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Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Team Telecom, a shadowy US national security unit tasked with protecting America's telecommunications systems, is delaying plans by Google, Facebook and other tech companies for the next generation of international fiber optic cables.
Team Telecom comprises representatives from the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice (including the FBI), who assess foreign investments in American telecom infrastructure, with a focus on cybersecurity and surveillance vulnerabilities.
Team Telecom works at a notoriously sluggish pace, taking over seven years to decide that letting China Mobile operate in the US would "raise substantial and serious national security and law enforcement risks," for instance. And while Team Telecom is working, applications are stalled at the FCC.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/18/how-us-national-security-agencies-hold-the-internet-hostage/
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Friday July 26 2019, @03:34PM
I've done as you've stated, about the antenna and friends and so on.
It's an Intranet, though. Anyone trying to poke into it will find the links are not only encrypted, but we've got IPSec VPNs running as well. We're not going for transmission speed records, but we do value our privacy beyond what consumer wifi can reasonbly supply.
I am not sure what google needs in your setup. My friends and I even run Novell IPX--the original Doom, Heretic, Hexen (which sadly hasn't aged well--some of the effects are no longer special...) Magic Carpet 2 (still awesome but Sacrifice can be awesomer), and more modern games looking for TCP/IP like Sacrifice, command and conquer games... all run great. No internet required! Of course we don't really play regularly anymore once the novelty wore off -- lan gaming is not dead yet, but in our case the lan reaches across town. it makes a pick up death match in doom a lot easier to do. Someone set up a quake server with bots, too, and its up 24x7 just like in the old days.
(There was one neighbor that actually had an open, unprotected IPX network advertised off their AP and their printer was on it...any XP machine we had would connect to it automatically when within "range", such as via accidental "cantenna" magification. He was just a few doors down as it turns out--line of sight was obscured but wifi cannons/bazookas cleared the way through. We sent a suggestive printout after mapping a PC to the printer and sending some informational suggestions about how to secure their network cause man those party pictures on that file share they also had open were something else... the guy later told me he thought IPX would be secure because no one else would be using it so he didn't take any steps to secure his! He didn't even have the antenna screwed in and couldn't reach his own IPX network from the yard, so he thought it was safe...)
Of course, everybody involved had to be willing to put an antenna on their roof--the above example not being the norm--and sometimes the home owners associations have had problems with people and their ugly non-conformist ideas. In that case, just hiding it in plain site with a non-functional (or functional) Dish Network service wok usually solved those problems.
Even the wok can be repurposed for wifi signals, but we didn't go to that level. 802.11g seemed to provide a good enough experience with the wifi links/line of sight to not need to dig too deeply into making it all overly hardcore.
That stated, it isn't as easy as I describe--some guis insist you are mistaken or don't have the commands in them that their respective CLIs do, and IPX drivers for modern OSes can be interesting to deal with (but VMs generally solve that problem provided the wifi can run the protocols chosen--which they should, because a true wifi AP doesnt putz around with layer 3 details--it just passes traffic like a wireless hub, and the point-to-whatever is just an elaborate wireless bridging method with protocol encapsulation on top of it to make those higher level connections).
Anyway you sound like you want to share someone elses internet on your mesh or point-to-multipoint (which I guess is uncool to say because mesh cloud is better nowadays). Usually there is a service policy agreement violation that occurs when that happens--that can draw a lot of unwanted attention...but now that so many people have so many devices, it is easier to get away with it provided none of your friends or neighbors are high bandwidth squatters. For that, anyone good with QoS can remedy what polite discussion might not be able to do before anyone gets a nastygram from a provider. (Or just cut them off! Hey, they aren't going to be able to reconnect if you change the IPSec passwords...)
I don't consider Google would provide "real Internet" without some sort of expectation to view that encrypted data, so maybe it would be best to just hide behind NAT in a few places and create some tcip ip-in-tcp ip tunnels within the ipsec tunnels and sort of make a fake software layer mesh redundant between your friends. This whole mesh I speak of is on a secondary network, so we aren't using the actual Internet to link neighbors and friends up--any internet connection would just be to get out to commercial or public entities.
Consider the private hookups to be like frame relay or MPLS or I guess the new buzzword of SD-WAN, except all without a subscription fee or stupid web wizards. One can pull oneself up with one's own bootstrap protocols via TFTP or BootP, after gaining some understanding of how to do it!
It's all possible--consumers are usually discouraged from consuming in that way, though. Just like how we're still maligned against running our own servers, distributing bandwidth across a few ISPs to a private group of resources is against the service agreement even if the amount consumed is no greater than before. It's like what the t-mobile CEO said. Customers that hide their data are denying them of profits because they are somehow "entitled" to profit from analysis of customer usage patterns. That, and it's hard to specifically blame someone for torrenting or whatever if that traffic is mostly obscured within a private network with multiple exit points. Sound sort of like Tor minus the hardcore privacy/security aspects? It is, in a way, but amongst people you know in person and presumably trust.
anyway this is all fun stuff to figure out how to do. at the very least, it might get you reliable wifi in your "man" (or general equivalency) shed out of the house if you have one to hide in away from everyone else if the basement is occupied already.