

Why wireless mesh networks won’t save us from censorship - shaddi
http://sha.ddih.org/2011/11/26/why-wireless-mesh-networks-wont-save-us-from-censorship/

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lucasjung
One thing the article didn't mention, which I've been considering in regards
to this problem: an RF-based internet alternative would be prone to all sorts
of other forms of government interference/monitoring. The U.S. government
already has serious resources at its disposal for the purpose of intercepting
or jamming RF transmissions. For "intercepting," this includes high-power
decryption capabilities, and for "jamming" this includes noise jamming but
also spoofing and signal insertion. So even if an RF mesh-network of some sort
were to be established, the government would be able to:

1: Know exactly where every transmitter is. This means they can find you in
meatspace even more easily than they can on the hard-wired internet.

2: Listen in on your transmissions without all of the legal issues associated
with wiretapping. To make sure they can do so, they would probably need to
pass a law prohibiting the use of many types of cryptography on unlicensed RF
transmissions. Such a law would be much easier to sell to the general public
"because the terrorists could be using it to coordinate attacks." If you break
this law, expect a knock on your door almost instantly because of #1, above.

When you combine #1 and #2, busting "pirates" becomes trivially easy: somebody
sees a "suspicious" file in your transmissions, localizes your transmitter,
and a few minutes later you get a knock on your door.

There's other stuff, like injecting false traffic, etc.

~~~
IgorPartola
Just to clarify: are you saying with your point #2 that the government can
break any encryption currently in wide use with 802.11 networks and all
popular VPN solutions? Or are you just saying that they can physically listen
to encrypted transmissions? I was under the impression that encryption scales
in complexity pretty much infinitely, so long as you don't care about
encryption/decryption speeds.

~~~
delinka
I had a relative that once worked in "government security" for the U.S.
government. What that meant, we weren't permitted to know. Personally, I think
he was full of crap and here's why: in his Professional Opinion, any
encryption algorithm implemented in software was doomed to failure because "it
could be hacked" - he was completely unaware that any hardware circuit can be
emulated in software.

Point: it tends to be these very gov't lackeys that think just because the
signal is in the air that it can be intercepted, decoded, decrypted and its
plaintext content recorded.

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marquis
I'd like to note that every single item listed in this is a technical barrier.
There are no political barriers, there are no wealth or resource barriers. RF
is free to use on the spectrum we need it to work on (ok, until that's
illegal). It's that it's a hard, hard problem to solve and it hasn't been
solved yet. Do not let that stop anyone from continuing to do work on this:
maybe it _will_ get solved.

~~~
shaddi
I generally agree, but I tried to shed some light on the fundamental
physics/math behind why building such a network is impractical. In any case,
it might one day be possible, but I think a better use of resources
(especially for non- and semi-technical people) is to contribute to the social
movement around Internet free speech and to build real-world political
networks.

~~~
sliverstorm
To me the damning evidence is that these problems still haven't been solved
for decades even with a fair amount of work by professionals. Solutions
probably exist, but will a decentralized group of redditors really be the ones
who solve them?

I personally figure if people just accept the low speeds of HF instead of
expecting full Hulu streaming for everyone, a lot of the problems will be
immediately mitigated, but that's unlikely- if only because HF gear is not
nearly as cheap and ubiquitous as WiFI.

~~~
saulrh
There's precedent for well-communicating groups with a well-defined goal
producing impressive results in the short term. Examples include the Manhattan
project, the space race, and the more recent Polymath projects [1]. These
redditors probably aren't the people to do it, but if the same attempt were
made on comp.* or at google it might go somewhere.

[http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Main_Pag...](http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Main_Page)

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wglb
This is a good article grounded in actual experience.

As the former operator of the w8lvn packet radio bbs, i can heartily relate to
_you haven’t lived until you’ve hunted down transient connectivity problems
resulting from RF weirdness in urban areas._

And he details real-world experience like "omnidirectional antennas suck".

Essentially, physics is not on your side here.

~~~
wisty
A directional antenna or two with some kind of actuator might help. A couple
of cantennas that could aim themselves could solve a lot of problems. But
there's still a lot of problems left. Ultimately, you either get really poor
bandwidth, or can only have static assets (like movie files, which don't need
to change over time and can be cached by someone nearby with a few big hard
drives).

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Directional antennas don't help create a "mesh", since they (by definition)
only connect stations in a direct line with each other -- a mesh is supposed
to connect to multiple other stations, so that if one goes offline, a route
can be found through another. A directional antenna will only (typically)
connect to one other node.

~~~
wisty
If you had an antenna and an omni, though, you could connect a local subnet to
the wider area. If you had a few directional antennas in each local subnet
(say, an apartment complex connected by omnis), then the subnets would connect
to the rest of the world.

Wireless meshes don't work. They need to be fractal - local omnis, then
cantennas, then backbones. If every geek had a cantenna (plus an omni to
connect to the non-geeks, and another geek with a cantenna), you could light
up most cities (OK, maybe not quite a city ... I don't really know). From
there, you need some super-geeks finding ways to connect the city nets
(private fiber?), but you don't need many super-geeks.

~~~
pyre
Isn't the problem with this, single points of failure? I guess it's still more
of a mesh than the current infrastructure. But if you're trying to 'route
around the government,' then having a defined structure seems counter to your
goals.

~~~
wisty
A full mesh is impossible. It just doesn't scale. You need a fractal system.
You also need graceful degradation (or progressive enhancement). It would be
great to push a tweat out, and have it visible on the local network until the
local network can sync with the central server.

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sophacles
This seems to assume that the only way to use a network is the current
(near)instant req/resp style networking, which is core to a lot of current
protocols. One of the things a darknet would enable is a slower eventual
delivery model, like email used to be. This is not ideal, but opportunistic
store and forward still can move information faster and easier than no network
at all. Things like freenet and freedom boxes are attempts to look at this
notion.

In scenarios where the darknet is being actively attacked, people are likely
going to be less concerned with instant services than any source of reliable,
uncensored information. Perhaps we need to really look into ways to get
information around following these methodologies and constraints as a
supplement to building darknets.

~~~
wmf
People are only going to buy the equipment in the first place if they can
check their Facebook over it. A network that's designed only for freedom
fighters ends up not getting enough nodes to reach critical mass (see
Freenet). People might tolerate an Internet-incompatible network if it also
came with lots of free warez, though.

~~~
v21
Piracy is definitely the draw for this. Enough to make it practical? Maybe -
it depends on how many good alternatives to piracy exist.

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WiseWeasel
OK, plan B. First, we quantum-entangle a few billion pairs of particles...

Failing that, even without connecting the hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of
square miles between cities, I think there is still great potential political,
economic and recreational value in decentralized Metropolitan Area Networks,
despite the fact that they won't supplant the Internet.

~~~
wolfeater
As the project creator I agree. It will never supplant the Internet, but
localized networks can play a huge role in how the web works however, and I
see establishing these as the real goal of the project.

~~~
110101001010100
It is crucial in my opinion how you define the goals of your project.

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derekreed
Yes, those are all problems, and they will require work to get around. Good
point.

"This will never work." << lol

