
How to Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet - Sandman
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Communicate_if_Your_Government_Shuts_Off_Your_Internet
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sambeau
My advice is: If Egypt is anything to go by, use the same tech as the
government.

While all other internet connected devices started to go down - the
Blackberries stayed up.

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borism
Blackberry doesn't have some magical powers to connect to the internet. It's
just an average GSM/3G device. Do you have evidence to suggest authorities
were filtering out non-Blackberry 3G traffic?

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jasongullickson
Yes...everyone thought I was MAD for researching autonomous solar-powered UAV
data relay stations but now who's mad eh?

...seriously it's like the poor-mans communication satellite...

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tomjen3
Wouldn't it be an order of magnitude easier to make a simple gas powered
balloon? You could hook it up with an altitude sensor and make sure it doesn't
drift away.

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jasongullickson
Simpler yes, but where does the gas come from?

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georgecmu
They should have mentioned FidoNet(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet>):
email, file transfer, newsgroups -- over telephone.

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stcredzero
FidoNet over WiFi nodes that only activate intermittently on a varying
schedule would be very hard for the authorities to track down. Just use a
strong stream cipher to produce the schedule.

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thwarted
Sorry for downvoting, I literally fat fingered the arrows on my phone.

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jgrahamc
It's worth pointing out that 'broadcasting' is specifically prohibited by ham
(amateur radio) licenses and so Wired's advice to 'broadcast' would be
breaking the license. Clearly, if you are in a country that's disintegrating
you might not care.

~~~
kd0amg
Most non-hams don't seem to be aware of the distinction between "transmit" and
"broadcast" (transmit to the general public, no reply expected). There are
likely to be other legal issues involved anyway (e.g. restrictions on handling
international third-party traffic: I cannot legally receive a message from an
Egyptian ham to pass on to a non-ham recipient).

This discussion also reminds me that I ought to get PSKmail set up.

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lutorm
This seems like a fine line. You can talk to an Egyptian ham about what's
going on and then decide yourself to pass on the information.

Also, how does the prohibition on passing third-party messages mesh with
packet radio equipment? Am I not allowed to send email over packet? I thought
that was one of the main uses back in the 90s.

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kd0amg
_You can talk to an Egyptian ham about what's going on and then decide
yourself to pass on the information._

As I understand it, this is acceptable. The FCC defines third-party
communication as: "A message from the control operator (first party) of an
amateur station to another amateur station control operator (second party) on
behalf of another person (third party)." If there's no particular person for
whom the message is intended, it would just be something I heard on the radio.

 _Also, how does the prohibition on passing third-party messages mesh with
packet radio equipment? Am I not allowed to send email over packet? I thought
that was one of the main uses back in the 90s._

For domestic traffic (with no encryption, pecuniary interest, etc.), email
over packet should be fine.

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fwdbureau
On a local level (which is on par with this whole open insurgency thing),
opening up your WiFi and using Bonjour services (and why not some kind of
custom landing page) seems like a brilliant idea. Big plus: it doesn't require
a computer degree so that's something that can spread easily, and cover a wide
range.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it amazing to have all the elements at hand and
already working, and never having thought of this

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bitwize
IP-over-carrier-pigeon.

Of course that can be easily thwarted by government agents with shotguns, so
maybe multiply redundant routes?

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emit_time_n3rgy
I'm not completely familiar with these yet but to have them separate from
mega-corporate networks would be great:

\+ <http://www.villagetelco.org>

\+ <http://openbts.sourceforge.net>

OpenBTS Egypt - <http://openbts-egypt.org/blog>

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radu_floricica
I wonder how easy it would be to improvise a "software" modem using the mike
and headphones. Should give around 1k, plus compression... much better then
nothing.

If there's any way to directly connect phones (mobile or landlines) to a
computer without any wiring it would be even better. Come to think of it,
could't one make an android or iphone app for this?

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vlisivka
IF government will shutdown even Internet, will it keep land-line phones
online?

You can start from linmodem project: <http://bellard.org/linmodem.html> , it
may allow to create 9600 connection on 1GHz processor.

Of course, phones have built-in DSP processor, but each phone model has it own
DSP. Some OpenGL chips are able to do FFT using vDSP (e.g. iPhone4), so it can
be used to accelerate soft modem.

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NathanKP
I really like how easy it is to set up an ad-hoc network using Mac OS X. If
the government shuts off the internet Apple computers would probably be
foremost in the creation of a private ad-hoc internet.

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jncraton
Unfortunately, the range of a single computer is very limited, and an ad-hoc
wifi network requires that all computers be in range of one another. What you
would really need to do is create a mesh network, where each host relays
messages to other hosts within range. This way, you can communicate with hosts
that aren't within direct range of your wireless radio.

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s-phi-nl
Has any of this been used for natural disasters where the internet (but not
necessarily telephone or power) went down?

