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Afghans Build Open Source Internet From Trash
An anonymous reader writes "Residents of Jalalabad have built the FabFi network: an open-source system that uses common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles."
For the win. P2P win, that is.
proud caffeine whore
This is the reason I'm proud to call myself a geek. This is why I contribute to groups like EFF. This is why I tinker with networking hardware and try out Maker projects, even though I'm a software guy, and not necessarily a great one- because I'm sharing in the culture that can build a digital commons in the middle of the desert in one of the most war-torn regions of the planet using /scrap/. I mean, I'm sure Afghanistan is a great country, but the neighborhood's kinda rough- I have nothing but pride and admiration for FabFi and the people of Afghanistan.
It's probably going to get slashdotted pretty quick, so I'm going to copypasta some of their front page stuff here, and provide some of the links from their homepage at http://fabfi.fablab.af/;
FabFi is an open-source, FabLab-grown system using common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles. With Fabfi, communities can build their own wireless networks to gain high-speed internet connectivity---thus enabling them to access online educational, medical, and other resources.
In the summer of 2010, the Fab team set out to show that Fabfi could be both reliable and sustainable. Choosing Kenya as a pilot site Fabfolk seeded three Fablab students with the hardware to begin deploying a network as a community-operated business.
FabFi is a user-extensible long range point-to-point and mesh hybrid-wireless broadband transmission infrastructure. It is based on the simple idea that a network of simple, intelligent, interconnected devices can create reliable networks in unstable environments. We use simple physics to make low-cost devices communicate directionally for very long distances (physics is cool!), and flexible configurations to adapt to a large variety of conditions.
They build their own parabolic dishes to increase antenna gain, much like the coffee-cantennas, wok-antennas, and pringles-cantennas we've all heard of.
Their blog is at http://fabfiblog.fabfolk.com/
Their Facebook page is at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=140474289914
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
...if they are using any pre-Taliban C-64s in their setup, and if Junis is involved?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Don't be that so harsh on the First World people, they have their own share of problems.
Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance -- Mr. Miyagi
In the US, we do the opposite: take the Internet and make it INTO trash.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm sure the people in Afghanistan have access to the same education as the people in California...
I respect the Afghan ingenuity. It might be in some future point and time that the combination of laws (broadcast copyrights to lock down the public domain, ACTA, son-of-ACTA, COICA, etc.) combined with ISP interest in trying to make a buck from anything, and the fact that it will be easy for people to become persona non grats (and denied access to the Internet) will end up forcing people in the US to do exactly what is being done overseas.
Want to watch that YouTube video without paying your ISP for a "non premium visited site" fee, a streaming video fee, a fee per second, etc? The Afghan system may be the only way for you to see it, or any content not sanitized and sterilized by Big Media.
It might be that the *only* thing that will stop the Internet becoming like Compuserve (or more accurately Prodigy because Prodigy required each post to be reviewed and pass a censor before being able to be read) would be technology like this.
Plus, LAN stuff is cheap. A wireless router for a subnet is dirt cheap. Wi-Fi is quite inexpensive compared to WAN stuff.
If people started adding point to point links coupled with caching and other techniques to keep as much traffic on the LAN as possible, we (as in people who want to use the Internet for more than a passive TV and want content other than what Fox News wants to present us), this is something we really need here in the US as well.
Of course, latency will be hell and gone, but that's better than no connection at all.
Maybe RTFA if you are that interested. I seem to have been able to find all the information on how to set it up and even read through the wiki with the server setup required.
You must really fail at the Internet if you don't know how to click on a link...
Wow, buddy, you're so ignorant (OK, or just uninformed, in that case sorry), you're not even worth getting angry about. Cause that's just sad.
Imagine growing up in a small town, where having a wire out of the wall to connect your radio to, and a water wheel in the small creek outside generating the electricity, is considered a luxury. With lots of space for few people.
Your dad died when you were very young. And all that he left you, was his AK-47. And although that may be a lie, you love that gun more than anything else. Because with it, you are respected. You feel like a man.
If you have the luck of going to a school at all, it would be at a level of at least 50 years ago, if it weren't mainly "teaching" religious stuff.
You are trained in fighting, since you can't remember a time, when there was not war and murder. You lost brothers and sisters, some even were tortured. (Not your sissy waterboarding stuff either.) And the US just set up Kharzai again, who was such a giant asshole, that the Taliban looked good in comparison, which is why they came to power in the first place.
So his drug lord brother started the "business" again. People rather plant poppy for heroine than vegetables for food, as it brings a multiple of the money. And even the police, who officially is supposed to destroy the fields, knows exactly that without them, the town would starve. So they play fake field destructions to fill their quota.
Plus you are happy you didn't have to have a arranged marriage when you were 13, like your grandparents and probably even parents. But it's not much better with love.
This is the world those guys grew up in. While you sat on the couch, munching cheese flips or some shit while watching TV and complaining to your mom about "having to" go to school in your average neighborhood.
Seriously, if people ask me how my dad was when he was young, I honestly still am making a big understatement, when I just have to say one word and one number: Rambo 3.
And you think you can compare yourself to these guys? No offense, but you wouldn't last a week. Just be happy, and save your country from the same fate, OK?
Junis, is that you? Shades of 2001.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
All humans don't have the exact same genes. Caucasians generally have a lesser bone mass to Africans. Facial features are radically different between different races, as do skin pigmentation. How can the mind be isolated from all of this?
Well, it's just that "Caucasians" cannot accept that they not only have weaker bones and a weaker sun protection in their skin, but also a weaker mind. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well played, Sir. Let me just add as a biochemist that the genetic differences are too marginal to even justify the concept of "race" in humans. Local varieties that differ on a ultimately meaningless level.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Wiki with the tech details here
The story was a little sparse on information, but one of the links goes to their page here: http://fabfi.fablab.af/. I didn't go through their docs, but I see that they do exist.
You should be able to figure most of it out just by looking at the pictures, if you have a bit of knowledge in the area.
The dishes appear to be offset parabolic dishes or troughs. Full wave for 2.4Ghz is about 4.9". So if you want to reflect that, you'd want to go smaller than 1/4 wave, or use a mesh with holes no wider or taller than 1.2". In the pictures, they appear to be using metallic window screen. You could probably get away with "chicken wire" (small mesh wire for chicken coops, so chicks can't escape). I haven't measured the spacing on those in years, but I do remember that it's small.
For your transceiver, stick your wireless USB device at the focal point, and back it with something to reflect the signal going the wrong way back into the dish, so your power won't be wasted. A curved piece of foil or some other metal will do the trick.
I'm suggesting putting the device on the focal point, rather than running an antenna from the device to the focal point, to eliminate loss from the length of the antenna wire.
"Borrowing" a satellite TV antenna (such as DishNetwork, DirectTV, or Sky), and replacing the LNB with your transmitter would serve the same purpose, but it will be more obvious. At a distance, window screen is effectively invisible.
If I remember the DefCon contest winners for long range wifi correctly, they used old C/KU residential dishes, with their transceiver at the original focal point. From what I understand, there is an effective size limitation, so going from 3 feet to 15 feet wide won't necessarily help your situation. A 100 foot wide antenna won't have an advantage over a 5 foot wide one, and you may degrade your signal due to receiving extraneous noise.
If you're crafting it yourself, you have to calculate your focal point. If you're using a previously used parabolic dish, the focal point has already been found for you.
You may have to mess around with polarity a bit. I believe most wifi operates with a vertical alignment, but does seem to survive ok with horizontal alignment. If you're going for long range service, getting the correct alignment is key.
When you're working with a target antenna miles in the distance, it's helpful to have a good telescope to find the correct direction. Fine tuning is easy enough by hand with a decent signal strength app (assuming your transceiver supports it). I've done it with good tools, and even just with Netstumbler. Move it around slowly until you reach maximum signal strength.
I've used professionally made antennas before. The longest term one was a 24dB parabolic at my house, and a 14dB panel at my office. The range was only 1/2 mile, but both sides reported 100% signal strength. That was very impressive, since they couldn't even get over 80% when they were within close proximity to each other with standard antennas. I ran with that for over a year, until our office moved. I was very happy having my own person T1 at the house, after office hours.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
They're not doing any crappy little cantennas, they're building fair-sized (2 to 16 ft^2) dishes with chicken-wire or window screen stretched over a wood or plastic frame.
Good post. But, to play devil's advocate, the first homo sapiens 200,000 years ago had practically the same genes as anybody today. What they lacked was a culture that understood today's technology and could pass it on to offspring. 200,000 years of biological evolution produces little change. 200,000 years of cultural evolution produces revolutionary advancement. People from different countries differ little biologically but can differ greatly culturally. It seems to me that a culture that emphasizes education will grow fastest.
Is there even one Muslim country where porn is not outlawed?
Is there even one Muslim country where porn is not found?
No. 1 Nation in Sexy Web Searches? Call it Pornistan
Random connection: Exclusive: Pornography found in bin Laden hideout: officials
Far more troubling than the porn:
"I hope that Kuwait will enact the law for...sex slaves"
"When I want a sex slave, I just go to the market and choose the woman I like and purchase her"
Pakistan: In the Land of Conspiracy Theories
What explains those crazed conspiracy theories running wild in Pakistan?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I think you completely missed his point, which was that those of us with brains and know-how are helping make people's lives better no matter how rich or poor they are, or where they live..
Free Martian Whores!
Yeah, I'm sure most afghans have access to US education... I mean, the plane ticket is probably more than what they make in a year, but sure...
I think you underestimate biological evolutions some. 200,000 years ago dogs didn't exists, now they range from chihuahuas to great danes. 6,000 years ago when agriculture started we started bonding to cats. Why dos a cat's purr evoke positive emotions in humans? Both species must have evolved in the last 6,000 years.
As to "having practically the same genes", chimpanzees share 95% of our genes.
Free Martian Whores!
This kind of "good enough" tech, also seen in the Arab Spring internet cafes, depends on access to used, refurbished, and re-marketed electronics cast offs. A new bill just submitted to Congress (Green-Thompson) will ban trade with these "geeks of color". Do-gooders say that American jobs will result (Americans will begin using "trash" to make our own internet), and the geeks in the emerging markets, freed from the "ewaste" exploitation, will then leapfrog into 4G.
As a former Peace Corps volunteer, nothing makes me happier than to see kids who studied technology textbooks use the schematics to increase internet. Geeks of Color Entrepreneurs need SBA more than they need AID.
Gently reply
We get them at our recycling plant on a regular basis. Sometimes working, sometimes they need a tweak. Often the best fix is to put the circuit board in an oven, or in the sun, and a tiny hairline crack in solder somewhere gets fixed. Currently, we export 22% of the used electronics we receive (78% are not worth exporting even if they worked). That export to geeks of color is being made illegal, since people assume that anyone exporting 22% must really be dumping 100%.
Gently reply
The Rob Flickenger "cantenna" design doesn't work. A Pringles tube is too small to be resonant anywhere near 2.4GHz, and the threaded rod with the stack of washers just blocks the signal from coming out of the end. It actually works better sideways, since the cardboard doesn't block any of the signal (and the silvery plastic doesn't act as a reflector).
Stopped waveguide antennas *do* work, but for a "cantenna" like that to work it would need to be about 80mm diameter and much shorter. I've built a couple like this, and they give about 6-8dB gain over a dipole. The really neat thing is that you can use them as a dish feed, although on all but the largest satellite dishes you find lying around it will be grossly over-illuminated. If you really want to feed a dish, put a USB wifi (or bluetooth) dongle in a corner reflector at the focus of an old satellite dish - make a wooden block that holds the USB dongle just about 5mm back from the front of where the LNB would go.
Incidentally, "Cantenna" is the name of an old Heathkit dummy load, so be careful asking radio amateurs about them - depending on the context you could be talking about a stopped waveguide or an old paint tin full of resistors, sand and engine oil...
It's worth pointing out that it's probably illegal to do this in most countries, without an appropriate licence. In Afghanistan, I suspect it's not a big deal.
I thought god just made us that way 8000 years ago.