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

I Wonder...

[mrozone]

Can a Hot Pocket be cooked in space?

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

[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

[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.

EMP will take care of that

[jollyreaper]

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

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.

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.

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.

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]

Uncensorable?

[PPH]

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

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: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: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.

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: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.