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Private Networks For Public Safety
JonZittrain writes "Projects like the New American Foundation's Commotion are designing ad hoc mesh networking to keep communications open when governments want to censor. Former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and I argue that mutual-aid-based networks can be helpful for public safety, too, after attacks or natural disasters. There should be easy practices for anyone to open up an otherwise-closed Wi-Fi access point if it's still connected to broadband and is near people in trouble, and separately, to develop delay- and fault-tolerant fallback ad hoc networks so users' devices can communicate directly with one another and in a mesh. This can happen even while full packet-based ad hoc mesh is being figured out. The ideas have been developed a little in workshops at Harvard's Berkman Center and the FCC. Why not bring the human rights and public safety communities together towards a common goal?"
Make the internet censorproof and impossible to shut down... Fuck da Polizei!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Looks like these people are working on something similar:
http://project-byzantium.org/
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
If we build a mesh network to communicate, then how will the NSA listen in? They'd have to dispatch someone to every disaster to ensure they had a node in the mesh that could listen in. That would cost us taxpayers way too much money
I was always wondering how you achieve routing and addressing in a completely adhoc network. Let us assume that my whole city put their wireless access point in ad hoc mode even on the same SSID or whatever. How do you achieve any form of coherent addressing and routing ? You do not want to follow the ethernet technique with huge arp tables, devices are never going to be have enough memory to store such huge tables. Routing will be completely inneficient.
Any idea?
Philosophically the emergency ad hoc network sounds like ham radio, individuals volunteering their time and/or equipment to help their community during disasters. It might help to mention this when trying to sell the idea to analog folks.
As long as they can keep the fucking government out of it, I'm all for it.
The problem I can see with it is the governments in question will simply start actively jamming or disrupting these frequencies if they think they're being used to subvert the systems they're trying to monitor.
To do this properly, I think you might have to resort to a system that randomly changes frequencies as it runs -- so modified hardware would be needed as well as software?
Open Garden - I tried version pre v1.0 during anonymous protests of wifi shutdowns on public trans. and it was not working very well (at all) but they're at v 2.0 now from the website: "Seamless connectivity allows people to connect any supported device to the mesh and thus to the Internet with no effort or configuration... introducing a way to access the Internet over multiple paths at once, improving speed and reliability... Once connected, devices find a path to the Internet also completely automatically. If a path fails, a new one will be chosen; if necessary, new connections will be established. The network is self-healing and self-forming. Each of the nodes operates only with local knowledge; together, they build a network using a probabilistic distributed algorithm."
closed minded is as closed minded does
"There should be easy practices for anyone to open up an otherwise-closed Wi-Fi access point if it's still connected to broadband and is near people in trouble"
That sounds like an open invitation for every hacker in the world to open up any Wi-Fi access point. How can you guarantee that such a capability wouldn't be abused?
In the form of CB and Amateur radio. They do not rely on a network to use as they transmit independently.
Also community wireless networks are around such as Air-Stream (http://www.air-stream.org/) in Adelaide, South Australia which have successfully created a city wide network. Many other community groups are now joining in and increasing this network too which helps them as well as others.
(Posing as coward as I have no account, I think I should go make one here.)
While much of Manhattan's traditional communications infrastructure was literally a smoking crater after 9/11, the Ricochet mesh network was alive and well, built to barely notice the loss of individual nodes.
The company had recently gone bankrupt, but all the hardware was still in place, so some ex-employees drove from Denver to NYC with a bunch of modems and laptops, to bring mobile connectivity to the recovery effort.
Mesh works in this case because MCDN uses geographic routing -- the packet header literally contains a packed lat/long for the destination, and nodes make their routing decisions by angle and distance. There's a layer of name-to-geo resolution which makes that all work, and in the Ricochet days it was centralized, but I believe it could be made to operate with DHT like torrent networks do now.
Concerned taxpaying patriot citizens should opt in to helping the NSA on a volunteer basis.
NSA should provide a spec for device driver writers to make alternative null devices, such that machines which opt to use this driver, anything written to the null device would be automatically sent to NSA. Then all software could be changed to divert a copy of all streams to the null device. For people who don't opt in, there's no privacy risk. For concerned taxpaying patriots who wish to share with NSA, they just run the new null device. For performance-nut patriots, you could have a special hardware null device to reduce the load on your machine and its own network connection. And for performance-nut privacy-nuts, your hardware null device would .. um .. well, certainly be faster than our lame software-emulated null devices.
And of course, if you're a real performance nut, then whether you're a patriot or an al Qaida sympathizer, you have several hardware null devices, striped.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has had since September 2012 to respond to my complaint about GoogleFiber joining the "any kind of server prohibited to residential ISP internet users". His administration at the FCC refused to give me in all this time, a single sentence explaining to me whether they agreed with any or all of my complaint that started as a sub-1000 character 2000F complaint, and evolved to a 53 page small font dead tree document delivered by the office of my state's Attorney General asking them to take the issue back over. That was back in 2012 as well. I still wait for a single sentence suggesting whether or not network neutrality can be thought of bidirectionally, in the naturally as-designed symmetric InternetProtocol(v6 in this case), as giving consumers a right to provide their own independent (of any mandated corporate or government service affiliation) service via servers connected to their "neutral" residential internet jack.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3643919&cid=43438341
just fork Tor for your private network(s). It's been forked before for different reason(s).
--" Why not bring the human rights and public safety communities together towards a common goal?"
Don't forget the amateur radio operators, we have been doing this exact thing for a long time.
http://hsmm-mesh.org/
73,
We have been doing this in south Africa for many years www.jawug.org.za
Use Google earth to see if you are able to join the network, extend it.