Projects
Bob B writes "Including an effort by MIT researchers to exploit dense urban networks of existing Wi-Fi access points to create municipal wireless networks rather than relying on EarthLink and cities to fund and build such wireless projects. Secure tunneling is the secret sauce for making it work and not making wireless AP owners liable for miscreants who might use the bandwidth, the researchers say."
This might ( most likely does ) violate most any ISP's eula. That also has to be dealt with as they want their cut too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If a story looks like a dup to me, I just don't read it. On the other hand, slashdot's completely broken moderation forces me to read everything, unless I want to miss some really good posts. So if they were going to fix anything, I'd say moderation is where to put the effort, priority #1.
As for the story, someone has to provide access to the net. Distributing it so that people get it from wifi puts the load - and the bill - on the people with the connections. As long as the Internet pipes are a commercial traffic system, unlike the highways, which are taxpayer funded (via the gas taxes, to some degree) traffic systems, "free" access always devolves upon one set of private individuals, for the benefit of others. That's fine if you feel like donating, but as we know from the history of downloading music, the ratio of freeloaders to voluntary payers is horrific and the payers take the majority of the load.
I'm of the mind that like the highways, data "highways" have turned out to be essential to commerce, education and communications - and because of this, the government should manage them with an equally-shared tax among the citizens; and since unlike the highways, the intertubes don't wear out proportional to traffic, bandwidth should not be a significant factor. Our (meaning, the US) network structure should be rebuilt to carry about a million times what it carries now anyway, and removing it from the private sector seems like a good time to get that done. Probably cost a few days of "Iraq war equivalent funding." (that's hand waving, but surely, we could afford it.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Seconded, I volunteer at a small elementary school with a one to one laptop program just a couple blocks from a major university, and interference effects are becoming more and more of a problem. Last I counted I could see something like 15-20 APs in one of the classrooms, and while sitting on the school's wireless network in that room you are guaranteed to lose all signal at least once an hour. This is obviously a problem, but moreover a dropped connection when using one of the network based programs (such as FASTT Math) results in the user being knocked out of that program, right now I don't see this technology being employed easily in a wifi dense setting until this problem of interference is dealt with.
Registered Linux User #423733
Finally, someone who gets it! I'm sick of all of these whiners who say "I can see 10 or 20 wireless AP's within range of my system, and it's killing me!" Gee, imagine all of those AP's converted into one mesh network. You'd only see 1.
That's right, 1 network to rule them all. If that's too paranoid for you, break it up into 3 overlapping networks. Call them NBC, ABC, and CBS for historical reasons. I don't care. Don't assume that if this model gets implemented any time soon, though, that you are going to see a proliferation of AP's. No, that's not why we want this (and believe me a lot of us want this).
The reason we want a municipal wifi MESH network is for redundancy, emergency services, and to wean our cities off of the cable/dsl duopoly. Also, a lot of you here are whinging about your ISP's and their terms of service. Get this, every one of you. If this model is put in place there will be NO ISP, unless you count the City of (Where-you-happen-to-live) here. Alright? A mesh is just that. No one controls it. It's the ultimate p2p network, and it scares the crap out of the telcos and cablecos because they lose control, pure and simple.
Please, if you are going to post something in response to an article about "Mesh" networks, read something about them. My favorite sites are www.saschameinrath.com, which talks about a working mesh network in the Champaign-Urbana area, as well as www.wetmachine.com, which is a political rant site about how the FCC is screwing us all (OK, the second one is just for fun).
For those of you whining that "evil people will use my bandwidth to download pr0n or talk to terr'ists, and I might be held liable..." you are uninformed about the law. Even if someone uses the part of your network that is nominally "yours" to send messages to your favorite band of evil-doers, you have no liability. You are covered under section 230, Title 47. The communications medium is not responsible for the actions of the people at either end of the line.
Let's take this "the medium is evil, because it is used by evil people" to its logical extreme. Are privately owned automobiles illegal? Why not? I can run moonshine in them, or use them to rob banks. How horrible. Cars must be banned. Also, there was an event which took place, oh, I don't know some time in September, in which bad things happened to people inside of buildings and airplanes. I don't see the world attempting to ban either of those things. Of course, the obvious solution to all of our technological problems is to ban technology, and go back to the lifestyle of nomadic hunter-gatherers, but good luck getting the Supreme Court to support you in that argument. We may as well ban oxygen because it is used by evil people to breathe.
My final point is this: mesh is the future, and it is inevitable. Who is going to construct the next generation internet? The incumbents? Give me a break. They're too busy rent-seeking on the crap they have sell us now.
Change happens during a crisis, and if you have been paying attention, you will have noticed that crises happen more and more frequently around here. Also, you may know, unless you have contradictory information, that the fastest way to set up an emergency communication network is by putting up a mesh network. You get your emergency services up and running faster with hippies and WRT54g's, as opposed to corporate suits in their slick vans and PR people.
And once people have gotten used to living in their post-warzone, post-hurricane, post-earthquake disaster area with a fast p2p network --(remember, the telcos and cablecos are going to limit you to the speed they think you can handle. You are going to be going as fast as the spec says you can go, which is currently 54mbps, with plain old 802.11g) do you really think all of these folks are going to want to go back to corporate mediated comms?
The only real problems left to solve, for the people who are interested, are security (VPN tunnelling) and ha
The paper describes outfitting such devices as the handheld computers used by first responders with elements dubbed a "device root key" and a "storage root hash" to enable temporary access to information.
I think this idea needs to be pursued. Having immediate but temporary access to need-to-know info such as medical history, contact phone numbers, and even a programmable access card for building (apt or condo) access to respond to 911 calls would be excellent.
The temporary, secure design would reduce the risk (or just the fear) of having first responders abuse the info (i.e. using a 'universal' key card to access a building during a non-emergency. As a first responder I know time would be saved if I could enter a building during a call without needing to enter buzz codes, etc, but I don't want to have the responsibility of universal access.
Expanding the system to share location/status of first responders/patients/threats/etc, along with live-updated info from the control centre would be very valuable.