No offense to the "reddit meshnet project", but the last I checked (this could have changed) what they're proposing isn't possible with the team that they have right now.
There are a couple of problems:
1) They don't have a solid hardware platform to work on, and the feeling I've gotten from talking to some of the people on /r/darknetplan is that they really don't have the proper understanding of wireless tech to make something like this happen. People are proposing cheap commodity wifi gear for this.
While it's certainly possible to do a very high density area with that, it's certainly not feasible to cover an area like a city, at least not without a considerable investment, and an understanding that network performance is going to be abysmal. (And at that point, just use ham radio...)
(Something like what they're proposing might work in an office, not so much in a neighborhood).
So is a problem, but hypothetically you could just toss hardware at it until it went away.
From what I heard in the IRC group when I was hanging out, the group is mostly made up of people who think it's a nice idea but have absolutely no idea what they're doing.
My prediction is this movement fails flat on its face, as the people with the knowhow to develop the new protocols for this network are uninterested in joining a mass of lemmings who are more interested about what the project is going to be called than if it will work.
Here's a fun issue: security and stability in BGP. As we've seen many, many times over BGP is a completely insecure protocol with persistant problems with blackhole and cyclical routes. Many people inside IRC have proposed BGP as the routing mechanism for the mesh network, but have no proposals on how to deal with a completely decentralized network of high latency connections.
That's my current proposal for routing protocol. How it works at scale, I have no fucking idea, but I'll manually write the redistribution if I have to at the aggregation nodes.
I would say don't even try, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.A.T.M.A.N. is a better bet. OSLR will never work at the kind of scale that this project is aiming at. It's meant for networks on the order of hundreds of nodes.
Also, you still need an addressing system. I was mentioning one of a hundred different problems that I've yet to see one person in the organization qualified to solve. If Van Jacobsen announced tomorrow he was building a worldwide mesh network I'd drop everything else and start contributing, but until then I see a lot of people flailing around and going nowhere.
The problem we are definitely running into is that as a crowdsourced project, we have a lot of people who don't know what they're talking about. However, we have a small subset that do (myself not included, I'm more aiming to get the ball rolling than anything) and have been hard at work on the project. There is a lot more noise than signal right now, but that will change as a more solid technological platform for local mesh networks arises. Once we have a basic platform we will begin to address issues such as the addressing and other scaling issues.
So I guess my final point is that we ARE working on a hardware platform and then we will work to make this accessible to the average person on /r/darknetplan . There are hurdles, there are idiots, but we are working on it and I don't think it is safe to call the project failed until we've had a chance to actually try.
I applaud the picking something that matters and swinging for the fences, instead of yet another "Foursquare for pets" like a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be doing these days...
What about an native implementation of Freenet? Currently Freenet is an overlay network, on top of the Internet, but from my limited knowledge of Freenet, it doesn't have to be that way.
Freenet, i2p and Tor are good examples of what we are trying to do, but they are not quite what we want. Our end goal intent is a completely separate network with it own infrastructure.
The internet is a patchwork of networks. Why not just add more networks to that patchwork.
Adding more networks to the internet, with more links between them, managed by a greater diversity of organizations and individuals, is what will make the internet harder for anybody to control.
It's been said that "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". What's needed, I think, is more available routes.
What I meant by a native implementation is one with no underlying infrastructure. Freenet (protocol) would be running directly on the hardware. Set up a mesh of (media agnostic) point-to-point links and use the Freenet protocol to route traffic and turn them into a network. A big caveat is that Freenet might not scale as required.
One problem you are going to face if you stick to an IP based network is: who is going to administer the address space? The same is true of any centralised function. In the "glory" days of community WiFi networks, most fell by the wayside because of this issue.
I think the ultimate goal should still be maximum decentralization. Even if there will be some "super nodes", they should still be as decentralized as possible, and without being tied to some corporation or Government. Otherwise, what's the point in even doing this.
The ultimate goal should be a close to 100% P2P "Internet". All of that may not be possible within this decade, but maybe in the future. For example the hardest part to decentralize this will be when trying to link 2 continents to each other through a true mesh network. But again, I think future technology will solve this. Until then, the best strategy is to build ultra-local mesh networks, then larger local ones, then city-wide, state-wide, and so on. Grow it gradually, like any movement.
I've spent time on mesh networks for disaster recovery efforts, I consider myself fairly technical when it comes to wireless networks, and it's a damn hard problem to solve. Even with some great gear, things drop off the network all the time, electricity fluctuations cause issues, mobile devices forget what signal they are connected to.. but I applaud this effort at Reddit because it brings the idea into consciousness - the fact is that we need better kinds of Meraki/Ubiquti-type hardware and maybe some of these people will sit down and solve some of the hard problems (reading more of this thread shows that yes, there are problem solvers involved, I wish everyone the most success).
I'd also like to point out one thing: in the time I've spent thinking about how to get the mainstream to care enough to consider dropping their telco lines I've arrived at the conclusion that the core issue for that final push will be apps. We need true, decentralised apps (maybe like what Diaspora was intending to achieve, for example). Don't think you can build the infrastructure and people will come. You need the apps and a reason to get traction from non-technical people who couldn't care less if the government was reading their kitten emails.
At this point, it really is a collection of hobbyists who want to help but can't offer much, however every day we acquire one or two more skilled, dedicated engineers/techs to help. IRC user Tanuki is currently running a meshnet project in Australia with 150 users over 200 KM. He was just offered satellite time for distant sites!
So is this like a true mesh network, or just a traditional wireless network. If it's a mesh network, do nodes have multiple point-to-point links. I assume they would over the larger than a few km distances you're talking about.
Hybrid network is fine for now, and maybe even desirable to get it off the ground and make it usable for most people. Just try making it work as well as possible with what technologies we have now, and as they improve in the next decade or so, it should become easier to achieve a true mesh network.
It's too bad that the people who perennially propose adaptive mesh radios as some sort of decentralized alternative to public wired networks never consult anyone that has actually worked with mesh on any scale. If they did they'd quickly look for some other solution. I thought Greenberg was a real journalist, what's happened to fact checking?
"If it wasn't for those damned laws of physics always screwing up my plans..." basically. Mesh networks have a pretty hard constraint of k/n^2 bandwidth total where k is an average node's bandwidth and n is the number of nodes. You quickly get down into the 'bytes per second' range.
Summary: Throughput of a mesh asymptotically approaches 1/7th of the non-mesh link rate. This is using the 802.11 MAC, but recent softMAC chipsets could be run in a more mesh-optimized psuedo-802.11 protocol (that has not been invented yet AFIAK), so you might get performance as good as 1/4th.
The problem has already been fixed. In South Africa, there is a mature, established private Wireless network spanning huge urban areas AND interconnecting them. It's based on cheap 5GHz hardware and directional antennae (mostly yagi). Details here http://www.ptawug.co.za/
The problem isn't how to create a large-scale wireless network. That's not simple, but it's been done. The problem is creating a large-scale, ad-hoc, mesh wireless network, without a central hub that can be shut down.
Wow, this is pretty amazing. The overall structure of the project, and the fact that part of it is funded through donations is striking. The coverage of the project is from what I can tell a very large area http://www.ptawug.co.za/content_list_5
These meshnet projects are interesting, and I wish them well.
But... we (democratic republic countries) already have governmental structures that allow for changing laws. Let's just organize and change the laws.
Aside from the industry-paid demagogues' rhetoric of 'STEALING' on the internet, we have to objectively think about this problem. We, the public, define the laws. We define what 'stealing' is. If a majority of the population is violating the so-called law, and it's hard to identify the specific victims of the law or even particular damages, then it's probably not a useful law anymore. Instead of jumping into a subversive massive campaign to overthrow the existing system, let's just use the tools that have been created to deal with these types of situations.
The simple fact is that the Internet and digital content has dramatically changed the way that intellectual property works, and the laws haven't kept up.
I like your civic-minded approach. But isn't it a bit idealist while the laws are written by the lobbyists of entrenched multi-billion-dollar businesses? I sincerely hope that's not the case in your country but it's definitely the case in mine.
It seems to me it's the (possibility of) technological circumvention itself which renders the laws outdated. If that's true, then the laws will always lag behind to the point of absurdity (as appears to be the case now).
Suing grandmothers, software patents, suing farmers downwind of the pollen of patented plants, etc. Where's the hope of changing those laws which are backed by multi-billion-dollar industries until lobbyists and campaign contributions are banished from our law-making process?
But isn't it a bit idealist while the laws are written by the lobbyists of entrenched multi-billion-dollar businesses? I sincerely hope that's not the case in your country but it's definitely the case in mine.
Fixing that problem isn't impossible. There are a significant precedents where people have forced governments to act against corporate interests (eg, the environmental movement).
Even things like the Tea Party show that the major US parties can be co-opted by people power. Yes, the Tea Party has mostly been co-opted itself, but look how many entrenched players that removed in such a short period of time. I'd suggest that is a reasonable model to study for anyone interested in creating a pro-consumer political movement.
Let's imagine that some big corporation invented a way to produce free energy, and at the same time, they also influenced current laws to ensure that their patents would never expire.
Would we build all sorts of back-channel technological methods to use these patents anyway so that we may avoid jail and fines? Or, would we simply say, "hey - sorry the idea of 100 year patents just doesn't make sense any more. We're changing the law."
He has been trying to make it extremely secure and anonymous, and all communications are end-to-end encrypted. To me it sounds like the ideal protocol for protection against censorship and spying on the users.
However, I don't know how well it can be combined with a mesh network, especially one that wants to piggy back on the normal Internet, since this protocol is meant for a stand alone network. But perhaps it can be modified for that. It would probably be best to talk to the creator of the protocol about it directly and ask for his help.
There is no real start up, yet. But its pillars are being built, yet. And actually delivering enough of option to be sure its start will be hard to neglect.
Not only is the idea itself not unique; other hackers have been working on this for at least a decade with little practical success. It's hard enough covering a city with wifi let alone connecting a mesh network over the air.
Rushkoff and others think it's just a matter of time... I remain skeptical.
How many of the groups members have worked in telecommunications and understand how antennae work, how signal broadcasting and processing works, how OTA protocols are implemented, etc?
You can't build the kind of robustness that we enjoy today out of commodity hardware. If you want a decentralized darknet, you'll probably have to dust off that 56k modem and get used to using fidonet again.
You can't build the kind of robustness that we enjoy today out of commodity hardware.
And that's not needed either. The purpose is communicating with each other in cases that the government brought down or is heavily filtering the internet (like happens in Egypt, Libia, etc), or in case of a disaster. It doesn't have to be as fast, or robust as the internet. 56k is plenty enough if you just want to send messages or small photos.
And in places no internet connectivity exists at all, it's better than nothing. We're just very, very spoiled.
Perhaps it's worth considering that if a new network is extremely slow compared to the present "expensive name brand hardware"-powered internet then it might not attract as much attention from the "streaming premium content" crowd. They might just leave it alone.
Who knows, by building such a network you might in the process prove that there's more value to an internet than simply as a new channel over which to sell branded entertainment and disseminate advertising. You might also show just how much can be done over a 56k link with a little creativity.
In my condo, I can see between 15 and 20 other wifi routers belonging to my neighbors. Every single one of them is password protected. I doubt any of them are talking to one another.
Forgive my ineptitude, but how does this differ from 'The Deep Web' available on Tor minus the cable coming out of your house?
While I agree SOPA is a terrible idea, internet censorship and having a central controlling organization (Or group of organizations) isn't such a bad thing. Look at Deep Web, it seems, to me, to be primarily used for illegal operations (drugs trade, child pornography and other nastys). The way I see it, this effort would be much better applied to resolving the issues we have with the current internet, reducing centralization and reliance on ISPs rather than "to shit with the working system lets start again".
And that's not even touching the technical aspects, the internet as we know it still isn't anywhere near perfect (IPV4 as an example). Are they expecting this to happen overnight? Some of the greatest minds of the last few generations have worked to make the internet what it is now, if university's are "experimenting" with this stuff it's clearly a long way from a realistic option.
That being said, wireless technologies are always improving. I'm sure the military already have some similar mesh based network (all be it on a smaller scale) far more advanced than anything we've seen (Assuming this since the majority of technological advances in communication originated from or were improved by the military). It's by no means a worthless project but I think the idea that in 6/12 months you can buy a box that gives you access to an un-modorated, unfiltered, private internet is a little ridiculous
I haven't completely read the OP, But why isn't Openmesh ( http://www.open-mesh.org/ previously B.A.T.M.A.N. ) mentioned anywhere in this thread yet? I like the fact that this is getting a lot of energy behind it, but the idea itself is not new. Please don't re-invent any wheels, time is too short for that.
I'm against crazy government control as much as the next guy, but is creating a decentralized system in this manner really the answer to this problem? I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, I am just really curious.
There seems to be a big decentralization movement in recent times (bitcoins!) but even as a person against the extremes of SOPA, I can at least appreciate the securities and benefits of a "traditional" governing body, no matter how ridiculous some members of government are--I'm just speaking as a not so tech savvy person, but to me one of the biggest psychological hurdles for a project like this is giving control to a group of people I am unfamiliar with--there is some sense of a rapport (even if there is some lack of trust) with the traditional government (just like with banks as I allude to bitcoins) that to me is a big obstacle for the meshnet growing to a degree where it becomes a true meshnet.
Either way, I love the hustle, and admire the project immensely.
Enthusiastic people with out technical knowledge are needed. First off a good idea with leadership can succeed in this area. The way to make mesh work which has not been tried has nothing to do with technology or any other comment issue found here. It has to do with how people get the internet right now. If you set up consumer sales side of your mesh project to look like any other ISP from the consumer perspective, i.e. you call up a number and a few hours or days later you have internet then it can work. Issues specific to mesh are you need to focus on islands, so you can only offer service in an ever growing area. As the mesh grows sales can grow until the islands merge. In the meantime, before islands merge you need to have access to old fashioned wire as well as after they merge. Ultimately its just another business model. It can work if deployed well.
I think what you want here is a device you can just plug in, and if it finds any neighbors it's in business. Home WiFi plus whatever kind of additional radio is best suited to join a "city mesh".
So yeah, random people on reddit probably aren't going to come up with this anywhere close to as fast as a small team with just the right skills.
Making and selling a great piece of idiot-proof hardware that does this sounds like a decent startup idea. And now that I've thought about it this much, I'm guessing there must already be some startups selling such a thing (anyone have firsthand knowledge?).
What reddit brings to the table is a large number of interested participants. If a couple of those people live within range of me, the idea suddenly becomes one I might consider buying and plugging in now, today.
This might not be a popular opinion, but as an individual who's capable of designing and implementing this, I'd rather vote in a politician who projects my ideals.
Reality is defined what happens NOW in its complete context. That would be considering all ideas. Through considering, these ideas should indeed be equally. And what happens NOW in its complete context, what is considered suitable, valuable to oppose with is probably created in the future.
Really? What is ridiculous about it? In the face of potential laws like SOPA which requires restrictions on routing traffic to certain destinations, it would seem that worrying about the potential liability of a network with exit nodes allowing traffic to the "regular" internet is exactly something one should worry about.
Actually, I was the one trying to bring that issue up. One can see the problem with exit nodes if you just look at Tor. Exit nodes on Tor are frequently served with DMCA notices and sometimes equipment seizures (in non-US countries). See https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en for more information
There may be ways to overcome the limitations of mesh networking, as outlined by many people here, but you will need to think outside the mesh, so to speak. It is probably best to think of the mesh as the "last mile" component rather than the backbone.
One idea: a $5 laser pointer can be modulated at well over 100 Mbit/s. Everyone in an urban area who can see one side of a building can bounce laser beams off of it. (Data recovery and collision resolution are left as exercises...)
In my student dorm, we used that to connect to the University network (which was a km or two across ...)
We would not get any internet by foggy weather :)
Actually, that was always something funny to say ... "We have internet by laser" then people would go "wow" ... and then you say "and it doesn't work when there is fog" and then suddenly, all the "wow" goes away :D
I read that Xerox did this between two of their buildings many years ago. Apparently it ran across some portion of a motorway and they had to turn if off occassionally. I've forgotten where I read this. Maybe someone else knows the full story.
Even if this project isn't backed or supported by the "right" technically qualified people right now, I have no doubt that that will change as soon as the government-controlled internet becomes a noticeable reality. This is only the beginning. It will grow.
If the goal is to connect peer to peer with a small group of people you know in person and can trust, I see great potential. People congregate in small groups. Facebook friends, Skype contacts, etc. The advantage here is that third parties like Facebook, Microsoft and a gazillion advertisers are not involved. If it's small like that, it's doable as an overlay without using wireless as long as at least one person has a reachable IP and can act as the keeper of everyone else's address info.
If the goal is to create some sort of www replacement that must scale to global internet sizes, where any stranger can connect, and where kids are allowed to do all the things they're not allowed to do legally on the www, I see big problems.
>and where kids are allowed to do all the things they're not allowed to do legally on the www, I see big problems.
How in the seven hells is this a problem of the network protocol? Or any other technology, really? I seriously don't want to take this offtopic, but what you are describing is a problem of the parents/guardians first and foremost, and has absolutely nada to do with the technology we are discussing.
Appeals to emotion like this and the sad truth that they work so well are the exact reason we need decentralized, censorship-resistant networks in the first place. To put it polemically: No, I don't want to "think of the children" because that's the job of their goddamn parents.
Not protocols, but usage. Not emotion, but common sense.
If Skype, a peer to peer network that uses a proprietary protocol and third party servers (neither of which is a prerequisite for a peer to peer network), was used primarily for file sharing over encrypted links, they would have some "big problems", as in "heavily funded lobbyists and plaintiffs", to deal with. These are the same "big problems" that are the driving force behind SOPA and consequently the same ones that have injected some steam into this reddit "think tank". SOPA has some interesting language where it refers to "or any successor protocol". Perhaps the next revision, or the next bill of this nature, will include language that refers to "any internetwork", present or future.
How a peer to peer network is used and who uses it does make a difference in terms of its acceptance and survival, even if in theory it shouldn't.
Here is a distinction I've been trying to make clear over the past couple of days.
While our "vision" of the absolute end goal sounds slightly more like the second, our actual goals are to produce the first. This is a much more realistic plan than our vision, and is what the project really aims to do. The vision just aims to bring everyone together about a set of issues that have been very much discussed in recent times.
There are a couple of problems:
1) They don't have a solid hardware platform to work on, and the feeling I've gotten from talking to some of the people on /r/darknetplan is that they really don't have the proper understanding of wireless tech to make something like this happen. People are proposing cheap commodity wifi gear for this.
While it's certainly possible to do a very high density area with that, it's certainly not feasible to cover an area like a city, at least not without a considerable investment, and an understanding that network performance is going to be abysmal. (And at that point, just use ham radio...)
(Something like what they're proposing might work in an office, not so much in a neighborhood).
So is a problem, but hypothetically you could just toss hardware at it until it went away.
2) It's the addressing, stupid. http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/m2nd5/its_the_a...
I am definitely the last person to discourage people from "doing it wrong" (http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/ - http://thingist.com/t/item/19766/ - http://thingist.com/t/item/21434/), but people running this, prepare yourselves for the reality that you could fail.