There was a surge in people doing wifi WAN style networks across whole cities, back when internet speeds were slow+expensive, and decent directional wifi antennas were available fairly inexpensively.
I think low-cost high-speed internet largely killed the need for it: perhaps Prism has given us a nudge to start again?
This is awesome, however, municipalities have put fear into people wishing to do this over legal issues arising from what someone might do on your connection. Who is to blame when something illegal (mp3 download, etc) happens? That whole issue needs to be put to rest so we as a society can create our own Internet without fear of suppression.
+1 great point. I sometimes leave my wifi open (I live in a small town, if that means anything) but then I consider the legal implications and lock it up for a while. ...then repeat...
The best solution would be allowing people to risk free run grid networks (which would be, I think, very low bandwidth) and have communities also supply separtae low bandwidth Internet connected wifi for free. We would then use a paid for service for anything for more than text or other low bandwidth uses. No one would download large mp3s, watch Netflix, etc. from the very low bandwidth community wifi, and the separate grid network would be local and likely not have anything to attract "Imperial interest" (sorry about the Star Wars metaphor :-)
Local grid networks could be part of support for local libraries, community centers, etc.
Having an open wifi should leave you free of any charges in the same way that an ISP is. Maybe it should be not culpable modulo keeping logs of everything for up to three months so that law enforcement can attempt to find anyone committing a crime once they have a warrant.
This seems something like the Serval Project (http://www.servalproject.org/). Difference being that Serval is for mobile telecommunications meshes, rather than fixed(-ish) data connections.
"To repurpose the famous A.J. Liebling statement, internet freedom is guaranteed only to those who own a connection. "And right now, you and me don't own the internet—we just rent the capacity to access it from the companies that do own it," Wilder says."
I hope this becomes a bigger trend, but if we're going to do this again, then I hope we do it right this time, and we make it as secure, as uncontrollable by governments, and as anonymous as possible (if you so make that decision on it).
The US government/NSA is ruining the old Internet, so I hope the new one will be very resistant to such attempts in the future. I would watch out especially for hardware-level backdoors for such an Internet.
If they can't spy on the network directly because it's P2P they will try to force either the OS vendors or the hardware vendors to implement backdoors and keyloggers for them. So at the very least the focus should be on open source operating systems with open source firmware (and possibly even open source hardware in the future). Such hardware should be given extreme preference for the mesh networks.
I never thought that the whole "trusting trust" essay would become a practical reality and an everyday danger that must be mitigated. But welcome to the 21st century. No flying cars, but lots of dystopian cyber punks eager to get in your business.
The problem is making it anonymous, uncontrollabe, P2P, flies in the face with other aspects like performance. Wireless links simply do not have the capacity to afford 10,000 people the speeds they are accustomed to today.
Most capital cities in Australia had a wireless mesh project during that era. wireless.org[1] was (and still is?) the toplevel website.
Melbourne and Perth seem to be the only ones left with active nodes? Canberra (air.net) used to be strong. Sydney lives on in the form of a website[2] and nodedb[3], a world wide map of mesh network nodes, started by "evilbunny" (Duane Groth).
The servers are still live, but the content is well out of date. The projects are dead, but all the infrastructure seems to still be there, if interest ever revives.
I live in the mountains (Central Arizona) and I have garnered some interest of other people in my community to set up a local mesh network. Really good in emergencies (e.g., east coast during Hurricane Sandy).
What backbone protocol is largely used for these projects?
I only ask because the range of even 802.11ac would be a limiting factor in these sorts of networks.
Reminds me of the packet networks that we hams used to build back in the BBS days. Most of the stations went off air with wide spread commercial internet service and operator turn over, but there's a renewed interest with newer, cheaper, radio gear come out.
Also there's many cities with a first responders mesh network.
I'm a little disappointed, though, that at least local to me most of the interest centers around hacking the old WRT-54G rather than more modern and powerful gear.
I saw an article about this a little while ago. If anywhere in the world could support a wide scale mesh network, it would have to be the Bay Area. It would be a really cool experiment to blanket a part of the Valley in mesh wifi: I imagine it would be very doable to raise $100K and send 1,500 mesh routers to people in Palo Alto or SOMA. Open Mesh has some really cool low-cost ($50 - $75) hardware that seems to just work: http://www.open-mesh.com/. Some might be plugged into an upstream link, but if most were only powered on as relays it would still work.
Are there any plans to connect up to an SF mesh? I could see setting up some backbones across the bay, but I'm not sure what the technicalities are around this.
I did give him an upvote, and maybe others did as well. Perhaps it was enough to raise rhodey from the dead? So perhaps my reports of rhodey's death were greatly exaggerated. Unfortunately I can no longer edit my original comment to reflect this.
"The goal of Project Byzantium is to develop a communication system by which users can connect to each other and share information in the absence of convenient access to the Internet. This is done by setting up an ad-hoc wireless mesh network that offers services which replace popular websites often used for this purpose, such as Twitter and IRC." - from http://project-byzantium.org/about/
Before they radically changed direction and were acquired by Cisco, Meraki tried to target community meshes in SF and beforehand as Roofnet at MIT. They handed out/sold a lot of mesh APs. I wonder what happened to the boxes.
Several hundred roofnet devices were distributed to low-income housing in the South End and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston. The networks are still limping along with some volunteer maintenance. There are some really dedicated people working to provide for some of the technology needs of the communities, such as free computer repair and training. Check out http://cstoboston.org/http://www.tech-center-enlightentcity.tv/
I have a lot of experience with roofnet, Meraki and Open Mesh. They work to some extent, but not nearly with the degree of reliability that an ordinary customer would tolerate. You are not going to get a reliable network with single-radio devices in an urban setting with lots of interference and construction materials that are not friendly to wireless signals. You can do somewhat better if you plan out your backhaul links using traditional, non-mesh technologies and only use mesh for the very last few hundred feet, and stick to dual-radio N devices. There is a lot of hype about some of these networks in Europe (Athens, Austria, Berlin, etc.) but what people fail to realize is that these networks are used by geeks who are happy to build their own antennas, mess around with a linux shell, etc. If you just hand people devices you're not going to have a network that is tolerable for most consumers. It may work okay in a developing country in the middle of a revolution where people are willing to hack something together, but for ordinary consumers who want a reliable connection and don't care about the underlying technology it just doesn't work.
While this is a great solution for places without easy last-mile connections, it seems to me this would still be vulnerable, as one compromised connection would essentially allow the same kind of snooping that we've got going on now.
Does anyone know whether this is so, or how to protect against snooping, as I would assume there is some implicit level of trust required for a network like this to stay secure.
Creating non-compromised endpoint hardware is a bit of a problem. I'm actually not sure if it is possible, even in principle.
Maybe if there was an open source/open hardware router which contained a chip with secure boot, into which you yourself could burn the public key, and then it would only allow the code signed by that key... Sounds too complicated to be user friendly.
Besides, there is no way to verify that the hardware router that somebody considers to be secure was not replaced by an identically looking box that had been compromised :( .
That creates an active incentive to physically lean on people to roll up networks.
cjdns works by requiring people to exchange keys with someone out of band to get access to their mesh, and to me that just seems as fundamentally defeating the purpose.
Yes, that means you need to build a system where bad guys are hard to impossible to track down and throw off the mesh. The problem is if you create a system where misbehaving people are trackable, then good guys can be tracked too.
Meshnets don't scale well anyway so perhaps strength in numbers applies here: if there are so many small meshnets that getting a mole in each one is totally impractical, spying on meshers en masse becomes totally impractical.
I guess it makes sense that the future could be dominated by multiple, parallel internets of varying degrees of freedom. The corporate controlled internet we know today is just the mainstream realm of YouTube and email, while darker DIY internets pop up that are the realm of torrents, bitcoin and various hackery. Kind of seems obvious this would happen eventually
Im quite surprised that noone mentioned AirJaldi - which has to be some of the most pioneering work in this area, over some of the most inhospitable terrain.
It was built to connect the Tibetan community in Dharmsala, India using modified, off the shelf hardware and custom software at some of the hardest mountainous terrain where such equipment can be deployed.
102 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadAlso the "L" in LAN, stands for "Local".
There was a surge in people doing wifi WAN style networks across whole cities, back when internet speeds were slow+expensive, and decent directional wifi antennas were available fairly inexpensively.
I think low-cost high-speed internet largely killed the need for it: perhaps Prism has given us a nudge to start again?
The best solution would be allowing people to risk free run grid networks (which would be, I think, very low bandwidth) and have communities also supply separtae low bandwidth Internet connected wifi for free. We would then use a paid for service for anything for more than text or other low bandwidth uses. No one would download large mp3s, watch Netflix, etc. from the very low bandwidth community wifi, and the separate grid network would be local and likely not have anything to attract "Imperial interest" (sorry about the Star Wars metaphor :-)
Local grid networks could be part of support for local libraries, community centers, etc.
https://projectmeshnet.org/
http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan
The US government/NSA is ruining the old Internet, so I hope the new one will be very resistant to such attempts in the future. I would watch out especially for hardware-level backdoors for such an Internet.
If they can't spy on the network directly because it's P2P they will try to force either the OS vendors or the hardware vendors to implement backdoors and keyloggers for them. So at the very least the focus should be on open source operating systems with open source firmware (and possibly even open source hardware in the future). Such hardware should be given extreme preference for the mesh networks.
I never thought that the whole "trusting trust" essay would become a practical reality and an everyday danger that must be mitigated. But welcome to the 21st century. No flying cars, but lots of dystopian cyber punks eager to get in your business.
Melbourne and Perth seem to be the only ones left with active nodes? Canberra (air.net) used to be strong. Sydney lives on in the form of a website[2] and nodedb[3], a world wide map of mesh network nodes, started by "evilbunny" (Duane Groth).
The servers are still live, but the content is well out of date. The projects are dead, but all the infrastructure seems to still be there, if interest ever revives.
[1] http://www.wireless.org.au/
[1] http://www.sydneywireless.com/
[2] http://www.nodedb.com/
Also there's many cities with a first responders mesh network.
I'm a little disappointed, though, that at least local to me most of the interest centers around hacking the old WRT-54G rather than more modern and powerful gear.
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh
rhodey wrote:
A group of us are already well on the way in Oakland, stop by some time! https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh
http://project-byzantium.org/
Does anyone know whether this is so, or how to protect against snooping, as I would assume there is some implicit level of trust required for a network like this to stay secure.
- Non-compromised endpoint hardware - In-person public key exchange - Onion routing
Maybe if there was an open source/open hardware router which contained a chip with secure boot, into which you yourself could burn the public key, and then it would only allow the code signed by that key... Sounds too complicated to be user friendly.
Besides, there is no way to verify that the hardware router that somebody considers to be secure was not replaced by an identically looking box that had been compromised :( .
should be based in social connections and trust.. the old school policy
cjdns works by requiring people to exchange keys with someone out of band to get access to their mesh, and to me that just seems as fundamentally defeating the purpose.
Yes, that means you need to build a system where bad guys are hard to impossible to track down and throw off the mesh. The problem is if you create a system where misbehaving people are trackable, then good guys can be tracked too.
Let's meet up to discuss more, how about a Google group to organize? https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sf-meshnet
It was built to connect the Tibetan community in Dharmsala, India using modified, off the shelf hardware and custom software at some of the hardest mountainous terrain where such equipment can be deployed.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi
Don't miss the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks (http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/).