German Hackers Propose Uncensorable Global Grid — With Satellites

braindrainbahrain writes "The members of the Stuttgart Hackerspace have taken it upon themselves to launch their own space program. The immediate goal of the Hacker Space Program is to create an uncensorable internet in space beyond the control of terrestrial entities using a network of ground stations and communications satellites. In the longer term (think the year 2035), they'd like to put a hacker astronaut on the moon!"

Comments

Only...

[Anonymous Coward]

To have it shot down by lobbyists

Re:Only...

[Gideon Wells]

Oh no, no lobbyists here. Just paid company advisers/historians who may make occasional mentioning of their day job while entertaining friends after hours off the clock.

Re:Only...

[Hatta]

I don't think lobbyists would be the ones shooting down these satellites.

Re:Only...

[interkin3tic]

Coming to a congress near you by 2020 if this happens: SPACE JOB act

(Solving Pirating American Copyright Enforcement Junk Orbiting Ban)

A bill sold as protecting American satellites from this terrible problem of space junk in orbit, American jobs from overseas satellite hackers bent on stealing movies, and national security.

It stipulates that the military will, at the RIAA/MPAA's command, blow up any satellite that the RIAA/MPAA lawyers say probably has pirated material on it. Additionally, large amounts of metal objects will be placed in orbit make it difficult for pirates to launch any more satellites. Sponsors of the bill say they don't really understand physics, but they doubt that could damage innocent satellites. They also point out that the constitution doesn't apply in space.

Re:Only...

[xmorg]

Yea, its pretty much sopa(2020)
Since there is a "possibility" that a "unauthorized internet" could be used by terrorists and other illegal activities, it would be imperative to shoot it down.

Re:Only...

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, the Chinese shot down the sat, the US didn't. It is not clear that the US could do it.

Re:Only...

[mark_elf]

The US shot one down immediately afterward, with an anti-ballistic missile fired from a warship. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-193 They also have the X-37B with shark-mounted laser beams. If they wanted it gone it would probably take a day or two at the most.

Re:Only...

[Phoghat]

Excuse me, I feel a song coming on...

Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Über alles in der Welt, Wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze Brüderlich zusammenhält. Von der Maas bis an die Memel, Von der Etsch bis an den Belt, |: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Über alles in der Welt! :|

I Wonder...

[mrozone]

Can a Hot Pocket be cooked in space?

Re:I Wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't answer that, but I do know a hot pocket for 20 cents is a steal any day of the week.

Re:I Wonder...

[rwise2112]

Yes, but you can't hear it scream!

Re:I Wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

:D love ya h4cker$!

Re:I Wonder...

[Muros]

Can a Hot Pocket be cooked in space?

I had to look up "Hot Pocket". Now I'm hungry. I hope you're happy with yourself.

Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Tekfactory]

Someone will shut it down, that's why we can't have nice things.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[elucido]

Someone will shut it down, that's why we can't have nice things.

Good people can use it to catch the bad people. Don't shut it down.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

What "bad people?" I posit that there is nothing inherently bad with any speech (aside from forcing others to listen to you).

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad people use phone and cars, and we still use these.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

A lawless internet; I wonder if it will last any longer than when lawless hacktivism boke the scene just a short time ago with Assange-gate.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

> I posit that there is nothing inherently bad with any speech

Excellent. Let me know your credit card numbers. I'm sure you won't mind if broadcast them to the entire internet - it's just speech. Also, there's no such thing as "imaginary property". You suffer no loss from my telling them to everyone - you are still in possession of the numbers after I do, so this is not theft.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[trifish]

Bad people use mobile phones, computers, cars, and streets too. Why not ban all of those too then?

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[MightyYar]

Let me know your credit card numbers.

I'm fairly confident that if it was impossible to keep credit card numbers a secret, people would come up with a new system. Perhaps we would all be better off and more secure if people could freely list credit card numbers.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Electricity Likes Me]

Ideally a credit card number would be a public key, and part 1 of a two-factor authentication scheme, where all it did was allow someone to request a payment from a nominated account. Trading entities would publish their keys so requests could be filtered and verified, but required manual confirmation.

No "silent" charges.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[hawguy]

> I posit that there is nothing inherently bad with any speech

Excellent. Let me know your credit card numbers. I'm sure you won't mind if broadcast them to the entire internet - it's just speech. Also, there's no such thing as "imaginary property". You suffer no loss from my telling them to everyone - you are still in possession of the numbers after I do, so this is not theft.

If a hacker has my credit card number, he doesn't need a privately run satellite network to share it.

And once he has that number, it doesn't really matter how many people he gives it to - once my credit card company discovers the suspicious activity and shuts down the card, it doesn't matter to me if one person or a million people have my card number.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[sexconker]

> I posit that there is nothing inherently bad with any speech

Excellent. Let me know your credit card numbers. I'm sure you won't mind if broadcast them to the entire internet - it's just speech. Also, there's no such thing as "imaginary property". You suffer no loss from my telling them to everyone - you are still in possession of the numbers after I do, so this is not theft.

The trick is that free speech means you can say whatever you want and never be punished for it, and you can never have your right to say shit removed, but you can be held responsible and punished for the effects of your speech.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Synerg1y]

Nice troll, you certainly got fed :)

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[bhagwad]

So if a looney reads what I write and goes on a rampage, I should be held responsible since that was the effect of my writing?

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[whargoul]

He never said to ban it. He simply said someone will shut it down after someone else uses it for nefarious purposes.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

no, that's not what he said at all. stop purposefully trying to muddy the discussion with idiotic rhetoric.

now, if you purposefully wrote something knowing that it would incite people to act violently, then you should be help responsible.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[jdavidb]

The reason we can't have nice things is not because bad people use them, but because bad people shut them down, using the other bad people as a pretense.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually most laws about cause and effect require the accusation to pass the "reasonable man" test.

Would a reasonable man dial 911 if you yell fire in a theatre? Yes. Therefore, you as the person yelling fire get the bill for the false alarm.

Would a reasonable man try to kill a senator because you posted a hardcore libertarian rant on a weblog? No. Therefore, if it happens, it's not your fault.

Yes, the reasonable man test has a lot of grey area (often related to silly stuff like religion), but that's for the courts to figure out. Sucks if your court is full of crazies. That's why "free speech" is always going to be limited as long as there's a government and people controlling it, even if you have the "right" spelled out on a piece of paper. He who has the money and the guns makes and/or breaks the rules and all that.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, people (as a mass) kind of suck that way. Having said that, I'd totally support this if I had reason to believe it would go anywhere.

They might be better off doing something Earth based though. Sure, they can arrest people in connection with stuff that they don't like, but unless they intend to spam our orbit with an unending supply of satellites... Well... There are fewer moral strings for using a missile on a machine than thorough crack-downs on people supporting a massive network.

The internet has shown that governments cannot be trusted not to screw up stuff for everyone. They shouldn't get to control stuff like this. It actually is best to keep it in a "Wild West" style.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[elgeeko.com]

All are good arguments, but none of them are constitutionally correct. Go read the first amendment. There's nothing in it that guarantees free speech. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" Far as I can tell this only contains provisions involving what laws CONGRESS shall NOT make.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[cheekyjohnson]

Let me know your credit card numbers.

Why would he do that? It's not the speech that I think is bad, it's how people react to it.

For what it's worth, if your credit card numbers got out there, I would say "tough luck." I'd prefer that they didn't get out because of how some people act, and it's not the speech that I think is bad, but people doing things that I think are bad.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[haruchai]

Well said.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[cheekyjohnson]

How is that free speech? You're still being punished for the content of your speech. If you said "hello" and that made a group of people panic and stampede all over everyone else (for some unknown reason), injuring them, would you be held responsible? Probably not. But it was still your speech that supposedly 'made' those other people do what they did (even though it's, in my opinion, entirely their fault and speech can't make anyone do anything), even if no one ever figures out that that was the case. But what if they did figure out that that was the case? Would you be punished for the "effects" of your speech? Again, probably not.

So aren't they taking the content of your speech into account, then? Or does "intent" suddenly become a factor?

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Sentrion]

Yes, but try operating a phone or a car that is not in compliance with state and federal regulations. In most countries you can't drive any car without a driver's license, and in most cases a car cannot be legally operated unless it is registered and/or passes an inspection. These "hacker satellites" would not be subject to any government regulation, which is the intent, and also why the satellites will be shot down. This job will probably be outsourced to China since they excel at censorship and have already demonstrated their ability to destroy satellites.

The only chance for these satellites to succeed is if hackers actually man the satellites so that destroying them might be a politically unacceptable solution due to human rights concerns. Even then, the earth bound powers may launch a fatal attack as soon as the orbiting hacker is deemed a "terrorist", "spy", "criminal" or "infidel", depending on which nation decides to take action against the satellites. BTW - manning the satellites, and even launching the satellites, is a serious endeavor that could most likely be thwarted by governments disrupting activity on the planet's surface. The FAA could literally come out and impound your launch vehicle for violating one of dozens of aeronautical regulations. And don't expect "freedom of the seas" to be of any help here either. There have been attempts in the past to set up libertarian societies in international waters, and most have been thwarted by other nation states (Principality of Sealand being a rare exception). You can't just go out into international waters, raise your hacker flag, and expect the world's navies to just ignore you - they will board your vessel, and most likely seize your ship and cargo. If lucky, those on board will be returned to their country of citizenship.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[EdIII]

Not someone. A government.

Take a guess if all the participating members of the UN Security Council could agree to use their missiles to shoot down those hacker satellites?

Hmmmm...... It's as if they think space somehow makes their communication equipment untouchable by governments.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

They dont need to shut it down because it is a pipe dream that will never happen.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

You live around violent psychopaths. Provoke them if you want.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[cayenne8]

There's nothing in it that guarantees free speech.

Well, I think there are the parts that pretty much say that ALL rights are inherently mans by birthright...and only laws passed (by the local and state govts) can limit them. Therefore free speech is mans to begin with.

While I paraphrase considerablly...remember that the Constitutions does NOT grant rights to the citizens...it spells out the limited enumerated rights/responsibilities of the Federal Govt.

The Bill of rights is basically only restating for emphasis...rights people already have. Those rights are NOT granted by the document.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[elgeeko.com]

Very true, the Constitution does not give rights to citizens, but instead limits the powers of the government. The point I wanted to make was that the First Amendment specifically states that it deals with laws Congress shall not establish. The "reasonable man" argument does not apply.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[pixelpusher220]

Mine effectively is...sorta anyway. Big bad Bank of America has a 'ShopSafe' program where I can get a randomly generated card/ccv/exp set with a fixed limit that I choose. Even has a $x/month recurring charge option for say, Netflix or other subscription services.

I give that random number out to merchants so if things are hacked, they only have on average a $50 limit to work with. Not $50 limit to my liability, but a fixed limit on that card number's chargeable amount.

And my cc number never leaves my pocket. If some vendor gets hacked, the exposed number is simply shut down and I don't have to then go change numbers at 14 other merchants.

My 2 factor is something I 'know', my password, and something I 'have' the generated number. It's not exact as the 'have' can be determined if they get the 'know', but it is two separate pieces of data. Though if followed through to the extreme (which I don't) and if this card was never used at retail places then the 'have' would be the ccv number which I need to enter to generate the random cc num.

I really don't like BofA, but I haven't found anyone else with this type of online payment random card number ability.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[mSparks43]

> I posit that there is nothing inherently bad with any speech

Excellent. Let me know your credit card numbers. I'm sure you won't mind if broadcast them to the entire internet - it's just speech. Also, there's no such thing as "imaginary property". You suffer no loss from my telling them to everyone - you are still in possession of the numbers after I do, so this is not theft.

What a wonderful strawman you built there.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[kiwimate]

Case in point: Anonymous.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes, yes. For instance, if you yell that the theater is on fire, and crowd panics and stampedes, you can be held liable.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Thing 1]

For what it's worth, if your credit card numbers got out there, I would say "tough luck." I'd prefer that they didn't get out because of how some people act, and it's not the speech that I think is bad, but people doing things that I think are bad.

I agree; furthermore, the thing that I think is bad is the system that was created with a single-factor method of emptying one's bank account.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[tehcyder]

*sigh* OK then, how about if I publish your private key/incredibly clever and long password as that is also just a string of digits?

You are mising the point that some things are not free speech and should not be freely available.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[tehcyder]

speech can't make anyone do anything

Obviously this is entirely correct, as no one ever gave someone else an order or instruction. In fact, the whole idea of "speech" containing any meaning is simply a fallacy, as evidenced by the total lack of corollation between your post and reality.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Alex Belits]

lol wut

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[cheekyjohnson]

Obviously this is entirely correct, as no one ever gave someone else an order or instruction.

Speech itself can't make anyone do anything. It's possible to give orders, but speech doesn't have some magical ability to control people.

For instance, if I told you to commit suicide right now, would you do it? That's what I mean. You would have to be willing to do it (for one reason or another). The speech can't 'make' you do anything. It's just a sound.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[__aaacif3008]

shouldn't it be up to the "owner" of the information to ensure that others do not obtain that information? as soon as some sort of censorship is placed upon what information people can and cannot share an authority must be appointed to regulate that, an authority that could potentially go on to "regulate" other things at its own discretion. if people want to keep information from being spread, and that information belongs to them, they shouldn't hand it out, and that should be that.

Re:Prediction: Bad people will use it

[Anguirel]

There's actually an additional security factor associated with that feature -- once a card has been used by a given merchant ID, it cannot be used by any other, so even if someone got your card from a given vendor, all they could do is buy additional products from that specific vendor. Note that with some large vendors, this can block uses on the same site with the same card (e.g. Amazon Marketplace is not the same as Amazon is not the same as Amazon Kindle Store is not the same as Amazon Kickstarter).

Free speech!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool. Now they can finally draw a swastika without the government freaking out and going apeshit on them. Because we all know, drawing a symbol on a piece of paper is what caused the Third Reich.

Nevermind the swastika was actually a holy symbol... apparently they want the Nazi's tarnishing of it to stand unchallenged.

Re:Free speech!

[SuricouRaven]

*Almost* a holy symbol. For some strange reason, the Nazi version was drawn back-to-front. Pre-nazi, the other way around dominated, though the flipped form was not unknown.

Re:Free speech!

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you mind buggering off to fetch it?
Take your time.

Oh, and feeb.

Re:Free speech!

[Hognoxious]

And aren't Nazi ones usually aligned diagonally, whereas Hindus' are horizontal & vertical?

Re:Free speech!

[steelfood]

No. They're found in all orientations in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Indian religions and philosophies, as well as their offshoots and derivatives (though they mean slightly different things). Flipped, diagonal, straight, etc. They also sometimes come with dots in the squares, but that's not a necessity either.

Re:Free speech!

[Anonymous Coward]

Shadow? Don't make me laugh!
I've seen bigger shadows from a grain of sand...
...at mid-day...
...on the equator.
I doubt you could even manage the boiled egg.

I hope you'll forgive my smugness, but I'm struck with the absurdity of being called pathetic by someone whose "contributions" to our mostly civilised discourses are prejudged to be even worse than those from cowardly cowards such as myself.

Ta-ta for now.

P.S. Is there any particular reason you bother with multiple accounts these days? They all seem to be equally shameful.

Re:Free speech!

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time don't bother. There's a reason why they/he are all at -1.

Re:Free speech!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yet another account, I see.

Your copy-pasta is showing, and, thanks to your bringing mums into it, the extent of your wit.
One would think having all those retorts saved somewhere would mean you'd have put more effort into them...

Re:Free speech!

[narkosys]

The swastika symbol pre-dates all known religion. There have been rock/cave carvings found of it. it is found in Hinduism and Bhudism as well as all across Asia and Western Europe and the Scandinavian countries (not sure about Eastern Europe).

Re:Free speech!

[Dr Herbert West]

I suspect we are witnessing a MichaelKristopeit bot-chat.... is it still trolling if one bot is trolling another?

Re:Free speech!

[Anonymous Coward]

Me? I was just killing time until Steam finishes downloading.
To be honest I'm not even getting the satisfaction of drawing new insults out of him...

He reminds me of the kind of kid every school has: the one that starts out saying things like his brother works for MS and has an XBox 1080 to test (but of course you can't come see it).

First you're drawn in.

Then you see them for what they are.

Then you start feeling pity for what is clearly a very disturbed individual.

Then you run out of pity and go back to hating the attention-seeking little brat.

Oh, by the way, well done on your work Doctor. I think perhaps you should have stuck with the second formula, though. I hear there's some tall guy running a funeral parlour that could give you a pointer or two if you're interested.

Annnd... done. There.
Now to enjoy something I haven't seen before.

Re:Free speech!

[newcastlejon]

I'm usually dead set against feeding trolls, but I did like seeing Guest House Paradiso again after what seems like so many years.

Why does he need so many accounts, anyway?

Re:Free speech!

[Anonymous Coward]

Symmetry seems like an inherently natural trait in human consciousness, perhaps due to the duality of intelligence. I'm noticing in my very younger relatives a keen sense of "balance" in things which they recognize can be balanced, an concept which is seemingly pursued less as people acquire more intellectual independence. An "L" is a pretty easy extension of a line, and the twice-symmetric display to the swastika is an easy extension of the concept. The base makes it much more difficult to continue the binary-limited theme, from there, though.

Re:Free speech!

[torsmo]

Uhm, the longest shadows are cast when the sun is either rising or westering. At mid-day, at the equator you'd, really, hardly cast a shadow.

Re:Free speech!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say that they _normally_ come with "dots in the squares" or other ornamentation. As you imply thought, the average Indian, on seeing a plain swastika, will think "religion" before "nazi".

Re:Free speech!

[Anonymous Coward]

At mid-day, at the equator you'd, really, hardly cast a shadow.

Exactly. Well done for getting that.
*slowclap*

Re:Free speech!

[toxonix]

I don't understand how the toothbrush mustache was ever a popular look. Maybe it's just my post-Reich bias.

Re:Free speech!

[LunaticTippy]

My understanding is that bad karma accounts have their posts throttled to one per day or hour or something. Hundreds of accounts give even the worst karma enough posts to be annoying.

EMP will take care of that

[jollyreaper]

If the big governments want rid of it, they will find a way.

Re:EMP will take care of that

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't need an EMP to do that, and wouldn't want to. Just wait until it is in space and then a mysterious failure occurs on each satellite, which would be believable, because s**t happens. Now how those mysterious failures occur, well, that's another story, but it isn't an EMP.

Re:EMP will take care of that

[theshowmecanuck]

Yep, the new National Defence Authorization Act should be good for this (in a manner of speaking).

Re:EMP will take care of that

[wiedzmin]

They'll just wait until one of these things accidentally collides with a GPS or Glonass satellite and gets nuked off the orbit in retaliation for this obviously extrimist act of aggression...

Re:EMP will take care of that

[forkfail]

When the telecoms and copyright house corporations decide they want to get rid of it, they'll be gone with a quickness.

There, fixed that for ya.

link to their talk at 28c3

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuwkzNjaPwc

Uncensorable?

[Wowsers]

And what is there to prevent a government transmitting from the ground to disrupt the satellite transmission?

Re:Uncensorable?

[Tekfactory]

If you are worried about governments, the problem is not disrupting the satellites at all, the weak link is the ground station which by definition resides in somebody's territory.

I don't think there are enough friendly countries of convenience to give you line of sight and global access to the satellites 24/7. Symantec published a book on the different IT Security laws all over the globe, its dated now, but a map of something like that would be interesting for this discussion.

So then you end up only running ground stations out of frendly countires somewhere in the netherlands perhaps, maybe to command and control satellites that route CnC information and traffic to the other satellites in the constellation which may be over an unfriendly country at the time.

I can't really see it working unless every user is a ground station/autonomous node.

There are some neat things you can do once you have this up, even for broadcast. Say you used it to broadcast grain or soybean prices to farmers in rural farming villages. Reformat traffic information from publicly funded sources (traffic cameras) and send them to a generic GPS or smartphone app so I don't need to pay TomTom or Garmin for the privilege of knowing if I will be sitting in traffic or not.

Re:Uncensorable?

[khallow]

If you are worried about governments, the problem is not disrupting the satellites at all, the weak link is the ground station which by definition resides in somebody's territory.

The weak part is the satellites. You have to launch them or their replacements from somebody's territory which is going to a whole lot less countries than what you can stick ground stations in. I imagine in addition, the ground station will be cheap and fairly easy to hide, assuming anyone needs to do that.

Re:Uncensorable?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking that this would provide excellent live target practice for the next round of US-based "Star Wars" anti-sat laser technology. I mean, the satellites are clearly owned by terrorists and child pornographers, so it's not like anyone's going to mind them disappearing. The Chinese by that point may be as strongly opposed to terrorism and child pornography as the United States, so they would likely cooperate happily in this fish-barrel shoot.

Re:Uncensorable?

[forkfail]

Perhaps more to the point, what's to prevent the RIAA participants and telecoms from shutting them down?

Re:Uncensorable?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese are already opposed to "terrorism" (for which read "the existence of the Uighurs")

Re:Uncensorable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why they should use asteroids as satellites. Try shooting down one of those puppies.

Re:Uncensorable?

[Andy Dodd]

Let's not forget that most if not all major governments have demonstrated fairly inexpensive (for a government) ASAT capability, such as the F-15 air-launched ASAT missiles.

Obviously these can only get to LEO, but it's going to take this group a LONG time to be able to even get to LEO - no amateur effort has ever gotten an object into orbit before. Amateur satellites have always piggybacked on commercial launches (early AMSAT sats), had MAJOR fundraising behind them (tens of thousands of dollars for launch costs alone for newer AMSAT launches), or used a "pooled launch" of research microsats with a lifetime before orbital decay of only 1-2 years (such as the CUBESAT project).

Re:Uncensorable?

[X0563511]

If you are worried about governments, the problem is not disrupting the satellites at all, the weak link is the ground station which by definition resides in somebody's territory.

The weak part is the satellites. You have to launch them or their replacements from somebody's territory which is going to a whole lot less countries than what you can stick ground stations in. I imagine in addition, the ground station will be cheap and fairly easy to hide, assuming anyone needs to do that.

There's a technical solution to this political problem: figure out how to launch such payloads from water, and do so outside the bounds of any national power.

Re:Uncensorable?

[Idbar]

Well, countries have also sovereignty over geostationary satellites. It's not like they don't have to ask permission to put them up there.

Unless, they would float on top of the oceans perhaps, but if countries managed to claim pieces of the south pole (Antarctica) by "projecting" their area, what stops them to do this 40km above the sea level?

Re:Uncensorable?

[khallow]

There's a technical solution to this political problem: figure out how to launch such payloads from water, and do so outside the bounds of any national power.

If you're launching from international waters on Earth, then you're not outside the bounds of a number of national powers.

Re:Uncensorable?

[wagnerrp]

If you fly any particular nation's flag, then you are bounded by their rules while in international water. If you do not fly any particular nation's flag, then you are not a protected entity, and fair game for anyone who wants to acquire you. If you have a bunch of flags to raise up whenever anyone comes by, then you are likely to be identified as a smuggler, intercepted, and boarded.

Re:Uncensorable?

[tmosley]

Gravity?

Unless they have access to anti-satellite weapons, and the permission to use them. Be careful you don't hit someone else's sat.

Re:Uncensorable?

[tmosley]

I don't understand why people think they won't launch these with commercial launch service.

Re:Uncensorable?

[DarthBart]

Wanna shut down a satellite? Just need a bigger antenna/more power. Witness Captain Midnight and HBO. And he was just a bored operator at a teleport.

Re:Uncensorable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some governments apparently are also able to use lasers to kill satellites.

I wonder how hard it would be to get reflections from the metal of space junk or the ISS? I expect there would be less multipath distortion compared to signals bounced off of the moon A laser reflection off of the moon would have far more usable bandwidth. I suppose atmospheric distortions and scattering would be the biggest problem in trying to work with light from only a tiny area.

Re:Uncensorable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, more drastically, have another, better-funded group with their own satellites up in space have a few "accidents" that just happen to fall in these satellites' orbits.

Whoopsie! Looks like one of our satellites just hit one of yours! How unfortunate! Well, accidents DO happen, you know. Don't worry, our redundant satellites can pick up the slack that yours are missing, as a sign of goodwill! Anyway, guess we'll both need to launch new ones into orbit, right? What's that? You can't afford one right away? What a shame! Oh, dear! We just lost control of ANOTHER of our satellites! And it's heading right towards one of your few remaining ones! Dearie me! What a terrible coincidence and spot of misfortune for you and your rogue grid that your government isn't going to support!

NOTE: If you're THAT paranoid of governments brazenly spying on you and having their respective judicial systems in their pockets to get away with it, not to mention terrifying collaborations of government and corporate interests, I fail to see how you DON'T think the scenario I just described would happen.

Re:Uncensorable?

[ColdWetDog]

Even if you do piggyback them, getting a half reasonable fleet of LEO satellites is big money. More money than typically a group of generally disorganized private parties can pull off. Hell, Globalstar, a 'real' company with a business plan is in deep financial trouble and Iridium had to be rescued by the US military.

If you go for 'white knights' then you run the serious risk of having them be the front for some serious bad boy operation like an international drug smuggling cartel who would just love to have their own satellite system.

Re:Uncensorable?

[Sentrion]

Because unlike government licensed and regulated AMSATs, launching anything branded with the word "hacker" or "pirate" carries with it a tinge of liability.

Re:Uncensorable?

[Andy Dodd]

Because they don't even have close to a fraction of a percentage of the budget required to do this.

You are talking millions for just launch costs here.

Look at Iridium - very similar in technical concept to this effort, it is unable to continue operation without MAJOR support from the United States government. (The US military is one of Iridium's largest users now. No one else could afford it.)

Radio is inherently jammable

[phayes]

to any government that cares to do so...

Re:Radio is inherently jammable

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still easier: they'll shut down the ground stations.
They should try mesh network but getting from the Americas to anywhere else looks challenging. Even in the same country lag can be terrible as packets get routed from home router to home router but a round trip from a bunch of satellites to get on the other site of the world is not quick.

Re:Radio is inherently jammable

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that but Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcast shortwave through Russian jamming for years during the cold war.

Re:Radio is inherently jammable

[Sentrion]

Both broadcasts you mention were supported by hundreds of full time engineers and technicians with the backing of American technology and tax dollars. A group of hackers, at best, might match the technological capability of cold war USSR. But even then I don't remember anyone ever being able to tune in to Soviet propaganda, except for PBS.

Guns

[Anonymous Coward]

I tend to agree, even as I applaud them for trying. The fact is that government = guns, and the man with the gun always wins.

To clarify, government is defined as the organization holding the unique "right" to employ deadly force (or threat thereof) as a business model. You simply cannot compete with that unless you have similar firepower (which government makes damn sure won't ever happen).

Re:Guns

[Anonymous Coward]

Your broken record was wrong even before the Arab spring revolutions took place. Governments can lose power by simply losing support of the people. Don't forget that "the people with guns" also have family and friends within the population. You can of course try to "solve" that problem by bringing in foreign mercenaries like Gaddafi did, but at that point you're probably already going down the drain and it's doubtful that any current European government would go that far.

Note: I'm not saying it's easy ("easy solutions" simply don't exist in such situations, at least not long term ones; real life in a democracy is not a shoot-em-up where you solve anything by just blowing up the other guys). I'm just saying that "having the guns" is by no means required to get the upper hand in case of a larger population vs government struggle. In fact, I'd argue that in most cases in contemporary Europe the population not having the guns would probably be an advantage. Add to that Germany's post-WWII tradition of having a very good constitution and a very strict Constitutional Court (strict versus the government, that is), and your gun obsession becomes even less relevant.

Re:Guns

[forkfail]

I always am amazed at you "government is the root of all evil" folks.

Let's say you do away with governments. Do you think that power will disappear? That government is power?

How is it that you can see the evil of governments (and yes, they do exist), but not see the fact that there has to be some entity of the people to counterbalance private power? That at least with public power, there is some sort of ability to limit private power.

Power abhors a vacuum. What you take away from governments, you hand to private entities - corporations, religious entities, whatever - something will fill the void. If you want any sort of control over what happens, you have to make the instrument of public power the tool of the public, and not the tool of the private entities. Therein lies the trick. Simply doing away with government is absolutely handing the deed to the hen house over to those that government is supposed to protect the rest of us from.

Re:Guns

[thomasw_lrd]

Maybe in your country. In the US. according to 2005 figures, there were approximately 100,000,000 gun owners. While the current number of US. troop is 1. 5 million. So in essence, a revolt in America by gun owners is almost an assured win, if you can get them all on the same page.

Re:Guns

[Anonymous Coward]

And on top of that, about 45 million of them are currently hunters or have hunted game before.

45 million potential snipers.

Let's go.

Re:Guns

[tmosley]

Power to the people. People can have a militia to defend themselves from outside invaders. There is little a modern military can do that a militia can't, and a militia is much much MUCH better at defending home territory than a standing army is. Armed societies with sovereign citizens simply can't be conquered, and attempts to do so lead to nothing but a bloodbath for both sides (witness Somalia). The only problem with Somalia (aside from continuous attempts at imposition of a central government upon the people from outside) is that they have clan councils which take most of the roles of government. Although one can move clans, that is obviously more difficult than switching insurance companies.

Of course, in the West, we would have companies fill in for most of the non-military roles of government. Don't like your police because they are abusive or corrupt? Then you just switch police companies. The corrupt guys don't last very long. They don't forget who they are working for, either.

Re:Guns

[cheekyjohnson]

I always am amazed at you "government is the root of all evil" folks.

Where did he even say that?

Re:Guns

[harryjohnston]

There is little a modern military can do that a militia can't,

I'm doubtful: militias tend to have poor firepower; few or no tanks, airplanes, things like that. Note, for example, that the Libyan militia was proving relatively ineffective against the Libyan military, until the west intervened.

Armed societies with sovereign citizens simply can't be conquered,

But can be exterminated, or forced off the land the invaders want.

Re:Guns

[forkfail]

I'm all for second amendment rights (to the chagrin of my rather liberal friends, often) - but nevertheless, a well trained, disciplined military force will rip through a disorganized militia.

Absolutely an armed citizenship can be subdued and conquered. Especially when you throw in the propaganda/advertising techniques that we've got these days to turn folks against themselves.

And regardless of this, you can't always be tearing down all organization - that is anarchy, and that road leads to extinction. No, there has to exist some entity that maintains justice and balance. And that entity is government. The people have been persuaded (again) that government is evil by the very folks that would see their own private power increased - that is, by the uber rich and the corporations.

If the tool of the people is broken and corrupt, then it needs to be fixed. But you can't do away with it completely. To quote Jefferson:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Re:Guns

[dpilot]

And we know all guns are equal. Your hunting rifle against a railgun, or old technology like a phalanx, or even ancient technology like tanks.

Any sort of revolution in the US has 3 possible outcomes - probably more, but these are the 3 I can see in a few seconds after reading your post.

1 - Military force puts down the revolution.
2 - The military is composed of people, and once they're ordered to fire upon US citizens they start thinking. Once the civilian deaths start, they think even harder, and revolt against the elected leadership. Think Egypt, both the initial and more recent unrest. The initial because their military did as I suggest, the more recent because of problems moving away from military rule.
3 - Gun owners are able to turn into effective guerrillas, with sabotage missions and the like. The US rapidly turns into a mix of heavily encamped/enforced/"protected" areas connected by large uncontrolled areas with lots of destroyed infrastructure. We send ourselves back into the third world.

Re:Guns

[imjustmatthew]

The difference between a military and a militia is training. Yes, tanks and big guns are extremely easy to fire, but do you know how to work together with others to use those weapons to launch a coordinated assault? Have you practiced and trained until you can work with your squad to clear a building without thinking about it?

This is what has fundamentally changed in the American military since Vietnam, we have fully changed from a loose organization of mostly short-term enlistees, draftees, and officers to a core of professional soldiers who will spend 20+ years in the service, and you know what, it works like a sonofabitch. It raises even the average private in the US army to a level 10, 100 times higher than the members of your militia because they can work together as a team. One on one your militia of hunters and private citizens might do alright, but you don't get any bonus from having them together. If I take a bunch of guys from a military unit the whole is going to be much more effective than if they fought individually.

Training is expensive and time consuming - your militia will never have the time or the money to train the way a regular army can.

Re:Guns

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL nice estimate. 45% of all persons in the U.S. own a gun. Unlikely. Goodbye credibility.

Re:Guns

[thomasw_lrd]

I believe that number 2 is the most likely, with 3 being a close second.

Most guns really arent equal. My hunting rifle has an M.O.A of at the worst 1, while most military weapons have an M.O.A of 8. So the number of shots being fired is almost a moot point.

And my hunting rounds are usually a lot larger than the standard military round.

While I agree that the average joe couldn't take out a tank, a tank is just as unlikely to take out a small squad. Tanks are most often used against armored targets. Just like planes. We have some bad ass targeting systems, but they still couldnt compete against an armed rebellion.

Re:Guns

[BluBrick]

Maybe in your country. In the US. according to 2005 figures, there were approximately 100,000,000 gun owners. While the current number of US. troop is 1. 5 million. So in essence, a revolt in America by gun owners is almost an assured win, if you can get them all on the same page.

Ya think so? Those 1.5 million have bigger budgets, superior weaponry, more basic guns, better armor and expert training. Regardless of any constitutional bleating about "a well-armed militia", the people of the US have no chance against their own military. No militia can be sufficiently well-armed to meet that force. I suspect that the primary purpose of the US flexing its military might every few years is not to convince the rest of the world that it is invincible, nor even to make profit for the Military-Industrial complex (although those are two highly favorable side-effects). No, it is to maintain the "balance" of power by dissuading its own populace from revolution. After all, the US was itself born of revolution, so any leader worth his salt knows that, all things being equal, the same is once again possible. That is why all things are very much not equal.

Re:Guns

[thomasw_lrd]

Really 1.5 well trained people can kill 100 people with gunfire? Apparently you've never played Warhammer 40k with space marines versus Tyranids. The sheer numbers allow the gun owners town. Now I realize that it wouldn't be the same, but it is similar. It's much like how the Revolutionaries were able to beat the English. Home field advantage and all that. Plus I doubt many military men are really going to fire on their own people.

Re:Guns

[JockTroll]

Have you practiced and trained until you can work with your squad to clear a building without thinking about it?

Of course. It was called "mandatory military service". Sorry you don't have it, must be frustrating to either have guns and not know how to effectively use them, or not having them and not being able to do anything at all but snivel, wring your hands and ultimately having to bow down before your lords.

Re:Guns

[forkfail]

It's inherent in his definition of government.

I'd argue that his definition is that of a broken government. The definition of a functional, western democracy is, IMO, that of the instrument of the people; the collective power of the citizenry to offset other powers, both internal and external to the nation in question.

Re:Guns

[Gonoff]

if you can get them all on the same page

There is your problem. Even in a non-fragmented society, you would have problems. These guns are spread between, right wing religious to middle of the road atheists, libertarians, tea party, weekend hunters, crazy people who hate everyone, survivalists, people who just think that carrying a gun is their "duty", people who think that owning a gun is cool, people scared of burglars and many many more. Put them all together at your own risk and stand well back (ideally behind thick steel plate).

My money is on the military. They are all singing the same song and tend to work together.

Re:Guns

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not his theory of monopoly on violence, it's Max Weber's.

Re:Guns

[cayenne8]

LOL nice estimate. 45% of all persons in the U.S. own a gun. Unlikely. Goodbye credibility.

Yeah, but those of us that DO own guns....own many more than one.

I'm sure if the time came...many could load more than a couple out to those that don't currently own them.

Re:Guns

[dpilot]

What's M.O.A?

I wasn't really suggesting tanks vs rebels, I was more suggesting that the military can bring overwhelming firepower to any battle, along with decades of experience, chain of command, intelligence gathering, and all that stuff. Obviously not all of it works perfectly, but it does work. I get the impression that there really are survivalists who feel that someday they may have to rebel against the military, training and equipping themselves "appropriately". But they're not truly battle-tested, and the government probably already knows who they are, at the outset.

I think it would be messy.

Re:Guns

[thomasw_lrd]

MOA is minute of angle, basically it's how accurate you can shoot a round Nd be in the less than a 1 inch circle.

You're absolutely right, it would be messy, but I believe sheer numbers win in the end. Maybe I've played too much Warhammer 40k.

Re:Guns

[imjustmatthew]

I'll give it to you, that made me laugh. You're right though, my assumptions would be less valid in a country with mandatory service.

Re:Guns

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you sound like the Captain. (Someone will get it!)

Re:Guns

[dpilot]

Perhaps, but I'm reminded of a line, albeit in a work of fiction, "Any decent Rebel can whup ten times his number in Yankees."

I think both sides would be in for rude surprises. Come to think of it, I strongly suspect that there are parallels to WWI here - various factions kind of wanting a war, to flex their national muscles, not realizing how bad reality would be. It would also be more like "Global Thermonuclear War," from "War Games."

Even if the masses won in the end, the victory would be Pyrrhic.

Another analog, read (not watch) David Brin's "The Postman", except keep in mind that in these other scenarios the rest of the world has been decimated as well. This might well be described as a US-only mess, bringing international possibilities. Here's one scenario...

Seeing the mess the US is turning itself into, other nations attempt to broker a peace, which of course doesn't work. So after giving us enough time to stew in our own juices and run low on ammo, "entrepreneurs" sneak in to get what they can, probably finding isolated spots happy for a bit of peace and modern convenience, in exchange for almost anything asked.

Or how about those well-financed Mexican drug lords deciding to bite off chunks of Texas and other southern states. They're at least as well armed as your rebels, well battle-hardened, and have no illusions of "humanity".

Re:Guns

[BluBrick]

Really 1.5 well trained people can kill 100 people with gunfire? Apparently you've never played Warhammer 40k with space marines versus Tyranids. The sheer numbers allow the gun owners town. Now I realize that it wouldn't be the same, but it is similar. It's much like how the Revolutionaries were able to beat the English. Home field advantage and all that. Plus I doubt many military men are really going to fire on their own people.

No, I have never played Warhammer 40k with magical dinosaurs versus spacemen - or at all. But more importantly, you're not seriously trying to compare a fantasy video game to actual warfare, are you? It's not similar at all. In real war, there are no rules that cannot be broken, people do not lose their credits, they do not take an extra 30 hit points nor do they surrender their "cloaks of becoming", their Mithril armor or their Great Swords; they are not healed by mystical potions collected on their quest, or any other sort of magical bullshit. In real war, people get horribly maimed and they fucking DIE!

But I'll grant that you are almost right about one thing. People (military or otherwise) will not fire on their own people - they will however, quite readily redefine what constitutes "their own people". Take for example:

• Romans vs Christians
• Catholics vs Protestants
• Colonists vs Monarchists
• Confederates vs Unionists
• Hatfields vs McCoys
• Bloods vs Crips
• just about any other conflict you care to name

That's why I said "almost right" just up there. Military men absolutely will fire on their own people under the right circumstances, and those really aren't too hard to come by. Simple weight of numbers would not be sufficient against the superior firepower of a professional military. It'd be like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

On the other hand, military men will target "terrorist" installations and encampments if ordered to do so, even if those terrorists are home-grown. And isn't one man's freedom fighter another man's terrorist?

Re:Guns

[Xenx]

I saw how this worked out with OCP...

Re:Guns

[Anonymous Coward]

holy shit are you ignorant.

Let's say you live in North Korea, and tell your friends, you know this government sucks. They say:

>I always am amazed at you "government is the root of all evil" folks.
>Let's say you do away with governments. Do you think that power will disappear? That government is power?

So you move to Sweden and are much happier. Your friends call you up from North Korea and say "Hey dissidant man, you think you living under no government now? You think all that power has just disappear?"

And you laugh in their face and say no it just doesn't suck as bad as your government or my parent post.

Re:Guns

[Anonymous Coward]

"No militia can be sufficiently well-armed to meet that force."

You might have been able to get people buy that a decade ago, then Iraq & Afghanistan happened. A small number of lightly armed, poorly trained & disorganized people were able to confound the entire US military, and increasingly desperate attempts to kill them ended up killing ever increasing numbers of innocent civilians, which increased resistance to the militaries operations by the general populace as well. While you are technically correct that assuming complete obedience of soldiers and unrestricted use of military tools (Nukes, chemical weapons, mass murder, etc) the civilian population could never stand up to the US military, in the real world those things don't happen. Any attempt by the government to order attacks on the citizenry would result in mass defection of soldiers, with as much of said military tools as they could get a hold of.

where do i donate $$$

[alen]

since it will cost like eleventy billion $$$ or euros where can i donate? i'll gladly donate $50,000 for this just to be able to download free movies and music

Re:where do i donate $$$

[cdibbs]

They probably only accept Bitcoins.

Re:where do i donate $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

If you pay $50,000 towards something... they are not really "free".

Re:where do i donate $$$

[hawguy]

since it will cost like eleventy billion $$$ or euros where can i donate? i'll gladly donate $50,000 for this just to be able to download free movies and music

I doubt it would have the bandwidth to handle movies and music and maybe not even pictures.

Think a 1980's era BBS and that's probably able all that an underfunded group of hackers could provide in a satellite they've built themselves (and paid launch costs for - their best bet would be to find a friendly commercial space launch company and get them to launch it on a test flight with the understanding that it may not actually make it).

But even something with such limited capabilities would actually be extremely useful and valuable with less potential for abuse than something that allows media files to be traded, which would quickly become an untraceable child-porn hub.

Re:where do i donate $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as in beer.

Re:where do i donate $$$

[kaychoro]

You already HAVE donated to it... when was the last time you checked your credit card balances?

Re:where do i donate $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be silly. It would be abused for trading media files and other copywritten content, eating up what limited bandwidth there is to use. In turn, the owners will start filtering it for more worthwhile causes. The the pirates will get all up in arms because "You're trying to filter free speech on a medium specifically built to be free!" Haven't you learned? That community does nothing but ruin things for the rest of us.

Re:where do i donate $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't underestimate the power of ascii child porn!

Pedobear wants YOU to be a distributor.

(insert ascii uncle sam styled pedobear here.)

Re:where do i donate $$$

[hawguy]

Don't be silly. It would be abused for trading media files and other copywritten content, eating up what limited bandwidth there is to use. In turn, the owners will start filtering it for more worthwhile causes. The the pirates will get all up in arms because "You're trying to filter free speech on a medium specifically built to be free!" Haven't you learned? That community does nothing but ruin things for the rest of us.

I think it would be relatively easy to block media files from being uploaded, even if it's ASCII (or unicode, or whatever) encoded.

File size limits, rate-limiting (only x posts from the same IP/user account per hour), algorithms to look for encoded binaries, etc can all combine to make it unattractive for media hosting. Bandwidth constraints alone would make it unattractive for large files. Or they could use a bit-coin type computational task required before a post is accepted can also help reduce binary traffic - you might be willing to spend a few CPU seconds to post a 1K document, but if it "costs" a million times more to post a 1GB media file, you'd likely find an alternative.

None of this helps with DoS attacks, which is the big flaw in this project, and it's how governments will shut it down. No need to send up a satellite killer, just jam its input channel(s) with a powerful transmitter.

Landside?

[smi.james.th]

I read about this on the Make Magazine blog a few days ago. (Link for anyone who's interested.)

Something that strikes me as weird though. From TFA:

In the open-source spirit of Hackerspace, Mr Bauer and some friends came up with the idea of a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals. Used together in a global network, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any given time, while also making it easier and more reliable for fast-moving satellites to send data back to earth.

So... these ground stations would I presume be connected together by, uh, the internet? I don't get it.

Not that I'm against this at all, I think it's a fabulous idea. I'd buy one. Or build one. Or whatever.

Re:Landside?

[Anonymous Coward]

The stations would not need to be connected to each other, they just communicate with the passing satellites. The clients connected to the stations could be done with wireless, maybe even make use of the upcoming white-space frequencies. Also satellites are too expensive I think a better idea is to use high altitude balloons. It is possible they could be easily taken down but they would be so cheap it wouldn't be much cost in equipment or effort to loft replacements. They could be pretty autonomous and use solar/wind for power. Also I believe this would allow for faster data transmission rates than a conventional satellites in LEO

Re:Landside?

[Electricity Likes Me]

They'd be connected by either satellites or point-to-point wi-fi.

While it's within the means of any standing army to shut down wi-fi traffic, no one proposing that they have a modernized economy is going to be able to do so without destroying huge amounts of mundane usage as well.

Re:Landside?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd mod you +insightful if I didn't think it was utterly futile. Too bad moderators automatically mod Kristopeit troll. Sure, Mike called the GP an idiot, but coming from Kristopeit, that's like practically a marriage proposal.

Re:Landside?

[jpapon]

I think that parent's argument was that "while also making it easier and more reliable for fast-moving satellites to send data back to earth" implies that the ground stations would have a ground link to one another. I could just be missing something, but that's the only way I see how ground stations could increase reliability and speed of the network.

Re:Landside?

[MichaelKristopeit421]

there are many ways to connect ground stations to one another without using "the internet"... but that doesn't matter, considering the ground stations could communicate with each other through the network of satellites.

i have a backup hughesnet link at my house that works in exactly this fashion.

Re:Landside?

[jon3k]

Anyone could choose to operate exclusively via the satellite network, but you could also use it to access the Internet. The ground stations could also provide an additional back haul, maybe using a Tor like system of encrypted tunnels, just for some extra resiliency. The same way most corporate networks might use a broadband and VPN to backup a some other private ip service (eg - frame, mpls, etc)

Now where have I heard this......

[sgt_doom]

Effing A! Phase I implemented......

http://thedaemon.com/

http://thedaemon.com/daemonsynopsis.html

Had this idea a decade or so ago...

[crankyspice]

Was going to write a science fiction tale around it, but life intervened (and I'm not the wordsmith to make "OMG, data from the skies!" interesting... Neal Stephenson can make building a data haven interesting. Me, notsomuch...).

The idea came about when I read about Sealand. Okay, sure, great, pseudo-island-nation with its own wacky laws -- but, (a) their pipes have to terminate somewhere, and (b) one pissed off Iranian speedboat[1] with a small hand-launched missile could wreak enough havoc to take Sealand offline, if push came to shove.

My idea coupled the then-burgeoning phenomenon of microsats http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/11/2013214_F.shtml with the fuzziness of international / maritime law; rogue geeks on sailboats uploading censored data to the satellite network, that could then be received by any kid with an 18" dish and readily available receiver plans. (Transceiver seemed a bit far fetched.)

Maybe I'll write it one day. How long 'til NaNoWriMo?

[1] Leaving aside for the moment the logistics of how such a speedboat would traverse the open ocean from the Strait of Hormuz to the coast of England ... [insert African swallow reference(s) here]

Re:Had this idea a decade or so ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

Was going to write a science fiction tale around it, but then I took an arrow to the knee...

Fixed.

Re:Had this idea a decade or so ago...

[Bucky24]

How long 'til NaNoWriMo?

Well it's not until November so another 10 months? Personally I think it would be awesome if they left that graph thing running, just resetting every month. It's a great motivator. I've been thinking about coding something similar, just haven't gotten around to it.

Re:Had this idea a decade or so ago...

[migla]

How long 'til NaNoWriMo?

Well it's not until November so another 10 months? Personally I think it would be awesome if they left that graph thing running, just resetting every month. It's a great motivator. I've been thinking about coding something similar, just haven't gotten around to it.

Seems like you could use the NaNaNoWriMoCoWriMO - National NaNOWriMO Code Writing Month.

Re:Had this idea a decade or so ago...

[Bucky24]

Hmm that's not a bad idea. I imagine it would be a good deal harder to track progress in the same way. I suppose we could go with "write x lines a day" but what about lines deleted/changed/ect? Maybe it could be a timed thing, like "this month you must spend x hours on this project, x/[28,29,30,31] per day".

The problem is that it's easy to quantify when a book is done (you have done x words today) but much harder to quantify the goals for a coding project.

Uncensorable?

[PPH]

I think China has already demonstrated the ability to censor satellite-based communications.

Laser Links

[Anonymous Coward]

Combine this with laser links between apartments occupied by nerds and we'd have a truly workable decentralized system.

What about money?

[kikito]

You know, putting satellites in orbit is kind of expensive. Who is going to pay for all that?

Re:What about money?

[MagikSlinger]

Pfft! They'll just wire up some servos, an arduino and some hobby rocket motors, and it's all good. :-)

Re:What about money?

[Tekfactory]

Serious answer SpaceX, they have a really low cost per kilo to launch to LEO, and higher cost to launch to GEO. They will be doing a lot of satellite launches for Iridium to put up their satellite network.

So now the problem is really architecting your standardized satellite not using a standardized picosat or microsat designed for limited experiments, but something meant to be up there for years handling comms.

Then bundle them in a multiple satellite payload of some sort and have them spread to their final orbits from there using precious fuel, or get 50 kilos of payload reserved on a lot of other people's launches.

Re:What about money?

[gknoy]

The cost to launch something like this is still several orders of magnitude more than most Kickstarter campaigns could fund, however.

Re:What about money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Three words: world's biggest slingshot.

Re:What about money?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the wikipedia says $50million for 10,000lbs to geostationary transfer orbit (whatever that is) with a falcon9 since nobody is saying.

Re:What about money?

[jon3k]

Serious question - I've seen some amateur rockets recently that were pretty impressive, like the guy that was building the 6+ foot tall sugar (?) fuel rockets. How close are we from hobbyists being able to put something into low earth orbit? I'm guessing not even remotely? Can someone give me an idea of scale - like hobbyists are making it up 30,000 feet and we need to make it up 60 miles or something?

Re:What about money?

[DerekLyons]

Serious answer SpaceX, they have a really low cost per kilo to launch to LEO

No, they have a really low cost by the standards of space launch costs. But, like a low price on prime rib, those low (by the standards of space launch costs) costs to LEO are still really freakin' expensive - on the order of $5k/kg. In practice, it ends up even more expensive than that because a) it's rare to use the whole capacity so the whole cost is applied to a smaller mass, and b) the paying load has to pay for the non paying portions (like adapters and dispensers) as well.
 

So now the problem is really architecting your standardized satellite not using a standardized picosat or microsat designed for limited experiments, but something meant to be up there for years handling comms.

The architecture is cheap. Literally lost in the noise when compared to the costs of R&D, engineering, procurement & production, testing & validation, etc... etc... Architecture is just a paperwork drill.
 

Then bundle them in a multiple satellite payload of some sort and have them spread to their final orbits from there using precious fuel, or get 50 kilos of payload reserved on a lot of other people's launches.

The first idea is one of those things I mentioned that raises costs - sharply. The second likely isn't going to happen, the folks paying for the launch are rarely happy about having a hitchhiker along to potentially cause problems.

Re:What about money?

[LunaticTippy]

Depending on how you define amateur, rockets have been sent up over 50 miles. LEO is generally 100-1000 miles.

LEO satellites and burst traffic

[Tekfactory]

I re-read my post if the satellites are in Low Earth Orbit and transiting every 90 minutes or so, can you burst up all of your internet traffic, and receive your answers on the next pass?

Certainly you won't be streaming audio or video like this, but for email and web-surfing one page at a time it would work.

Re:LEO satellites and burst traffic

[discord5]

but for email and web-surfing one page at a time it would work.

*click* DAMN! Missed my window. Oh well, I'll try again in 9 hours.

Re:LEO satellites and burst traffic

[Electricity Likes Me]

Two satellites drops that 45 minutes, three to 30 minutes, 4 to 22.5 minutes...

But more realistically, if you actually had the funding for such a scheme you'd use a pair of geo-stationary satellites as a universally accessible uplink, and have them farm out downlink to low-orbit birds.

Re:LEO satellites and burst traffic

[Synerg1y]

why not, what about buffering and caching?

How do you think you do it on a cell phone?

I'm assuming they'd have the equivalent of tower to tower coverage where the next satellite would pick up where the previous one left off, otherwise this is a really inferior idea compared to proxies or usenet.

Re:LEO satellites and burst traffic

[jpapon]

I think you're going to need a pretty powerful antenna to be using an uplink that's in geo orbit...

Re:LEO satellites and burst traffic

[tmosley]

Eh? That is how current satellite internet services work. When I had it, my dish was slightly smaller than the one I had for TV (I cancelled both long ago).

Why stop there?

[Anonymous Coward]

I propose making an Empathy Gun.... That'll be much better, right?

If we're dreaming the impossible, why stop at satellites?

Bandwidth?

[brit74]

But, how much bandwidth would they need (especially considering all the bandwidth torrents consume) and how much bandwidth could one satellite provide? It sounds like they'd need a whole fleet of expensive satellites. Sounds to me like it's either a pipe-dream or a bluff.

Re:Bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

how much bandwidth could one satellite provide
Think about how many mpeg streams say directtv does. Then consider that is not exactly new tech...

Re:Bandwidth?

[gl4ss]

well, who wouldn't like a bunch of telecom satellites for themselfs to play with?

problem is, who's global grid would that be? theirs? mine? yours? 23432423 chinese villagers?

Re:Bandwidth?

[Dripdry]

Maybe the EFF could moderate/ "own" it?

Re:Bandwidth?

[DarthBart]

Power vs Bandwidth.

Want lots of bandwidth? You need lots of "received power", either via high power transmitters or large aperture antennas. DBS satellites (Dish/DirectTV) have large solar arrays/batteries and high power amplifers for their transponders. The video streams are also run on fully saturated transponders, so they can use every bit of power available rather than share it with other transponder users.

Can't generate that much power? You don't get the bandwidth. I've run 45Mbps+ full duplex over a satellite link, but that was using 5m dishes and decent sized amps with full transponders. I've also had to try hard to squeeze 400kbps out of a link using 1.2m dishes + 4w Ku band amps via a shared transponder.

Re:Bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obvious troll, but I'll bite so others don't get misinformed.

You should read up on multicasting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast

Then realize that there is a significant difference in bandwidth requirements between a one-way broadcast of a few thousand mpeg streams and asynchronous transmission of a few million different TCP streams. The ignorance in your post is baffling.

Re:Bandwidth?

[wagnerrp]

There's a big difference between a telecommunications satellite and a television satellite. A television satellite is nothing but a repeater. It gets a feed from a ground station, and bounces it back out over its primary antenna. A telecommunications satellite needs to simultaneously relay traffic from many endpoints to many other endpoints. Think of it like a network hub versus a network switch.

Re:Bandwidth?

[kaizokuace]

or a series of pipe dreams.

Re:Bandwidth?

[DerekLyons]

Sounds to me like it's either a pipe-dream or a bluff.

Reading their FAQ, it's neither. It reads like a half thought out late night fantasy that someone decided would be a good idea to widely publicize without having actually decided what it is they're fantasizing about in the first place - let alone run any numbers on the whatever-it-is.

Re:Bandwidth?

[sgt scrub]

A television satellite is nothing but a repeater.

Someone needs to invent a reflector. Something where both clients could beam signals at while interpreting the signals from the other client. It would be a mater, pun intended, of using the correct material to reflect the specific wave length. The problem then becomes knowing the amount of energy needed by both clients to make up the loss in signal when it hits the reflector, the efficiency of the reflective material, and a good timing system to know your looking at the same object at the same time. It is a damn shame light waves wont work for a distributed system. There are already plenty of satellites that can be used to reflect light in space already. Of course, you would have to pin point the object with both clients and both clients would have to know what time they are "seeing" the object in a much more accurate way. Hell, you could use an airplane if your timers were good enough.

i wanna help

[Anonymous Coward]

do you need extra help? where do i sign?

victorcheng1407@hotmail.com

Re:i wanna help

[Anonymous Coward]

i really wanna help too, posting AC to protect my identity.

bill.gates@microsoft.com

Nice idea for a perfect world

[kheldan]

..but it's a childish idea that completely ignores the realities that it'd either get fucked up when too many people got involved with it, or it'd be used to commit crimes, or it'd be assumed to be used to commit crimes, so one government or the other would confiscate control of it.

We need to stop indulging in fantasies and accept the reality: We need to save the Internet we have, keep the asshole corporations and the asshole dictators of the world from destroying it. If everyone stopped using the Internet there would be no Internet; the power to shape what the Internet will become is in the hands of the people who use it, not the asshole corporations and dictators of the world. Stand up for it.

Re:Nice idea for a perfect world

[Infernal Device]

..but it's a childish idea that completely ignores the realities that it'd either get fucked up when too many people got involved with it, or it'd be used to commit crimes, or it'd be assumed to be used to commit crimes, so one government or the other would confiscate control of it.

We need to stop indulging in fantasies and accept the reality: We need to save the Internet we have, keep the asshole corporations and the asshole dictators of the world from destroying it. If everyone stopped using the Internet there would be no Internet; the power to shape what the Internet will become is in the hands of the people who use it, not the asshole corporations and dictators of the world. Stand up for it.

Alas, it is those selfsame asshole corporations and governments that created and funded it in the first place. They hired geeks who thought they could change the world, but forgot about human nature, which is to be greedy, grabby and generally as grubby as possible.

This is a sociological problem being band-aided with technological solutions and ultimately the bandaid is going to have to be removed.

Re:Nice idea for a perfect world

[Dripdry]

Paraphrasing another slashdotter: Asking the majority of people to change their habits, ways of thinking, and who they are to create change is a bit naive, if well-meaning. We need to work with what's actually here, and what's here are a lot of facebookers, tweeters, and everyday people who DON'T GIVE TWO SHITS ABOUT OUR GEEK PROBLEMS. Trust me. I know a lot of them. They don't care, they wouldn't understand (fundamentally) why they should, and changing that is a tricky affair.
Create waves: take away their comfort. Their facebook, tweets, weatherunderground.com, google homepage, gmail... take away those to create a sudden shock and I think you'll see awareness spike. But... we've already given that power away to large companies. So, unfortunately, it's mostly in the hands of large companies on the internet to shock people into changing.
  It's like telling a child the same thing over and over and over and over: They don't listen, they need a lesson to show consequences for their actions, and ordinary people need to be shown why not standing up is a bad idea, because so far they really haven't. They have their bread and circuses so they're comfy and happy with their 2 kids, Mazda Miata, hot tub, motor home, flying lessons, and girlfriend on the side. They're "happy" and have hat they want, why should it bother them if the gov. taps a few phone lines and disappears a few people they don't like? (sarcasm)

Re:Nice idea for a perfect world

[kheldan]

I agree with you, and it's worse than you think: The government and corporations are now actively dumbing down the public, because an informed, educated populace is a dangerous (to their agenda) populace. Of course it's the absolute worst thing you can do in the long run, because nations will fall because of it, but these people (if I may use the word loosely here) don't care about the long term, they only care about NOW, their profit, and their private parts being serviced regularly. If, after they're dead, the whole world falls to pieces, why should they care? They had tons of cash, and all the power and sex they could want, and fuck everyone and everything else.

I agree with you. Make life inconvenient for the sheep, to show them that everything is NOT OK.

Re:Nice idea for a perfect world

[Anonymous Coward]

Create waves: take away their comfort. Their facebook, tweets, weatherunderground.com, google homepage, gmail... take away those to create a sudden shock and I think you'll see awareness spike.

Creating a sudden shock by removing the comfort of ordinary people will only turn those people against you when they turn on their preferred source of news and hear about those evil hackers who want to take away their Facebook and Twitter. They will not be moved to re-evaluate their perception of who is good and bad in the world.

Jamming ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Iran did jam western satellite TV channels recently. So if they can do that, most nations can jam satellites. It is not exactly hard to jam the uplink.
But maybe they just want a downlink ? That would be much more expensive, as a jamming satellite would probably be required.

Re:Jamming ?

[SuricouRaven]

Jamming an uplink is doable, but also prone to cause diplomatic issues. Cutting a neighbouring country's TV off is sure to incite trouble. Iran jams downlinks, which isn't really that hard either. Comsats actually transmit at a surprisingly low power - they have to run off solar - and are a very long way from the receivers. That is why you need a fairly large parabolic collector to pick them up. Such a sensitive receiver is easily overwhelmed by a moderately powerful jamming signal - not even dishes are perfectly directional. Downlink jamming is much more localised.

Hackers on the Moon?

[mykepredko]

When I saw that in the summary, the first thing that came to mind is that a number of people would like put hackers on the moon.

It might rank number two after putting hackers in a blender but it's definitely in the top five.

myke

Re:Hackers on the Moon?

[Dripdry]

Does anyone else think this could be the next big B-Move blunder of the 21st century?

Moonraker

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I'm imagining Bond in space trying to shoot a bunch of nerds in space who just want to talk about politics.

Sea Launch

[Comboman]

You have to launch them or their replacements from somebody's territory which is going to a whole lot less countries than what you can stick ground stations in.

Actually international waters are the best place to launch a satellite from and are not in anyone's sovereign territory.

Re:Sea Launch

[hedwards]

They might not be anybody's sovereign territory, but you're still bound by the laws of the country of your citizenship or failing that the flag on the vessel. What's worse is that in international waters pretty much any navy can put a stop to the launch without having the same sort of international incident if you were launching from land.

On top of that sea based launches are incredibly tricky even for well funded outfits, Boeing had several of their attempts fail.

Re:Sea Launch

[jpapon]

pretty much any navy can put a stop to the launch without having the same sort of international incident if you were launching from land

I'm pretty sure that shooting at or boarding a vessel to stop a communications satellite launch in international waters would cause an international incident.

Re:Sea Launch

[khallow]

I'm pretty sure that shooting at or boarding a vessel to stop a communications satellite launch in international waters would cause an international incident.

With who?

Re:Sea Launch

[jpapon]

The countries of the citizens on the sea-launch vessel, and the flag it flies? Just because you're in international waters doesn't mean that others can shoot at you or board you... there's a word for that sort of thing; piracy. You know, the YARRR kind, not the digital kind.

Re:Sea Launch

[tmosley]

Pretty much everyone.

Re:Sea Launch

[Anonymous Coward]

Bounce off Antarctica first and then hit up international waters? Most of Antarctica is "claimed" by various countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica#Antarctic_territories). You could stop somewhere in the unclaimed territory (although the USA reserves the right to claim some of it... no clue how in the hell that works, since they're nowhere close to it. The entirity of South America is kinda in the way), head back to sea, and launch away.

Re:Sea Launch

[Sentrion]

Hey - it works for me! I put a Turkish flag on my cargo ship, and I'm sailing in international waters. Hold on. Gotta go. I think Israeli commandos are repelling to my deck from a helicopter.

Re:Sea Launch

[khallow]

The countries of the citizens on the sea-launch vessel, and the flag it flies?

If you illegally launching satellites, then you don't have legal protection.

Re:Sea Launch

[khallow]

Doesn't work that way. If you're breaking the law, say by launching satellites that aren't legally registered with a country, then you don't get those protections of law.

Voter education

[coogan]

Wouldn't it be better to spend all that effort and money on systems to educate Joe Public out there about what these assholes in power are up to and get them voted out of power or failing that forcibly remove them from the system - remember the 99%?. This is working around the problem instead of attacking it head on.

Re:Voter education

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I think we all remember the 99% - that fundamentally worthless movement & rallying cry overwhelmingly raised by children of 1%'ers with too much time on their hands and too little sense; The one that was tumblr'ed, micro-blogged, tweeted, facebook'ed, meetup'ed, myspace'd, foursquare'd and g+'ed from the IBM, Lenovo, HP, Sony, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and RIM devices of "impoverished" first worlders wearing designer clothes with images of Che Guevara emblazoned on it, and complaining about how their Harvard educations in advanced underwater basketweaving weren't netting them their "fair share" of wealth that they feel their existence entitles them to.

In that regard, I'd submit that shooting satellites into space to run your very own private internet is very much in line with the methods of the so-called "99%" - symbolic, ineffectual protest-as-lifestyle-choice. A chance to have their very own "I protested something once" story to tell the grandkids, as if the issues they're protesting were anything but first world whining by people with first world problems, too much time on their hands, and no sense whatsoever.

Re:Voter education

[Anonymous Coward]

Those systems already exist. Use them.

Amateur Radio Satellites

[Ozoner]

Are you aware of the more than 70 Amateur-Radio Satellites which have been launched since 1961?

see http://www.spacetoday.org/Satellites/Hamsats/HamsatsBasics.html

Re:Amateur Radio Satellites

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I'm also acutely aware of the 2 functional ones still .. functioning. It's not like they've fallen out of the sky (aside from arissat-1), but batteries go dead and firmwares go haywire.

73

Re:Amateur Radio Satellites

[jon3k]

Can you imagine being the guy who forgot to put the semicolon at the end of a line, and then uploaded the code? You'd never heard the end of that one.

A few hurdles ..

[n5vb]

1. $10k/pound. Maybe less depending on which launch carrier will give you a ride to orbit, and how many sats can be taken up per launch, and how easily you can get each one into the orbit you want. And extra sats, because launch payloads don't always make it.
2. Latency. Not as bad as with GEO sat links if you have a constellation of LEO sats, but packet round trip times are going to be seriously long, especially if you have multiple sat-to-sat line-of-sight hops on long connections. Unless you're connecting to a host in the footprint of the same sat you're connecting on, those trip times might cause TCP connections to drop if they're not aware of the longer latency. (This was a major problem with commercial "satellite Internet" ISP's a few years ago, as I recall.)
3. Infrastructure. There will need to be at least one nameserver on the network, ideally a distributed name service that can propagate from a root name authority, and while it's probably not too outrageous to put the backbone routers on the sats and have them dynamically manage their routing tables based on which sats they can see (and possibly determining their locations via SGPS so they can route geographically) and maybe host the distributed DNS service as well, a fair bit of the core infrastructure and management will have to be on the ground somewhere. If it's in a country that doesn't absolutely love the idea of this system being operational, expect that ground control rackspace to be raided at some point. And if it's in an isolated location that isn't well defended by a willing host country, or the host country becomes unwilling at some point in the future, same hazard. (This actually makes some risks far greater because
4. Attrition. LEO is LEO, and one of the facts of life at LEO altitudes is drag, at least at perigee. The sats will have to have some propulsion capability to maintain orbit, or more will have to be launched periodically to replace the ones that have de-orbited. Higher altitudes are far less susceptible to drag, but increase latency and possibly exposure to van Allen belt radiation. And there's always the danger of random collisions with space debris at almost any altitude, although low-LEO orbits are a lot more full of trash than higher altitudes.

That's just off the top of my head. A worthy endeavor, but one that would require significant investment and planning.

Re:A few hurdles ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Attrition. LEO is LEO, and one of the facts of life at LEO altitudes is drag, at least at perigee. The sats will have to have some propulsion capability to maintain orbit, or more will have to be launched periodically to replace the ones that have de-orbited. Higher altitudes are far less susceptible to drag, but increase latency and possibly exposure to van Allen belt radiation. And there's always the danger of random collisions with space debris at almost any altitude, although low-LEO orbits are a lot more full of trash than higher altitudes.

That's just off the top of my head. A worthy endeavor, but one that would require significant investment and planning.

You made me curious - could attrition be offset with buoyancy in theory? Or would a balloon at that orbit create more attrition than lift? Now that I'm thinking about it, it seems like maybe the goal should be mesh networks of high altitude balloons instead...

Re:A few hurdles ..

[Anonymous Coward]

> Now that I'm thinking about it, it seems like maybe the goal should be mesh networks of high altitude balloons instead

That is a fantastic point. I wonder what would cost more in the long run: high altitude balloons or satellites.

If one of the balloons needs servicing it could theoretically be brought down, fixed, and sent back up. If a satellite needs servicing it would just have to be replaced and the old one would burn up in the atmosphere.

(anonymous because I'm lazy)

Re:A few hurdles ..

[HBI]

Not to entirely handwave the latency bit away, but a good PEP can solve a lot of the issues associated with latency. Compression and proxying can be handy also, but the TCP acceleration is vital and can offer a real world 30% improvement in usable bandwidth as well as much faster response times, as chains of acknowledgements are spoofed.

Re:A few hurdles ..

[Amouth]

something to think about is to put the head of the ground force on Antarctica.. it is a horrid nasty place to live.. but it is also protected from military incursions by a large portion of the first world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System

Practicality of mesh network ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't a mesh network built from volunteers be a more realizable goal?

Re:Practicality of mesh network ...

[doti]

yes, it would.

like http://www.servalproject.org/ (there's also an app)

Passive Optical Reflector - Fresnel Reflector

[Anonymous Coward]

To start, or as an additional plan, place passive optical reflectors in orbit. They have numerous advantages.

Advantages

* Effectively Unlimited Bandwidth - The better the laser / the more frequency lasers, the greater the communication rate.
* No Electronics
* Weighs Less / Easier to Launch
* Harder to Interfere With

The equipment needed to connect is a tracking telescope retrofitted with a laser and PIN photodiode or photodiode array. A photodiode array can double as the tracking system.

Re:Passive Optical Reflector - Fresnel Reflector

[Anonymous Coward]

4 words: Laser pointer at Airplane.

One Major Problem

[harl]

Many nations have already displayed the ability to destroy satellites.

There is no defense against said attacks.

Re:One Major Problem

[Sabriel]

Most nations with the capability to destroy satellites tend to have satellites of their own they'd like to keep. It's getting crowded up there.

Satellites?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this really need satellites? I'm not a sat comm expert... but...

What's the bandwidth of a satellite? How much power does it take to get that? How do they supply that? What does it cost?

Is there any reason we couldn't get a similar effect by floating a kite up into the ionosphere and tethering it to our residence? It sure sounds cheaper to me...

I mean, I know there's all sorts of restrictions about big towers... but it seems to me like there ought to be public wireless spectrum that could as readily accomplish the same thing without leaving the atmosphere. Sure you'd have less distance... but when you can fly a kite at up to six miles up there...

It's still gotta be cheaper than a damned satellite launch...

This isn't what I thought they meant...

[DC2088]

... by "Hacker Spaces"...

Why not LOS shots?

[HBI]

This is a 5ghz band line of sight radio that I have worked with.

This product delivers 108mbps of real bandwidth over a shot that can be up to about 20 miles. The radios can also be meshed, allowing multiple connections to each antenna. It's essentially not all that much different than wifi AP rigged up with a directional antenna. We've seen articles about such shots being extended to the same ranges the RF-7800w achieves. The key issue with such shots is the terrain, of course. Hills and valleys pose problems.

That said, why isn't anyone thinking about this? It would work. True, it wouldn't help with transoceanic shots, but in that case you could consider satellite to carry that kind of traffic. Or just pipe it over the wired Internet using the encryption mechanism of your choice - cheaper and easier. Use the sats as a backup to that in the event of government interference.

Re:Why not LOS shots?

[Em Adespoton]

Indeed... redundancy is the key. What we really need is a system that will use what's already available (Internet, HAM packet radio, etc.) but have redundant fall-back options, such as line-of-sight, fresnel reflectors, weather balloons, etc. In essence, the ground stations should be mesh network gateways, that can be set up to track all the transmission methods that *could* be used -- and integrate the data into the mesh. If the format is standardized, then everyone could fab/code their own modules for specific transmission types, making the overall system extremely robust.

Private RF transmission outlawed in your country? No problem! Use a Fresnel reflector!
Remote location with no sats overhead? No problem! Use a tower and long-range packet radio!
Living in a rural area with interested parties living miles apart, out of line-of-site? send up some balloons!

None of these solutions will be enough on its own, but together they'd make one pretty solid communications network. Satellites could easily be part of this, but shouldn't be the end goal. The end goal should be communication.

Re:Why not LOS shots?

[Sentrion]

Why couldn't you just set up a series of buoys for the transoceanic shots?

Re:Why not LOS shots?

[HBI]

Well, I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head.

One is power - you might say solar but that only works ~ 12 hours a day on average, the rest would have to be battery powered and then you have battery failure to deal with, also. Stringing a power cord over an oceanic distance is infeasible, of course. At least at the surface.

Next, to get that ~ 20 miles a hop, you need to elevate the antennas. And I say antennas, because you'd have to have one facing in each direction. So you'd have a buoy with a minimum 15 meter mast off the top. Probably wouldn't stay upright. At the surface, the horizon is as little as 7 miles.

Then, you'd have to deal with wind and wave movement. The LOS antennas need to have at least a rough point at each other, within a degree or so at that range. If that 15m mast is flipping back and forth in waves, that isn't happening. Even at the surface it would be a problem - seen a buoy in rough weather? They bounce all over the place.

Then, how do you anchor the buoys? There will be a fair bit of play in any technology for anchoring a buoy at over 10k feet from the bottom. This will impact the antenna pointing as noted above.

I like the creative thinking but I don't think it will work.

Re:Why not LOS shots?

[DerekLyons]

That said, why isn't anyone thinking about this?

Because, other than in local areas, it won't really work. Look at a map of the US and note how far apart major urban areas are - and how many repeaters will be needed to connect them with decent bandwidth and redundancy.

Re:Why not LOS shots?

[HBI]

Wouldn't having a lot of meshed nodes be one of the elements of said redundancy? Kind of hard to DF and shut down thousands of nodes...

Re:Why not LOS shots?

[DerekLyons]

As I said - look at a map of the US and the distances between major urban centers and start doing the math.

Re:Why not LOS shots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not use a natural satellite? Like the MOON?

You can use radio or laser moonbounce.

Radio moonbounce usually requires a significant antenna and transmission gear; however, IR laser moonbounce can have a small transmit telescope and the receiver could be an old-style projection TV fresnel lens and optical detector.

There are decoding programs that can retrieve text from signals -30 db below noise floor. Unbelievable until you see it.

An IR laser ground station described above should only cost a couple grand, tops.

HAM Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use a HAM radio with a computer connection then you can talk to anyone that you want to.

Re:HAM Radio

[doti]

this makes so much more sense.

and also http://www.servalproject.org/

Re:HAM Radio

[ColdWetDog]

Just use a HAM radio with a computer connection then you can talk to anyone that you want to.

No encryption.
No commercial activity.
No illegal activity.

Monitored by thousands of Ham radio operators who jealously police their government-given spectrum.

Insert quarter to play again.

Re:HAM Radio

[Archon-X]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio

Or...

[betterunixthanunix]

I am not going to operate a base station in the United States. Yes, amateurs have done satellite operations in the past, but there is no doubt that some well-meaning person will send an encrypted message -- and thus create a legal mess for a US operator. It is a great idea, but it is pretty hard to hide a satellite base station and pretty easy to run afoul of the law with this proposal.

I'll come in again.

[Hognoxious]

Potential snipers shooting at whom? Most gun owners wouldn't raise an eybrow, let alone lift a weapon, if teh gubmint was only repressing "bad people", i.e queers, niggers, and atheists. And commies. Oh, and muslims, who are technically atheists because if it's the wrong religion, it's the same as having none.

Space Ninjas

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Wqy0M6-c8Q

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions

[Anonymous Coward]

Great idea, but do you really think "the powers that be" are going to let this happen, or continue for any length of time if it should happen? I can see it now - all kinds of laws made to "protect" the interests of ISPs, governments seeing this as a tool for terrorism (which we all know is just a big lie to justify terrible, inhuman psychopathic stuff like NDAA2012, etc...), up to and including "pre-emptive" attacks on such satellites, then going after the "guilty" here on Earth.
Better idea - we take our Internet, our lives, and our rights back. Start by not legally treating corporations like people. Currently the law sees a corporation the way it sees a person. The problems start when we realize corporations can't be jailed, don't die due to old age, have much deeper pockets than any of us, etc...
For the mean time, I've ditched my cell phone, keep home internet to a minimum, and am re-learning what I did before there was an internet. Remember "I was just following orders" is not an excuse, and fight "The New Normal" with every fibre of your being - our future depends on it.

Re:The road to Hell is paved with good intentions

[Sentrion]

The predecessors of our modern FAA and FCC both began at the infancy of aviation (NACA in 1915, and FAA in 1926 when aviation went commercial) and wireless communication (Radio Act of 1912), respectively. Whenever activity goes unregulated, there is a congressman somewhere with a bill waiting to be voted into law. Any new development that frees people from the confines of their well regulated environment will quickly be snuffed out or absorbed by an ever expanding bureaucracy.

Re:The road to Hell is paved with good intentions

[Anonymous Coward]

Until enough freedoms are snuffed out to make the people rise up, take back control and form a new government. The circle of life

Prediction: inconsiderate people will use it

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the notion of "censorship" and "tragedy of the commons" being opposites is why we can't have nice things. Any system put into place to enforce "fair" will be viewed by someone as censorship.

I have a better idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

When somebody proposes censorship, censor him with a Kalashnikov.

its not that expsensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on bandwidth needs It might not be that expensive to build the satellites. The problem is going to be getting an orbital slot to put them in, since the "MAN" controls the slots. Also getting them up might be an issue, but with all the non-gov space programs being worked on its not that hard to see them getting it launched.

Ham radio operators have been building and getting satellites launched for over 50 years and were just a bunch of radio geeks. A number of universities have been them as well. Now these are not geostationary orbit and bandwidth is pretty low, but dont think changes for more bandwidth would be an issue.
make has an article for building and launching your own satellite for $8K. http://makezine.com/ cubsats cost about 50K to build. A quick google search with hamsat will turn up lots of info on the topic.

Prediction: China will SHOOT it down...

[macraig]

... with those anti-sat missiles they tested last year. Or... the United States will trump up some DMCA or IP infringement claims and take them out with mega-lasers we didn't know we have.

Satellite is unusable

[msobkow]

Bill Gates proposed a global satellite network, too. If I recall, he wanted to launch 24 geostationary platforms.

But even though he could have afforded to do it, Bill scrapped the idea. Why?

Because accessing the internet over a satellite link SUCKS. You have huge delays due to lag time, and you can forget anything that requires a time-sensitive data stream like skype.

I know several people stuck with satellite internet, and they all HATE it. The only reason satellite internet has any foothold at all is there are some people who have no other choice.

And "uncensorable"? Puh-leaze.

There are many nations who can take out your satellite with a missile at any time, and it's not that hard to jam a satellite uplink from the ground if you're not trying to take out the link completely.

It's an unworkable if noble idea.

Latency, cost, bandwidth...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly someone hasn't really considered the ramifications of latency, cost and bandwidth. There's a reason fiber optics deployments have skyrocketed vs satellite comms.

Copenhagen suborbitals

[Anonymous Coward]

This plan reminds me of Copenhagen Suborbitals, I wonder if they know about each other.

BRAVOLINGUS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to create your own country, religion and cultural rituals to hide behind so that you can cry discrimination when the suits attack your network.

This was first discussed this summer

[VP]

at the CCC Camp in Germany. A lot of space-related topics were presented there

NO!

[uvajed_ekil]

It would be shot down by communist China, not lobbyists.

Why not just stay at sea in intl waters?

[WaffleMonster]

For some reason I was browsing the text of the law of the sea the other day which most countries of the world have signed and ratified.

The interesting thing about it is that while pirate broadcasters can be ceased in international waters by the flag the boat is operating under or by any country where the signal can be received that provision applies only to "sound radio" and "television" broadcasts. It says nothing about data transmission.

I would imagine a few strategically placed unmanned solar/wind powered boats at sea bouncing signals off the ionosphere would be a heck of a lot cheaper than launching birds into orbit...

Libertarians at their stupidest.

[Ramin_HAL9001]

I don't agree with libertarianism, although I do sympathize with their positions.

But these German guys just don't know what law is, it seems. Law exists because we need an way to peacefully share resources amongst conflicting parties who all want access to that resource, and does so in a way that maximizes the number of people who thinks the allocation is fair. Space is one such resource. Bandwidth is another. Without regulation, conflicting parties would have to resort to brute force to decide who gets the biggest allocation. And they think they can launch satellites without international cooperation, and let it work on the principle of a free-market anarchy?

These German libertarians think they can do without law, or make their own system not controlled by any government. It is so pathetically unrealistic. Like how do you eliminate spam? How do you prevent censorship by malicious users of the system? Will "the free market" solve these problems? Really?

The real problem is that democratic government has been taken over by wealthy elites. That's why we have so many unfair and nonsensical laws like SOPA, because the law is no longer determined by the people. Let the people make their own laws, but do so in a way that does not violate the rights of the minorities. Don't go trying to build an entire society from scratch, re-inventing every wheel in history as you go. The only way to make the internet work is with international cooperation. The only way to prevent censorship is to make sure the government we elect doesn't censor anything.

it won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

why not redesign the internet from the ground?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this is a good idea to start of with a clean slate and develop sensible replacement internet protocols, something which is perhaps location based. A decentralized alternative to DNS would also be desirable.

Young engineers get all the hoopla

[toxonix]

This is the old hardware solution to a software problem. These are the "Architectural Astronauts" at their best.

See the douchebag sexconker run

[Anonymous Coward]

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38587742

Hackers always doing it the 'hard' way

[recharged95]

Why not just hype up the bitcoin space, make some quick cash and buy out Iridium. I hear they're looking for some owners.

Sounds familiar

[Thuktun]

Increasing efforts to free the signal? Escalating counter-measures to block traffic to prevent piracy? This is starting to sound vaguely familiar.

http://craphound.com/unwirer/