from the now-thats-social-networking dept.
Over at PandoDaily, Nanthaniel Mott writes, Are Peer-to-Peer Mesh Networks the Future of Internet Freedom?
"Open Garden has raised $10.8 million to create the next Internet. And as crazy as that sounds, thanks to the success of its FireChat peer-to-peer messaging service, it might just work.
Instead of sending messages through an Internet connection or cellphone network, FireChat uses the Bluetooth and WiFi radios on every smartphone to create its own “mesh network,” which can then transfer data between the networks’ members without requiring any external infrastructure.
That second Internet, or Internet Two or whatever it will be called, is likely to become increasingly popular in the coming years. Countries around the world have started to restrict Internet freedoms, whether it’s through laws requiring companies to keep data on domestic servers or via the imprisonment of people who use the Internet to share information the government doesn’t want them to share."
Are peer-to-peer mesh networks the future of internet freedom?
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Friday December 19 2014, @10:46PM
Look, if my ISP wants me to open up my wifi router as a hotspot - i may as well set it up as a mesh net node and encourage my neighbors to do the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @11:19PM
Most ISPs prohibit you from doing that. The same with hosting (federated) servers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by buswolley on Friday December 19 2014, @11:26PM
They prohibit your from using your internet in such a way, they don't prohibit (and can't) from using tech (ie. wifi and bluetooth) to communicate to other devices. The idea of the mesh network is that it doesn't use the ISP at all.
subicular junctures
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @11:35PM
Mesh networking solves the "last mile" problem. You still need Internet access for inter-city access.
Thankfully, you can tunnel with cjdns or I2P.
It remains to be seen if Namecoin will become the standard for IP address-free host look-ups.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday December 20 2014, @12:11AM
Somebody somewhere has to connect it to the net.
Otherwise all you have is local coms. (For some extended value of Local).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by everdred on Saturday December 20 2014, @01:01AM
Not necessarily. You could theoretically link up your local networks, over long-distance wireless links, without using the legacy Internet.
Of course, you'd be creating another internet, but that's besides the point.
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Saturday December 20 2014, @01:36AM
Or the whole point
subicular junctures
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday December 20 2014, @06:15AM
It is the whole point.
We only need mesh networks because the ISPs will not treat us, or our packets, fairly and accordance with a dumb pipe. They are not entirely to blame. Anytime you have some form of centralized control (read: money flowing upward), you have a point of failure that government can make fail in 2 minutes with armed agents threatening people with language decided by Senators. As government has been wholly hijacked by corporate interests refuses to allow our packets safe passage in the principles of safety or greed.
Decentralized is incredibly attractive as it accomplishes the removal of those influences by rendering them impotent (or so it would seem). It's the people taking back their power, as the regulations controlling ISPs are clearly not conducive to freedom or fair expression. They screw us over.
Back to reality check. We may have enough purchasing power as citizens to loosely hook up and service small communities, and maybe even entire cities. It will *not* be as fast as normal, and because you need to work with the totality of the traffic to create intercity links. Regardless of how greedy and underhanded corporations have been, they aren't lying about the cost of laying long fiber runs across the country.
It's a forced relationship so the answer may be massive civil disobedience in the form of mesh network routers that tunnel all of their traffic. In short, we need MeshNet + DarkNet, or DarkMesh. The real question is how long will the ISPs play ball when their attempt at anti-Net Neutrality fails? Nobody has any money. This is the Great Depression. Endless arguments, debates, and papers showing how much less we make than our fathers 50 years before us. It's very much like ESPN smoking the crack pipe hard thinking they can raises prices above inflation, which has only worked by pushing onto credit cards.
Going to laugh my ass off when the entire industry makes no more money doing their bullshit, only makes less, and then watches in amazement as encrypted traffic (various implementations of Darknet technologies) doubles about every year.
Meshnets are a good idea, but they are dead on arrival for replacing the Internet unless we have honest and frank discussions about our incredible bandwidth needs for these runs connecting up cities.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @07:00PM
We may have enough purchasing power as citizens to loosely hook up and service small communities
There was a related item a while back (fiber).
German Village Expanding Self-Built Broadband Network [soylentnews.org]
The group hopes to connect 59 villages in the county by 2021
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday December 19 2014, @11:34PM
Ah, but check the AUP, and you will find they forbid this, while still doing it themselves.
They probably wouldn't bother tracking you down, unless you was blatantly obvious about it or the bandwidth utilization goes to the internet grew excessive.
But a pure peer-to-peer network isn't that useful except for dense city dwellers. Once you get to be 100 feet from your neighbor (or out of effective wifi/bluetooth range) you are dead in the water. Only a city dweller could have imagined this scheme would actually work/
Still it might be good enough for messaging. But the mesh as a whole will need linkage to the net, probably by thousands of home routers or some such. And that is where the trouble begins and the tragedy of the commons takes hold. Pity the mesh member with a ISP connection living next to several houses full of porn addicted slackers.
Does anyone know of a cell phone that can manage full bore wifi transfer 24/7 and constantly jumping wifi connections with a batter life expectancy of more than a couple hours?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @11:40PM
I think the bandwidth usage can be solved with a "tit for tat" algorithm that throttles leeches.
Yes, I agree mobile devices as routers is kind of silly.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday December 20 2014, @01:22AM
I think the bandwidth usage can be solved with a "tit for tat" algorithm that throttles leeches.
But how would that work, exactly?
Lets say I got a solid internet connection so I share it on a neighborhood mesh.
I don't need bandwidth, I got bandwidth, so from my perspective, everything going through my router is leeching.
Best I can see is some method where uplink providers set a max bandwidth, and provide a means of
telling other uplink providers their max and their 10 second average current load.
All the uplinks are going to need a back channel to balance the load to take advantage of the multiple paths.
This seems to me to require some industrial grade router capability, so that connection requests somehow get handed
off to the least busy uplink.
I've written this type of load balancing for farms of application servers, but I was in control of that, and wouldn't expect that to work in a mesh. You'd kind of want to do that balancing in an mesh of its own, where uplinks and routes could come and go at will.
Sounds messy.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday December 20 2014, @01:32AM
Its good to know some people are working on this...
http://www.academia.edu/6405188/Load_Balancing_Techniques_for_Wireless_Mesh_Networks_A_Survey [academia.edu]
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/tech-reports/2006-11.pdf [buffalo.edu]
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389128606003185 [sciencedirect.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @06:47AM
Well, After that NSA revelations about QFIRE (compromising routers to "beat" real servers for packet injection), I did a bit of a thought experiment. What if you examined common router firmware for 0-day exploits/backdoors and networked a bunch of home routers (possibly after cracking default wireless passwords) without the user's knowledge?
1. Without careful firewalling, this would effectively reduce everybody's security by putting them on the same local network.
2. Assuming IPv6 is used, the ISP may get odd complaints that make no sense according to the trouble-shooting script when the connection drops about once per month.
a. Some major sites like Facebook and Google would "just work", while many smaller sites still solely on IPv4 would not
b. When the user tries by-passing the router and connecting to the modem directly, the Internet would drop out completely (during an outage)
3. Because everybody has bandwidth caps, it would be noticed if everybody got routed through one connection.
a. Every router in the mesh advertises as a (IPv6) gateway.
b. Every router in the mesh keeps track on how much ISP internet bandwidth is used by the mesh.
c. Every router keeps track of how much the mesh is used for Internet access by "local" clients (IE: clients the router owner expects)
d. The gateway adjusts it's advertised distance to the Internet to keep the two above numbers approximately equal (within a GB or so). For "local" clients, the ISP connection would be preferred unless many mesh users used up bandwidth. In the latter case, the mesh would be preferred for Internet access.
e. The last point in d. is a major security vulnerability if the rogue mesh is discovered (as is illustrated by the "Upsidedownternet" website.
The above does not address the case where you have a fat pipe you want to share (in a reasonably fair manner). The simplest way is require your users to authenticate to avoid the shaped queue. You may even be able to bill for (low latency) bandwidth used*. My current ISP, that actually allows sharing, does still prohibit reselling the connection. There may be legal reasons involving registering with the CRTC for this.
*I like the concept of net neutrality, but feel that people should be able to buy dedicated back-haul bandwidth at a premium (in 64kbps chunks). Anything you don't use is up for grabs for the bulk transfers of other users. That implies two things:
a. VOIP should work with 1 or 2 "channels" (if your router does proper QoS).
b. Each "channel" implies you are allowed to use about 16GB of bandwidth in a month. (No sudden jump in price at 300GB :P)
PS: I probably dropped enough information that I can be identified. I am AC because I am too lazy to generate yet another username/password pair.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @08:22AM
Well thought out. Have you considered joining the ORP1 project? http://orp1.com/ [orp1.com]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday December 19 2014, @10:47PM
Next question? (The whole "net neutrality" debate appears to be going south.)
(Score: 4, Informative) by jelizondo on Saturday December 20 2014, @12:48AM
Damn right! Actually it is already south of the border. On July 8, the LEY FEDERAL DE TELECOMUNICACIONES Y RADIODIFUSIÓN (Federal Law on Telecommunications and Radio) was approved, establishing net neutrality in Mexico for all Internet access providers (Art. 145) forbbiding providers from "obstructing, interfering with, filtering or discriminating among applications, content or services."
Not quite happy with Mexico's government on Human Rights and other issues, but at least they got this one right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @12:50AM
Internet2 already exists and is trademarked. Please don't name something "Internet Two".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @01:02AM
LibreNodes. It's not taken yet. [google.com]
The obvious one for (monolingual) Americans is taken. [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @04:36AM
get off that meshnet and login gewg
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday December 20 2014, @05:36PM
what about...
Internet 2.0?
*ducks*
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @05:58PM
AHAHAHA! ^_^ 3
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gravis on Saturday December 20 2014, @02:50AM
unfortunately, when you get a certain number of wireless devices trying to communicate at the same time and you end up with so much noise that they fail to be able to communicate effectively. now let's say you solve that, you now have the problem of having to go through thousands of hops just to connect to a server that on the other side of the country.
the truth is we need the internet backbone in order to have a speedy internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @01:07PM
Not to mention the potential for MITM will multiply like crazy. I mean, I know the gubment is already mirroring the fiber aggregation points on the backbone...but they aren't trying to steal my CC info.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday December 20 2014, @11:51PM
What about cubesats? If citizens launch enough of these into LEO with adequate hardware, there's your internet backbone.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by lizardloop on Saturday December 20 2014, @11:05AM
For me the biggest problem of mesh nets is the lack of content. Assuming I did go to the hassle of organising a mesh net in my city the things I want to do with the internet are
1) Login to my servers that sit in big data centres and administer them.
2) Browse popular news websites.
3) Send emails.
4) Occasional online gaming.
1 and 2 are pretty much out. Conceivably someone could set up a local news website but I doubt you'd get anything of the quality of the current big sites. 3 and 4 could work for an amount of what I do but you'd have to have some good coordination on which games to play.
Essentially the most useful part of the internet (fast cheap communication with almost anywhere in the world) gets taken away by mesh networks.
Don't get me wrong, the idea appeals very strongly, but I just can't see the point in doing it unless it matches up to what we currently have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20 2014, @01:34PM
yeah well i used to think that governments are greedy and thus "sell" naturally occurring, god given radio spectrum
to the highest bidder .. but after running my own little wifi experiments i must say that the "omni present"
cell network would never work if it were not regulated...probably the second most easy thing to destroy/jam
in case of war (electricity being the first ...).
as for "Countries around the world have started to restrict Internet freedoms" they are either AFRAID of their citizens
(good luck wit that) or just plain dumb.
obviously the internet is "not finished" yet.
putting muchos restrictions on what a paying customer can and cannot assemble
and send down the wire really is really just govermentally mandated stupidity of the population -or- maybe they have a side deal
with educational institutes that licenses them to be the only ones allowed to think (and do what they want with "da internet").
of course i understand having to run a GNAT because there aren't enough publicly routable ip addresse to go around,
but messing with DHT networks is a completely different story ...