

Starfish: A User-Controlled Network - coderdude
http://newtechpost.com/2011/05/05/starfish-a-user-controlled-network

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eps
_But imagine your cell phone has a wi-fi chip, and most of them have it
anyway, it creates a local network. Imagine that network is an ad hoc network
and can immediately connect with other networks. So all the cell phones we
have create their own small networks and become interconnected with each
other._

Ta-da -- <http://penumbra.warmcat.com>

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wcoenen
Imagine that your data has to hop through dozens of cheap consumer routers
with unreliable links to reach its destination. You could easily end up with
multi-second latencies, making the network useless for most applications.

Then you would try to fix that by putting some high-performance traffic
exchange nodes with longer distance links in your network. Perhaps arrange
them into hierarchies... Wait, that's how the internet already works.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering#Modern_peering>

~~~
bdunbar
_Imagine that your data has to hop through dozens of cheap consumer routers
with unreliable links to reach its destination._

By golly - he's re-invented FidoNet.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet>

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CodeMage
Someone's being overly idealistic:

 _"Do you know who’s watching you, do you know who’s looking into your emails
or possibly could?. Do you trust your service provider not to filter your
data, or not to look at what you’re sending and receiving?

"What I’m proposing or trying to do, is to move on."_

[...]

 _"Imagine you’re on your cell phone. Today, if you want to connect to anybody
else you need to go to your provider. But imagine your cell phone has a wi-fi
chip, and most of them have it anyway, it creates a local network. Imagine
that network is an ad hoc network and can immediately connect with other
networks. So all the cell phones we have create their own small networks and
become interconnected with each other. That gives you a whole range of
possibilities, and because you need no infrastructure externally, you make it
by yourself. You have a cell phone, someone else has a cell phone, you just
create it; you can have free network access."_

Let me see if I got that straight: we don't trust a handful of highly-visible,
high-profile entities to behave honorably (i.e. not snoop on us, not filter
our stuff, etc.), so we'll just _crowdsource_ it? Right now we have a handful
of suspects who have to walk on eggshells because everyone's itching to find
something to blame on them. It's far from ideal, but I don't think handing
over my communications to my neighbors or, even worse, arbitrary strangers is
a step in the right direction.

~~~
stellar678
At the very least, this would change the design constraints of the problem.
Right now it's easy to push off communication-security questions because
"generally, mostly, kinda" the network can be trusted to deliver your
information without snooping or tampering. In an environment where there was
no pretense of this trust, it seems that good design would call for more
robust security in order to transit over a wholly untrusted network.

That said, this network looks mighty inefficient. It looks like the terrible
early days of decentralized P2P filesharing where all nodes were equal and
routing barely worked. That didn't clear up until they backpedaled a bit with
superpeer-type setups, which brought things back more like the Internet
diagram in this article.

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sambeau
How is this different to the mobile ad-hoc networking found in the XO-1 'One
Laptop per Child'?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child>

