
Mesh Networks - dil8
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-privacy-nsa-isp
======
shaddi
It seems like there's been another surge of interest of late in mesh networks.
Last time this happened, I wrote up a piece explaining why mesh networks are
really a poor solution for circumventing censorship:
[http://sha.ddih.org/2011/11/26/why-wireless-mesh-networks-
wo...](http://sha.ddih.org/2011/11/26/why-wireless-mesh-networks-wont-save-us-
from-censorship). Since then, some of my colleagues and I at Berkeley wrote a
more academic version of this blog post. The talk is available here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMYDmtzsTQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doMYDmtzsTQ)
and you can grab the paper too if you're interested:
[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~shaddi/papers/foci13.pdf](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~shaddi/papers/foci13.pdf).
The short version is mesh networks have fundamental scaling limitations that
make them a poor choice for building alternative infrastructures like the ones
discussed in this article; for example, a result from 2000 showed that
capacity available to each node in a mesh network actually _decreases_ as the
mesh grows.

The other thing I'd note is that this article is referring to "mesh networks",
when it really means "community networks": networks run by a community,
regardless of whether the network is a mesh or not. I don't know about the
Athens network in particular, but I know that the Freifunk and Guifi networks
are rather hierarchically structured (i.e., are not true mesh networks). This
is necessary for building a wireless network with reasonable performance due
to the aforementioned fundamental scaling limitations of mesh networks.

I love the enthusiasm of everyone working on mesh networks, but I think it's
valuable to keep a critical perspective and not get carried away with that
enthusiasm, if for no other reason than to stay honest about the technical
challenges involved.

~~~
mathgenius
I'm wondering if software defined radio has anything to contribute here. Ultra
wideband could help to mask the radio signals. Software defined antenna's
could help with the directionality problem. This stuff is expensive today, but
maybe not in a few years..

I'm really surprised that P2P doesn't scale on a mesh and would like to
understand this better. I do research on message passing algorithms and
obviously trees (hierarchies) are great, meshes are not... I can see that the
overhead of routing messages is going to grow (like n^2?) with the mesh size,
but i'm surprised there is no way around this.

~~~
wmf
In general, the market has overtaken hobbyist hacking by a wide margin. Any
technique you are considering has already been considered and either adopted
or abandoned by the Broadcoms of the world. Basically all radios are now SDR-
ish but their firmware only contains a highly-optimized implementation of a
single protocol (e.g. 802.11). Sure, a spinal code PHY with a mesh MAC will
beat 802.11 by some percentage, but it costs 10x more because it's an FPGA
instead of an ASIC so you end up switching back to Atheros/Broadcom radios.

------
devx
I hope this becomes a bigger trend, but if we're going to do this _again_ ,
then I hope we do it right this time, and we make it as secure, as
uncontrollable by governments, and as anonymous as possible (if you so make
that decision on it).

The US government/NSA is ruining the old Internet, so I hope the new one will
be very resistant to such attempts in the future. I would watch out especially
for hardware-level backdoors for such an Internet.

If they can't spy on the network directly because it's P2P they will try to
force either the OS vendors or the hardware vendors to implement backdoors and
keyloggers for them. So at the very least the focus should be on open source
operating systems with _open source firmware_ (and possibly even open source
hardware in the future). Such hardware should be given _extreme preference_
for the mesh networks.

~~~
olefoo
The TOR project has been doing some work on deterministic builds to deal with
exactly that issue. [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-
part-o...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-one-
cyberwar-and-global-compromise)

I never thought that the whole "trusting trust" essay would become a practical
reality and an everyday danger that must be mitigated. But welcome to the 21st
century. No flying cars, but lots of dystopian cyber punks eager to get in
your business.

------
frisco
I saw an article about this a little while ago. If anywhere in the world could
support a wide scale mesh network, it would have to be the Bay Area. It would
be a really cool experiment to blanket a part of the Valley in mesh wifi: I
imagine it would be very doable to raise $100K and send 1,500 mesh routers to
people in Palo Alto or SOMA. Open Mesh has some really cool low-cost ($50 -
$75) hardware that seems to _just work_ : [http://www.open-
mesh.com/](http://www.open-mesh.com/). Some might be plugged into an upstream
link, but if most were only powered on as relays it would still work.

~~~
616c
And yet another mesh network, from HacDC hackerspace in Washington.

[http://project-byzantium.org/](http://project-byzantium.org/)

~~~
benkillin
"The goal of Project Byzantium is to develop a communication system by which
users can connect to each other and share information in the absence of
convenient access to the Internet. This is done by setting up an ad-hoc
wireless mesh network that offers services which replace popular websites
often used for this purpose, such as Twitter and IRC." \- from
[http://project-byzantium.org/about/](http://project-byzantium.org/about/)

------
jurjenh
While this is a great solution for places without easy last-mile connections,
it seems to me this would still be vulnerable, as one compromised connection
would essentially allow the same kind of snooping that we've got going on now.

Does anyone know whether this is so, or how to protect against snooping, as I
would assume there is some implicit level of trust required for a network like
this to stay secure.

~~~
oscargrouch
A sort of invitation only controlled by social relations? not perfect but at
least, misbehaving people can be trackable..

should be based in social connections and trust.. the old school policy

~~~
vidarh
That creates an active _incentive_ to physically lean on people to roll up
networks.

cjdns works by requiring people to exchange keys with someone out of band to
get access to their mesh, and to me that just seems as fundamentally defeating
the purpose.

Yes, that means you need to build a system where bad guys are hard to
impossible to track down and throw off the mesh. The problem is if you create
a system where misbehaving people are trackable, then good guys can be tracked
too.

------
scrollbar
A couple comments mentioned wanting to build this in the Bay Area. I've been
wondering for awhile why there's not an active group here.

Let's meet up to discuss more, how about a Google group to organize?
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sf-
meshnet](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sf-meshnet)

------
ck2
If you wanted to start a mesh network in your town, is there advice on how to
protect yourself from legal liability in case someone does something clearly
illegal with it?

Do mesh operators have the same "safe harbor" protections?

What if the FBI shows up on your doorstep and says "give us access or go to
prison" ?

~~~
bluedino
What do you do if your ISP says 'shut it down'?

~~~
wmf
The mesh itself should probably be an ISP. For whatever reason I get the
impression that ISPs give downstream ISPs much more benefit of the doubt than
they give end customers.

------
daurnimator
Similar thing exists in Melbourne, Australia:
[http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/](http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/)

~~~
nikatwork
There used to be one in Brisbane in the mid 2000s (BrisMesh), but it seems to
be dead now.

~~~
femto
Most capital cities in Australia had a wireless mesh project during that era.
wireless.org[1] was (and still is?) the toplevel website.

Melbourne and Perth seem to be the only ones left with active nodes? Canberra
(air.net) used to be strong. Sydney lives on in the form of a website[2] and
nodedb[3], a world wide map of mesh network nodes, started by "evilbunny"
(Duane Groth).

The servers are still live, but the content is well out of date. The projects
are dead, but all the infrastructure seems to still be there, if interest ever
revives.

[1] [http://www.wireless.org.au/](http://www.wireless.org.au/)

[1] [http://www.sydneywireless.com/](http://www.sydneywireless.com/)

[2] [http://www.nodedb.com/](http://www.nodedb.com/)

------
dil8
"To repurpose the famous A.J. Liebling statement, internet freedom is
guaranteed only to those who own a connection. "And right now, you and me
don't own the internet—we just rent the capacity to access it from the
companies that do own it," Wilder says."

------
rwhitman
I guess it makes sense that the future could be dominated by multiple,
parallel internets of varying degrees of freedom. The corporate controlled
internet we know today is just the mainstream realm of YouTube and email,
while darker DIY internets pop up that are the realm of torrents, bitcoin and
various hackery. Kind of seems obvious this would happen eventually

------
sandGorgon
Im quite surprised that noone mentioned AirJaldi - which has to be some of the
most pioneering work in this area, over some of the most inhospitable terrain.

It was built to connect the Tibetan community in Dharmsala, India using
modified, off the shelf hardware and custom software at some of the hardest
mountainous terrain where such equipment can be deployed.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi

~~~
chrisbolt
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi)

------
MichaelMoser123
Don't worry, if this idea gets adopted then they will quickly label it as a
'terrorist network' ; no problem.

~~~
cLeEOGPw
Besides I think since it would be quite local networks, it could be easily
jammed by few NSA stations in the area.

------
damian2000
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_netw...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region)

------
freifunk_berlin
There is a huge community around wireless community networks in Germany.
Checkout [http://start.freifunk.net/](http://start.freifunk.net/)

Don't miss the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks
([http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/](http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/)).

------
gwu78
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?page...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html?pagewanted=all)

For best UX, set your "Referrer:" header to google.com

Also, I think Cisco paid over a billion for one mesh community network's
project. I think a YC cofounder may have been involved in that project. Not
sure. Its Cisco brand name is Meraki.

It appears portable autonomous networks (i.e. no telco needed) are useful and
valuable for many, diverse reasons. I posit that if you can build your "no
telco required" network from affordable parts and can get it to work
consistently, then it has value, irrespective of whatever "intended uses" for
it you might have in mind.

Of course, I could be wrong.

~~~
wmf
_Also, I think Cisco paid over a billion for one mesh community network 's
project._

Meraki was worth $1B because they almost completely pivoted away from mesh
towards more conventional networking.

~~~
gwu78
Almost.

If I build a better LAN, it might be used by companies with high maintenance
corporate networks, or it might be used by high scoring gamers at LAN parties.
The LAN technology does not fundamentally change, only the usage.

However, your point is well taken. As far as buzzwords go, "mesh network" is
not in the same league as "cloud computing". You will not see "mesh network"
in Cisco's marketing.

But was this really a "pivot"? Or is this a case of a use (corporate LAN) that
differs from the original one (community LAN): what I would call an
"unintended use".

My idea of a "pivot" is something like when some young developers want to
start a company that takes orders for food delivery over the web but then,
after consulting with the older folks who would provide funding, decide
instead to build a news commentary blog that functions like a forum. That
sounds like more than a change of usage. It sounds like an entirely different
program. But maybe not. Maybe the system they create for taking orders is more
or less the same one they use for taking comments on news items.

Anyway, it's an interesting story and regardless of how the stuff is being
used now, it was originally used for creating "mesh networks", a type of
portable network that could run with a telco. Now it is used, by Cisco
customers, for creating "distributed networks".

~~~
wmf
My point is that newer Meraki products don't use mesh technology at all, so
it's not just a different use case.

~~~
gwu78
But, for example, Meraki products are used to create LAN's that have an OOB
control plane. Correct? That sounds a lot like "supernodes", where Cisco runs
the supernodes. Is that "traditional networking"?

I'm not clear on the exact definition of "mesh networking", but I think it
implies forwarding data traffic. If so, that disqualifies Meraki. But I'm not
sure of the purpose of your point (with which I agree) because I never used
the terms "mesh networking" or "mesh technology".

For the record, I used the words "portable" and "no telco needed". In my mind,
this encompasses more than just "mesh networks".

------
Carltonian
There's just a lot that has to be rethought for mesh networks to work as "show
up with an antenna and you're on the internet/ are the internet". IP layer,
I'm looking at you.

I remember being told about research being done on multi-core processing in
the 70's, but no headway there could outpace the standard of shrinking the
technology and increasing the clock rate. Now we may as well assume n-cores.
It's my hope (because mesh networks sound way more democratized and just
"seem" like the next logical way of scaling the internet) that antennas become
cheaper at a faster rate than wired infrastructure (given the fairly inelastic
cost of digging shit up) and mesh networks start to make sense.

------
fphhotchips
This seems something like the Serval Project
([http://www.servalproject.org/](http://www.servalproject.org/)). Difference
being that Serval is for mobile telecommunications meshes, rather than
fixed(-ish) data connections.

~~~
devx
Or the Project Meshnet:

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

[http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan](http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan)

------
junto
Could someone build this into DD-WRT or Tomato and then build this on top of
WIFI / WLAN? In a built-up conurbation, you have a high concentration of WIFI
routers that have a short range but with such a large concentration, maybe it
doesn't matter?

------
gboudrias
We've also got the same thing going on in Montreal :)
[http://wiki.reseaulibre.ca](http://wiki.reseaulibre.ca) (we're trying to
figure out how to have a bilingual wiki...)

------
mark_l_watson
I live in the mountains (Central Arizona) and I have garnered some interest of
other people in my community to set up a local mesh network. Really good in
emergencies (e.g., east coast during Hurricane Sandy).

------
sigil
If you live in Seattle and you're curious about mesh networking, I highly
recommend checking out
[http://seattlewireless.net/](http://seattlewireless.net/)

They've been at it since 2000, have various nodes throughout the city and some
impressive long distance directional links. (Seattle's topography provides
some interesting challenges.) When I lived there in about 2005 there were
regular wireless hack nights. Find Matt Westervelt or Rob Flickenger.

------
wyclif
Submitted by me 2 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266765)

------
synchronise
What backbone protocol is largely used for these projects? I only ask because
the range of even 802.11ac would be a limiting factor in these sorts of
networks.

~~~
sliverstorm
In densely populated areas, WiFi can suffice due to the mesh topology.

------
webmech
We should definitely do this in america, God we need this!

~~~
pcunite
This is awesome, however, municipalities have put _fear_ into people wishing
to do this over _legal_ issues arising from what someone _might_ do on your
connection. Who is to blame when something illegal (mp3 download, etc)
happens? That whole issue needs to be put to rest so we as a society can
create our own Internet without fear of suppression.

~~~
mark_l_watson
+1 great point. I sometimes leave my wifi open (I live in a small town, if
that means anything) but then I consider the legal implications and lock it up
for a while. ...then repeat...

The best solution would be allowing people to risk free run grid networks
(which would be, I think, very low bandwidth) and have communities also supply
separtae low bandwidth Internet connected wifi for free. We would then use a
paid for service for anything for more than text or other low bandwidth uses.
No one would download large mp3s, watch Netflix, etc. from the very low
bandwidth community wifi, and the separate grid network would be local and
likely not have anything to attract "Imperial interest" (sorry about the Star
Wars metaphor :-)

Local grid networks could be part of support for local libraries, community
centers, etc.

~~~
krichman
Having an open wifi should leave you free of any charges in the same way that
an ISP is. Maybe it should be not culpable modulo keeping logs of everything
for up to three months so that law enforcement can attempt to find anyone
committing a crime once they have a warrant.

------
EGreg
This is excellent! The Internet actually was supposed to be one InterNetwork
of many. How is this different than a LAN though?

~~~
rantanplan
The Internet _is_ an inter-network of many.

Also the "L" in LAN, stands for "Local".

------
antonios
I had been a member of the AWMN for some years. You can see a map of the nodes
here: [http://wind.awmn.net/?page=gmap](http://wind.awmn.net/?page=gmap)

I remember AWMN had experienced a boost when the ADSL's were out but very
expensive, so many people used to buy one and share it alltogether.

It has come a long way since.

------
mathattack
Seems a stretch to say its untouchable. A policeman. An always show up and ask
you to attach some hardware to the machine.

~~~
einhverfr
Or an antenna could just listen in on the signals.....

------
xradionut
Reminds me of the packet networks that we hams used to build back in the BBS
days. Most of the stations went off air with wide spread commercial internet
service and operator turn over, but there's a renewed interest with newer,
cheaper, radio gear come out.

Also there's many cities with a first responders mesh network.

~~~
lostapathy
There's been a renewed interest in this lately among hams, actually.
[http://www.hsmm-mesh.org/](http://www.hsmm-mesh.org/)

I'm a little disappointed, though, that at least local to me most of the
interest centers around hacking the old WRT-54G rather than more modern and
powerful gear.

------
knowaveragejoe
I'm surprised noone has linked to the FNF before. They seem to be one of the
more organized mesh efforts in the US.

[http://thefnf.org](http://thefnf.org)

------
joshfraser
Anyone interested in getting a private mesh network set up in Silicon Valley?
Seems like it would be a fun and educational project if nothing else.

------
genkaos
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net)

------
lifeisstillgood
What caught me was the localism - stunning

------
devx
Am I crazy or did the URL of the submission change? I've never seen that done
on HN before.

~~~
nitrogen
I've seen it happen on rare occasion when the original submission was content-
free blogspam.

------
yuhong
Again, the sudden title change of submissions suck.

~~~
yuhong
Update: Thanks for changing it back.

------
zoom
Meshing has always been the end goal.

