
A Revolution in Your Pocket - UkiahSmith
https://rbs.io/2019/05/a-revolution-in-your-pocket/
======
RodgerTheGreat
I'm definitely sympathetic to the ideas described in this article. I strongly
feel that software should be designed to serve the interests of users, and
running locally is structurally necessary to accomplish this.

For some applications, it seems plausible that mesh networking and cooperative
routing could potentially replace centralized communications infrastructure.
It's probably OK if an email takes half an hour or more to wind its way
through intermittently connected machines to get to a recipient, and for
things like maps and restaurant menus you can take advantage of physical
locality.

Most of the time, though, the decentralized approach means information
propagates slower, less reliably, and with greater need for redundancy (and
thus overhead), so anything that's already challenging current infrastructure,
like livestreaming video, is right off the table. And then there's the part
where if you aren't living in an urban center there may well not be any other
machines for miles to mesh with.

I'm also doubtful about the assertion that mobile devices are up to the task
of "machine learning". Cell phones have severely limited power and thermal
dissipation capacity. The tensor units that have started to show up on mobile
devices are exclusively designed to _evaluate_ pre-trained networks; training
is far more expensive and practical today only because of the economies of
scale in a datacenter: train once, run many times. But to train fancy NNs, you
need big heaps of data, too, and not always the sort of data you can source in
an... entirely above-board manner.

Perhaps the answer is simply that some of these things aren't done anymore, or
at least not for free?

~~~
devoply
I was thinking today why not just create an overlay network on top of the
internet that throws-back to a place without corporations or governments?...
Back to the 90s internet. With its own DNS servers, etc. Which does not
resolve anything outside of the overlay network. So no facebook, no Google, no
cloud services... Maybe a user run directory like Yahoo! used to be. Nothing
but realms run by webmasters. A walled garden of the people by the people for
the people.

~~~
dillonmckay
Tor?

~~~
tenebrisalietum
i2p.

------
shtack
We've been working on a very similar idea to this for the past few months:
[https://pocketweb.io](https://pocketweb.io)

There is a very early iOS beta available, and Android is coming within the
month. We've thought a lot about battery and data and have gotten really good
results by leveraging existing radio wakeups, batching requests, and doing all
sorts of optimizations to the sites themselves.

Right now we're focused entirely on personal websites, because we believe the
majority of those can actually easily be hosted on a phone (eg. How many
people actually view your LinkedIn page every day? A single Facebook page
doesn't require a datacenter. Etc).

We're limited to single static pages with images right now but better support
for multiple pages and server code with SQLite is coming. More template types,
for example stores, are coming as well.

Let us know what you think!

~~~
mikenew
Love the idea. Couple first impressions from the iOS app though:

1\. Most of the icons and images are really low-res. You should include @2x,
@3x assets or just have higher res images and let them downscale on older
devices. 2\. A lot of the "Latest Active Sites" won't load, and the spinner
just spins forever. I know the whole point is that it's a site hosted on
someone's phone and may or may not be available, but there definitely needs to
be a more graceful way to fail. The spinner blocks the UI and doesn't go away.

I know it's isn't part of the core service you're trying to offer, but seeing
blurry buttons and having the app get into a broken state after clicking some
links is not a good first impression. There's a lot of signalling involved in
the first 30 seconds or so when a user (like me) is trying to decide if they
want to invest time and brainpower into exploring your service, and it's worth
smoothing those things out.

~~~
shtack
Thanks for the feedback! We're still in very early days with regards to the
UI, and I know there's a ton of room for improvement. Hopefully we'll have
something more presentable ready soon!

------
mwcampbell
I noticed that the word "battery" doesn't appear anywhere in this post. Isn't
conserving battery power one reason why we delegate so much to central
services?

That said, I think the wireless routers that a lot of us have in our homes
could play an important role in this kind of decentralized Internet. They'd
need to have more computing power than many wireless routers do, but that's OK
because they're already plugged into the wall all the time.

~~~
awinder
That vision is definitely being explored, not necessarily built into the
router but usually as network attached appliances for some kind of “local
cloud” (idk marketing). Syncloud & antsle are some Ive seen on the device
side, and usually they run owncloud or nextcloud plus other “apps”

The problem is from a reliability standpoint running stuff at home can be not
great. Home network quality / reliability is not going to be datacenter
quality, you’re going to have to deal with this thing running all the time &
power costs, and you’re probably going to have to be tech-inclined enough to
admin these apps at some point. These things have real costs, I think there’s
a place for an honest discussion about what things cost for sure, but I don’t
think people are getting fleeced on apps in the cloud by and large

~~~
lucasverra
there was a proposal ~10years ago on that [https://fon.com/](https://fon.com/)

------
ggm
This feels like a superset of the problem medical records management is in a
digital age.

There are the bits you need public. your anaphylaxis status. your advanced
health directive with 'do not rescucitate' and your organ donation status.

There are the bits you need semi public. You need a trained health
professional in sexual health to know you have chlamydia, but its not relevant
to a physio doing upper body work.

There are the bits you need private. your mental health status adversely
affects your employer insurance, and your employment. You do not wish this
revealed randomly.

Some health models empower some health professionals with magic override keys
to see almost all of it.

Some models empower statisticians to see all of it in 100 years after your
death.

Some models you carry it in a smart card. Some models you carry keys, and its
in a central DB.

~~~
Kiro
> your mental health status adversely affects your employer insurance

This statement makes no sense in 99% of the countries in the world.

~~~
mxuribe
In the U.S., any condition that you have CAN BE AND WILL BE used against you -
either by insurance firms, employers, etc. Even if in some cases it is illegal
to be used against you, the U.S.' environment is such that those with power
over you will use such info against you...so you can unfortunately consider
the U.S. in the 1% of the countries that you cited. </sigh>

~~~
privong
I think you and @Kiro are in agreement. My interpretation of @Kiro's comment
is that most of the world doesn't do employer-provided insurance, so that
aspect of @ggm's comment would essentially only apply to the US.

~~~
ggm
An awful lot of the oecd economies with FinTech, mining and the like do have
employer funded health benefits. It's a tool to attract high-performance
staff, by offering fringe benefits which bypass taxation.

If you are working for a trans national in a developing or emerging economy
you will have these benefits.

So sure, normal health internationally is not the us model. This is packaged
perks

------
FerretFred
This article really resonated with me. I rarely use my Android phone for
talking to people, and the apps and setup are geared to getting work done
securely and with as much privacy as possible. I seem to spend a _lot_ of time
tweaking settings to stop Google trying to run my life and monitoring me.
Overall, I have a good experience but I really wish I didn't have to keep
fighting my phone!

What would _really_ make a difference (to me at least) would be a libre
phone/OS. Yes, I know these are available but I can't afford them. What we
need is a freedom-minded philanthropist to step in and Save The World. Once we
have a more private phone then surely privacy-designed systems could flourish,
as the author describes. If that happened I'd be there like a bear!

~~~
kasbah
I would suggest installing LineageOS on a supported phone and not installing
any of the proprietary Google apps (play services, maps etc). I have been
doing that for a number of years.

[https://lineageos.org/](https://lineageos.org/)

~~~
paulcarroty
LineageOS still use Google services, even without preinstalled google apps.

~~~
kasbah
Which ones, do you have a link where I can read more about it?

~~~
paulcarroty
DNS, connectivity checks, etc

------
jcfrei
This is an idea that keeps coming back every 2 years or so. While it is
enticing to think about, these ideas never manifest into anything. With most
decentralized projects there usually hasn't been a big enough financial
incentive to execute them.

~~~
abecedarius
I don't disagree, but... when Bitcoin came out I ignored it because of the
long history of digital cash schemes that had failed. I assumed the same
forces would give it the same fate.

If decentralized money can finally find some traction, maybe so can other
kinds of networks. Maybe the financial incentives are a part of the context
that could change.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Cryptocurrencies are special in that, almost from their very inception, they
could be used to make money. There are at least four ways one can make money
with them: those with access to cheap electricity and enough starting capital
can literally print money out of thin air; they form unregulated exchanges to
gamble on; they're very useful for scamming people; they're also useful for
laundering money and buying illicit goods. These four things give
cryptocurrencies _a lot_ of interest and participants.

------
fenwick67
The author should check out Scuttlebutt if they haven't already. There's a
compatible mobile app called Manyverse which will sync your social feed over
WLAN or Bluetooth with peers while it's open, and also over the DHT and via
public forwarding servers.

------
tomxor
> Many, if not most, of us already own a hand-sized computer with a persistent
> network connection that we take pretty much everywhere and which lives in
> our pockets or bags. The top of the line Android and Apple personal
> computing devices [...] run at upwards of 2 Ghz, have around 4GB of RAM, and
> on-board storage ranging between 64 and 512 GB.

Who is "many of us" really? If this is supposed to be a promising new avenue
for decentralising the internet it seems a little premature... I feel like
there are too many wide eyed rich people with $1k phones living in a bubble
sometimes - the vast majority of the world cannot afford the expensive toys
you take for granted.

> honestly, does anyone use their “phone” primarily as a voice communication
> device anymore?

Most of the world... (The internet does exist outside san francisco, but hey
you can decentralise _your_ internet I guess)

~~~
rschulman
I live in Washington, DC, actually...

But I appreciate the feedback. I think you're right that I'm being a bit
optimistic here, but the whole vision is a work in progress.

I'm also not sure that current smartphones are actually what you would want to
use for such a vision. They're convenient because lots of people have them,
but they're not purpose-built for the kind of work that I'm discussing here.

~~~
tomxor
> I live in Washington, DC, actually...

Yes, SF was just a euphemism for "rich people city", oh great now you made me
say it!

> I'm also not sure that current smartphones are actually what you would want
> to use for such a vision. They're convenient because lots of people have
> them, but they're not purpose-built for the kind of work that I'm discussing
> here.

Smartphone technology has already created lots of nice side-effects like the
super cheap single board computer craze... I honestly think this is currently
the closest device that is of a practical cost and performance for almost
"everyone" as a personal server.

But the main issue with all these decentralised ideas is not really if your
personal server is fast enough, but whether it has enough pipe (this is still
a problem even in a mesh network). Dare something be slightly popular
(especially video), your personal pipe will never be large enough, this is
where centralisation rules unless P2P serving technology is pushed more (there
are already some nice working examples out there for video and even entire
static sites).

------
sorrowfulgeek
This is not a new idea. Apple already emphasises that they do all the machine
learning on your own device and no data is sent to the cloud. But this
approach only works well for a small class of problems. For other types of
problems you need to look at data wholistically at a large scale in order to
see patterns and you need a cloud service.

But more importantly we know that complex services break once in a while. If
such services run on entirely on your personal device then the complexity of
your device goes up exponentially. That’s not good. We learned in the 90’s
that a better model is to centralize complexity, and make end devices as
simple as possible. (Look up Larry Ellison’s 90’s speeches about Network
Computing.) So, no, moving the center of computing to personal devices is not
a good idea!

~~~
boomlinde
_> For other types of problems you need to look at data wholistically at a
large scale in order to see patterns and you need a cloud service._

What types of problems do you have in mind?

 _> But more importantly we know that complex services break once in a while.
If such services run on entirely on your personal device then the complexity
of your device goes up exponentially._

The idea is that a lot of problems aren't so complex once delegated to
participants of the network.

 _> We learned in the 90’s that a better model is to centralize complexity,
and make end devices as simple as possible. (Look up Larry Ellison’s 90’s
speeches about Network Computing.) So, no, moving the center of computing to
personal devices is not a good idea!_

By "we learned in the 90s" you mean that a company with an obvious commercial
interest in the idea tried to push it and largely failed because it was based
on assumptions that were practically Jurassic within a few years ("you don't
need a powerful machine to support the use of common network services" and
"thin clients can be much cheaper than general purpose computers"). We have
our multi-core gigs-of-RAM phones and multi-core gigs-of-RAM Chromebooks now
that may superficially qualify for implementing the idea of a "network
computer" or even "thin clients" by dubious standards, but are actually just
powerful devices that are locked down to proprietary third party services for
reasons that have no real advantage to the consumer; "fat" clients.

Other things we learned in the 90s: JNCO jeans are cool.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
_> What types of problems do you have in mind?_

Search comes to mind. Traffic information systems are going to become more
important. Also, everything related to fighting fraud, spam, etc.

------
mark_l_watson
Nice write up. I am straying off topic, but I am interested in local
decentralized data, machine learning, and apps. I switched to iOS several
years ago for privacy reasons, but at least a few years ago it was a nuisance
to permanently install one’s own apps on your iPhone. My iOS developer account
expired a few years ago so maybe this has changed. It seems important to be
able to build apps from source code and install them on your own device.
Android is probably a better story for this but my Samsung phones had a ton of
crap ware on them, taking hours to clean up (as much as possible). What do
people use? De-Googlized Androids? Easier way to install one’s own iOS apps
just on your device?

~~~
29083011397778
I've been using a de-Googled Blackberry KeyOne. I adore the keyboard, and
Blackberry is pretty low on apps with undisclosed and/or non-standard
permissions[1]. Root's unavailable, but disabling everything down to, and
including, Play Services, is good enough until the Librem 5 is available.

At this point I'm down to a minimum of apps from the yalP store (Firefox,
Whatsapp, Signal, Wire, VLC), with everything else on F-Droid.

AndOSM is more than good enough for me; either it's right there within a
search, or I find a website with an address, and add what was missing at my
earliest convenience. It's not perfect, but data seems to be added faster than
the world changes, suggesting Google will have to innovate or lose their lead
in accuracy/completeness.

[1]
[http://eprints.networks.imdea.org/1959/1/An_Analysis_of_Pre-...](http://eprints.networks.imdea.org/1959/1/An_Analysis_of_Pre-
installed_Android_Software_2019_EN.pdf)

------
genpfault
Keeping all those radios powered on and transmitting/receiving for mesh
network servicing/upkeep is going to burn through battery pretty quick :(

~~~
rschulman
Author here.... I'm actually really interested in what we can do about the
battery situation. The vision I laid out is clearly more battery intensive
than your average phone is today. I do have some ideas about breaking apart
the compute and display components, allowing the compute (and wireless) to go
in a bag (or something) and connect up to a hefty battery while the human
interface components are lighter weight.

~~~
theamk
Carrieng extra weight in my backpack and remembering to charge it all the time
sounds pretty annoying. Why would someone do this, compared to using a remote
computer? Maybe a home server, if they really hate cloud?

------
JohnJamesRambo
Is there any hope we can have something like a "Linux phone" someday and not
have to cater to anyone or any privacy infringement at all?

~~~
louib
I'd say our main hope at the moment is the Librem 5
[https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/)

------
Causality1
Assuming I'm an average user, this revolution would require my phone to double
the time spent transmitting and receiving data, and block off a large chunk of
its internal storage for information I don't care about. I cannot imagine as a
consumer thinking these losses if battery life and data capacity ever being
worth it.

------
ekianjo
Sharing data directly from mobile sounds like a poor idea since data caps and
data volume pricing is rampant in many countries. Plus it is likely to make a
poor battery life even worse. I would rather folks upload data on their home
or shared servers for sharing purposes.

------
SmellyGeekBoy
A decentralised internet running on mobile devices? Richard Hendricks would
like a word.

------
fit2rule
I really wish the OS vendors weren't asleep at the wheel on this one, or
otherwise being distracted by the effort to just 'move everything to the
cloud'.

Imagine if we had an OS that solved the usability problems of IPFS and made it
immensely easy to publish content on ones own named segment of an IPFS network
- instead of having things like Dropbox glom themselves around a paltry excuse
for file-sharing system services that exist in most modern OS's today?

Wouldn't it be grand if someone write an email client - yes, EMAIL - that
integrated with a smart contact system, allowing one to run and operate ones
own social network without requiring any further infrastructure beyond local,
private email services. Everything I do on Facebook, I was once able to do
just as easily on Email - the interface is the only difference. I want social
networking back under my control again, and a return to email, wrapped in a
better local tool for providing the services, is the way to do it.

I also want to be able to turn myself off the Internet - having the ability to
turn my phone off and be unavailable to the Internet at large - not just as a
consumer, but also as a provider of information - should be a basic,
inarguable right.

If the OS vendors weren't chasing the cloud bucks, this would be a reality.

I believe an opportunity for a smart team exists: build a Linux distribution
which incorporates a few basic ideological rules:

* The user owns their data

* The user controls their data

* No new services or protocols are needed to provide better services: Use OSI properly or GTFO

* The UI is the final frontier for freedom

* If the user wants to fully disappear: OFF SWITCH

* If the user wants to engage in public discourse: ON SWITCH

* De-centralize all the things, bring control back to the local user always

As the years go by, I feel more and more inclined to start a test-bed Linux
distro which uses these rules to build out a user-controlled OS designed for
widespread content distribution on the basis of such things as IPFS, albeit
with a much, much better UI for maintaining ones assets than currently exists.
If anyone else is interested in such an experiment, I am all ears ..

~~~
theamk
Btw, "OFF SWITCH" is fundamentally incompatible with IPFS.

If you serve your website from IPFS, the first visitor will get the full copy
and start serving it. You can toggle your switch as much as you want, this
won't have any effect.

It's funny that Facebook is much better at giving control to user than email.
At least in Facebook, you can delete post. And once you send email, there is
no way to retract it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _It 's funny that Facebook is much better at giving control to user than
> email. At least in Facebook, you can delete post. And once you send email,
> there is no way to retract it._

This is hitting straight into data ownership question. As a sender, I might
want the ability to retract a message I sent. As a receiver, however, I do
_not_ want the sender to have that ability. Once a message reaches my inbox, I
want to own it.

I'm strongly on the receiver side on this one. This is how it works in
meatspace - once you send a message, you can't unsend it; it belongs to the
transport layer and then to the receiver.

------
nanomonkey
Anyone interested in this sort of revolution should look into Dweb Camp
([https://dwebcamp.org/about/](https://dwebcamp.org/about/)) put on by the
Internet Archive crew. Folks from Mastodon, Gun, Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Beaker
Browser (DAT), etc. will likely be there. If not, look into these names,
download Manyverse for your Android phone (Scuttlebutt client) and start
playing around.

------
jamesgeck0
I keep waiting for someone to port Beaker Browser[1] or Dat to mobile.

1\. [https://beakerbrowser.com/](https://beakerbrowser.com/)

------
ilaksh
I like a lot of these ideas. And eventually it seems like mobile devices is
where it could go.

But before we are entirely reliant on mobile, we may be able to do a lot of it
on our home computers over the regular internet using decentralized protocols.

But back to mobile, does anyone know of any open decentralized identity
solutions that will run on a smartphone?

------
tanzbaer
A summary at the beginning would be nice.

~~~
JadeNB
The paragraph after "The Vision" seems reasonably clear on this:

> There is the potential today to reclaim control of our digital lives from
> monopolist platforms and unnecessary rent-seeking. There is a world within
> reach where always-on, always-connected pocket computers become personal
> data stores. All your photos, documents, messages, and other data live with
> you, not on a faceless server belonging to a random corporation. The only
> machine learning done is done for you. Data only leaves your device because
> you want to send it somewhere.

~~~
Zanni
But they're not stored on central servers because we don't have room on our
phones but because we want to share them with others. This whole article feels
like an attack on Facebook and similar services without actually naming them.
And, as a consequence, without actually addressing how they succeeded or how
to supplant them.

~~~
JadeNB
I wasn't making an argument, just repeating the author's summary that was
requested.

------
ggreer
I don't know where to begin so I'll just quote chunks and respond to them.

> Our data will stay on our mobile computers and be backed up (encrypted of
> course) in the cloud

If one's phone is stolen or destroyed, how does one restore from the cloud
backup? What prevents me from buying a 2nd phone and attempting to "restore"
it from my friend's backup? Do I just have to guess his password? I'm
imagining something like Apple's iCloud backups but that service involves a
_lot_ of details that need to be right to ensure its security. That costs
money, which means users either have to pay in cash or by having their data
mined (or both).

I predict that the most popular backup service in this hypothetical world
would be a free service that leaves user data unencrypted and sells it to 3rd
parties.

> We will carry with us the fundamental representation of our identity, backed
> and verified by advanced encryption, instead of cumbersome passwords or
> logins associated with the same large platforms that control our social
> lives

That's great until the battery dies or there's a hardware failure or the phone
is lost or stolen. Then you have to restore from a backup and that means
verifying your identity in some other manner. At some point, identity reduces
to a combination of: 1. A password or secret. (Something you know.) 2. A token
issued by some trusted entity declaring you are who you claim to be.
(Something you have.) 3. A biometric. (Something you are.) Assuming your phone
is dead, only option 1 can be used without a 3rd party storing identifying
information about you.

> Sharing of data, either broadly with a large group or directly person to
> person, will happen directly between mobile computers, skipping the
> intermediaries like Facebook or Twitter we’re used to today

People's phones aren't always online at the same time. Sometimes they're in a
tunnel or on a plane or away from civilization. Given that constraint, who is
storing and transmitting the data between the two people? Who runs the service
that lets phones say, "I'm Bob's phone. I want to talk to Alice's phone. What
is her IP? Oh she's offline? OK send her this data when she's back." Are they
compensated for doing so? If not, why would they run such a service?

> Artificial assistance will be local first – for example, searches for the
> best nearby coffee shop will turn to the nearby network for responses before
> asking the entire planet

I seriously doubt the local network would give better recommendations and
results than Yelp or Google Maps, as both entities would sync the local info
to their own databases and run their own algorithms on the data. Their results
would be a superset of the local data with better algorithms. Who curates the
local network's results for spam or fake reviews? Why would they have an
incentive to do so?

> Machine learning will provide personalized intelligent assistance that runs
> on your own mobile computer

I don't think that could work. The latest phones have hardware to run ML
algorithms efficiently, but they don't have the hardware to train them. That
requires TPUs and a lot of power. Also you need large data sets to train
models. That means aggregating lots of people's data.

Most people either don't understand or don't care about the implications of
Facebook/Google/Amazon slurping up information about them. If anything, people
prefer it because they get a better experience. Their news feed has more
interesting content. Their Amazon recommendations more closely match what they
want. Their search results are more relevant. For these people, the current
situation is a win-win.

I'm not against this idea, I just don't think it has a chance of working. For
something new to succeed, it needs to be more compelling than existing
products. More importantly, it needs to offer advantages that existing
products can't copy. If at the end of the day you build something that's
slightly less convenient to use than Facebook, it doesn't matter how privacy-
centric it is. You'll only attract a few idealists.

------
8bitsrule
A phone is good for talking to people. Don't need a computer for that. Much
better audio (analog) would be a plus.

I'd use a mobile-sized computer with no radios, just ethernet, USB (for a
keyboard) and HDMI (monitor).

Putting both in one package? just asking for troubles.

~~~
theamk
> I'd use a mobile-sized computer with no radios, just ethernet, USB (for a
> keyboard) and HDMI (monitor).

sounds exactly like Raspberry PI? (or any of the 100's of other cheap SBCs)

------
stickfigure
This is just... weird.

We have centralized services for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that
they're more reliable than decentralized systems. Phones get lost, stolen,
drowned, and crushed. People drive through tunnels or into mountains without
cell signal. Batteries die.

It seems patently absurd to think that a P2P network of handsets is somehow
going to replace The Datacenter, on any timescale.

~~~
GregoryPerry
That's pretty much the intent and role of IPFS though. Based upon current
saturation statistics for mobile telephone handsets (which has to be 95%+ for
every person 15+ years old in the USA at least), you're only a few meters away
from another handset that's likely GPS enabled. Why in the world do we need
centralized mobile carrier infrastructure when mesh-based P2P comms are now
possible over ISM band networks? An IPFS + 900MHz P2P mobile chipset addon +
GPS-based geographical routed P2P communications transport for handsets (and
rapid adoption of the same) is all it would take to eliminate the mobile
carriers. This could be as simple as a BLE-enabled device or phone case...

~~~
foobarian
Mesh networks unfortunately scale really poorly [1]: O(1/sqrt(N)). You really
need a fat backbone to turn the topology into something more like a hypercube.

[1]
[https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/grid:mobicom01/paper.pdf](https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/grid:mobicom01/paper.pdf)

~~~
GregoryPerry
...for static ad hoc networks. GPS-based geographical routing would be a
dynamic, constantly changing optimized mesh.

~~~
foobarian
Type of routing doesn't make a difference for the above result. The main
assumption is that node-pairs that want to communicate have random locations.
That leads to O(N) pairs trying to go across O(sqrt(N)) links in the middle.

In practice who knows what kind of communication patterns you would get.
Applications would probably evolve around the long distance limit if it
existed, but it's hard to imagine not having backbone links. Most likely the
meshes would stay relatively localized (and I believe there exist a number of
regional wireless mesh networks out there serving real customers).

------
verdverm
What about the potential for malware propagation? Why should I trust the mesh
network?

------
ohiovr
reminds me of beartooth

[https://beartooth.com](https://beartooth.com)

------
judge2020
Would like to note that the idea of mesh decentralized networks is a big plot
point (later) in the Silicon Valley HBO show -
[https://play.hbonow.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GVU2WugfAylFvj...](https://play.hbonow.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GVU2WugfAylFvjSoJATvA?camp=Search&play=true)

