What are Zig Forums's thoughts on the feasibility of a global meshnet as an alternative to the internet?
I have to say, updating the *Internet as a platform* is an interesting idea. We all eventually replace or update or patch our internet-connected devices, why not also the means that makes them useful? When considering the internet as a platform, how would you improve it?
I am particularly interested in this idea not only for the fact that it would mitigate censorship and allow universal access but also because i have come to realize that the Internet is the great equalizer in the digital age. Anyone can log on and find an answer; start a business; find a home; hire an employee; and so on.
As i see it, an alternative internet is an opportunity for humanity to create something truly special, a non-natural resource that is unlimited and free. De-centralizing such a powerful resource would, in my opinion, be the only way ensure its endurance in the future as a resource that connects and informs.
I would love to hear some other perspectives on the topic. For me, I want to be free from interference.
The problem with mesh metworks is that as you stop having to pay money to join, it becomes unclear who owns what addresses and thus the routing gets really, really complicated. Even if you solve the problem of giving put adresses, every node basically has to have an up to date table of tue whole topology of the net to be able to route packets. The only solutions I can think of is making the addresses based on geographical location, or nodes requesting routing information to other nodes etc. but you get the idea, and all those issues make the network slower than a centralized network. Plus then there's the simple issue of who pays to keep the nodes up, and how do you jumpstart the network given that the Internet currently has everything and your mesh net has nothing or very little to offer compared to it. Sure, you can offer a proxy, but whats the point when you can just use the Internet directly without messing with all that stuff and then having a shitty connection in the end? I say just accept that a global packet network is too hard of an undertaking for amateurs, and just use the Internet. If SHTF and the Internet stops existing, then nobody will bother to keep the mesh nodes working either, because everybody will be short on power and time to do it.
Even if you get it to work, for radio networks with N nodes you'll have to trade coverage for bandwidth. HF gets you pretty far (think maybe half of north america for a single packet radio station) but the rates are horrendous, 9600 bps is standard. And it's power hungry as fuck, hundreds of watts for a single transmitter. Plus there's limited spectrum anyways. And you need a ham radio license to use it. VHF or UHF allows for higher data rates, but it only gets you a couple miles no matter how much power you pump into it. So you need multiple nodes on every city you want to have coverage. And you need directional antennas or ridiculous amounts of power to get any kind of decent range. The only truly good solution is satellites, except they're too expensive. Sure you could use cubesats, but then you have the issue of low power which means low bitrate, and the issue of lack of directional antennas which means even lower bitrate. Just use the fucking internet, there's a reason fiber optics is the industry standard. And you probably like to have pictures, video, CSS and javascript at the click of a button, so low bitrates probably wouldn't do it for you.
Jackson Watson
There are global meshnets already redditfaggot. No you're not invited
Elijah Morris
larp
Aaron Lopez
because you'd know? lel
Matthew Bell
I think I'd know, yeah. Radio signals aren't easy to hide, especially in the age of SDRs. AFAIK only the US military has global packet switched networks independent from the internet.
Carson Garcia
Maybe Iridium could be considered one too since it supposedly has p2p capabilities.
Jaxon Cooper
And BTW, anyone who's interested in decentralized stuff should look into usenet. There have been examples of it being transported on tapes from one place to another (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet#Usage_examples). I've also heard it used to be beamed through satellite for the downlinks (haven't been able to find much info on that).
Chase Rivera
lel. You keep believing that kid, it helps our network stay secure.
Jayden Torres
So how do you connect across the ocean? Satellites?
Levi Fisher
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There's already a global meshnet, and it's been around for about 100 years. Mouthbreathing illiterate brainlets aren't allowed to use it, though. Your only option because if your deminished mental status is to pay the big coin to ((them)), and there's no way around it.
Landon Martin
Oh, come on. Are you the "lel" autist, or yet another sperg? It's not that hard to get a ham radio license and learn a little bit of morse code. OP was clearly talking about a packet switched network, not individual radio contacts. Plus ham radio can't really be considered a mesh network unless you can convince the other operators to relay your message to the destination. You talk about not paying the jews, but since you're posting on the Internet, someone is ultimately paying for that bandwidth, even if you're posting through one of these 13cm links that are available on some cities. And that's the problem I mentioned with VHF and above, it's only short range. Which means you can't build a net independeny from the Internet. On HF there's no switched packet network except for APRS which is a clusterfuck and would probably not work without I-Gates. The other thing you have is Winlink but it only provides send-only email capabilities and you have to get lucky with propagation and/or be in a well covered area, plus it's not really a mesh network since it relies on the Internet. In any case HF only really allows you to use a text console (slowly) and little more, maybe some shitty low res noisy pictures with SSTV. On satellites there barely is any amateur packet radio activity whatsoever. So no, your radios aren't comparable to the optical fiber links spanning whole oceans and allowing uninterrupted high bandwidth data transfers.
Lucas Sanders
(me) (not me)
no one claimed they were. OPs question was about a:
which exists
as if more is needed
Zachary Brooks
Yeah, that's why we know the location of every number station down to the inch, because HF is sooooo easy to triangulate.
Tyler Kelly
The real problem with mesh nets is that they work well for a given geographical area, but not globally. So putting one up in your city would work fine, but it won't be global without access to back hauls. I don't know if any work has been done here, but some kind of mesh over any protocol routing system would solve a lot of this. Have a way to have the nodes handle however it is that they send the info, but display their possible connections, latency, throughput etc. So you could include any possible way to send information, including smoke signals, tor, or just the clear net if that wasn't blocked.
Broadband-hamnet is something I mentioned here a while ago. But it requires a ham radio license and that's FCC regulated. One can establish a tunnel and create connections overseas, extending the average range of the mesh network.
Well, presumably we're talking about building a MESH NETWORK, so you would want to route data from MULTIPLE USERS through your transceiver. Did I mention that ionospheric propagation is unreliable and with the allowed levels of power for ham operators you only can transmit data from maybe one coast of North America to the other, and that's in the right conditions? If that's all that's needed, then why the fuck are you here, an INTERNET site, instead of on a packet radio BBS? If text ought to be good enough for everybody, then why are you arguing about it on an IMAGEboard?
One thing is knowing a signal EXISTS, and another is knowing WHERE IT COMES FROM, you fucking drooling retard. The fact that you know number stations sending orders to fucking spies ARE THERE proves that you can't easily hide radio signals. You can perfectly hide the content with encryption, sure, but you can't hide the fact that the link is there. And yes, it's very fucking easy to triangulate HF stations. Amateurs can do it from the comfort of their own homes to within a few dozen kilometers with a couple general purpose $200 radios connected to the Internet without even having to drive around hunting for them (rtl-sdr.com/kiwisdr-tdoa-direction-finding-now-freely-available-for-public-use/). Otherwise the polish rebels fighting against the commies in the 80s wouldn't have to use an old amateur satellite (AO-7) that only worked half the time because HF was too easy to track down.
If they can only help you achieve 1% of what you can do with an actual Internet connection then they aren't a real alternative, especially with no existing organization and infrastructure in place (servers running 24/7 etc.). The fact that you're here posting USING THE INTERNET is proof of just that. Otherwise you'd be using that platform instead of giving money to the jews to let you use the Internet backbone to connect to Zig Forums's servers. I mean, you can't even reliable leave a message for somebody in Europe from the US, something that probably could be achieved with a commodore 64 and a few repeaters built with 60s tech distributed around each continent to maximize the likelihood of finding a good propagation path.
If you require the Internet to be up and running for the net to function you might as well use the Internet yourself. IMO the main value of a mesh network would be to defeat either censorship or a disaster that would disable the regular communications infrastructure. But yeah, the FCC requires hams to transmit everything in the clear, so any dissident transmitting using encryption would be breaking the law anyways.
Michael Ramirez
To add to what that user said, sure, NVIS and satcom might be harder to track than regular skywave propagation, but let's not kid ourselves, it's very possible. No antenna is perfectly directional, every one has some side lobes. For NVIS there's no precedent that I know of (probably because the FCC doesn't give too much of a fuck about the amateur spectrum at the moment and NVIS is not a popular mode in the first place) but the Army has had contracts to develop the technology (sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/561526). On the other hand, if you tap into military (and probably commercial) satellites expect to be fucked in the ass until you bleed (wired.com/2009/04/fleetcom/). Although these guys more or less admitted to TX into commercial satellites in public and afaik nothing happened to them (youtube.com/watch?v=2aBXpho5b7w) but then again they're professional researchers, who knows what'd happen to you if you're a random guy and had regular unauthorized interactions with them.
Thomas Cruz
you could at least replace some of the internet connections with this. long range could use that and places where peers are closer could use wifi or cables instead
Dylan Howard
possibly interesting stuff staltz.com/an-off-grid-social-network.html scuttlebutt.nz/ boingboing.net/2017/04/07/bug-in-tech-for-antipreppers.html en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet (the predecessor to Usenet, both are interesting technologies from the decentralization and not-relying-on-the-internet point of view. not sure if matrix and similar services have that capability) we should also investigate postal networks not requiring any technology to operate, maybe having instructions on how to do public key cryptography by hand (which would be only necessary to perform once to exchange a symmetric key then use a simpler pen and paper cipher such as the stack of cards method or whatever)
nah, I bet you could get about 30km under ideal conditions. under realistic conditions
Robert Turner
i cant really believe that anyone would care if you bumped the power to maybe 1w or even more if you dont live in a crowded city. it would look normal to the average user as long as you arent taking all bands with it so they should not have any reason to do anything to it
Charles James
yeah, the main concern is probably a techie at a real company getting annoyed at you using up some of their channels, so if your ssid doesn't show up anywhere like that you're probably good
Jackson Young
"LoRaWAN is optimized for ultra-low power and long range applications. As such, the network operates on an unlicensed ISM sub-1 GHz spectrum network which is free to access for both network operators and device manufacturers."
"In this paper, we propose a LoRaWAN network with autonomous base stations that can work without Internet connectivity for essential services, while being able to provide additional features whenever Internet access becomes available"
Jordan Turner
How would you connect meshnet between Americas and Eurafrasia?
Check out yggdrasil yggdrasil-network.github.io/ - E2E encrypted. - Private key defines your ipv6 address ownership. - No need to keep whole topology to operate.
Lemme tell you something son, the overwhelmingly majority of people a.k.a normies don't give a damn about censorship and freedom, even if you managed to get a working global mesh network it would be used only by a handful of autismos and wouldn't have not even 0.01% of the content you have on the internet. Also another thing to consider is that the same entities that curb freedom on the internet could easily shut down your precious mesh networks if they want to, all it would take would be for them to claim that you guys only want a separate internet to spread your evil nazi-pedo-terrorism and that's it the network would go down and you guys would be sent to jail.
Not if the transmission of the info is kept in secret. You could do dead drops like those Russian spies that were found in the US a couple years ago. Also consider onion routing which is pretty useful even in the regular Internet and allows you to trade latency for anonymity. You can even interconnect networks and add a small crypto payment for things like solving captchas or paying for bandwidth. They would if the Internet is shut down, and if it isn't, we don't even need a meshnet, we just need steganographhy, onion routing and/or open APs throughout the city. Who will suspect that video of you toying your pooper that you just uploaded to degeneracytoday.com has all the latest neo-nazi memes?
I tested Scuttlebutt, and it seems to be irremediably pozzed. The client is written in Electron, it has a CoC, you are expected to be a namefag, it seems to be prone to censorship, and I couldn't find anything on how to actually transfer data without connecting to one of the servers.
Interesting info on JS8Call (ultra-low bandwidth mode) which has some mesh networking capabilities: youtube.com/watch?v=F0TkJJIsY3o Problem is AFAIK it can only make one hop. There's no routing built in, so some kind of protocol should have to be built on top of that. And then some kind of solar powered relay needs to be made so people can set it up cheaply. The transmitters can be as small as this hamradioreviews.eu/2017/01/23/keychain-qrp/
Christopher Lee
OP, Not exactly related, but if you are in the US and you want to establish a municipal mesh net, you should put together a proposal to install some Ubiquiti APs or other turn-key mesh WiFi routing hardware. Get a couple neighborhood association busybodies into the idea, get Planning staff to consider it, and then apply for a FEMA PDM grant to buy and install the routers. Most PDM grant applications are for stupid make-work construction contracts for "underserved" groups, so your competition is weak. Pitch the idea as a resilience and continuity of government plan. Have directional links between the library, emergency services and city hall so that they have a secondary, local comms network if the ISP goes down. Sprinkle in some sob story about how a free muni-net could help black people apply for jobs or get an ejucayshun from their smart phones while they're hanging out at the bus stop.
I think the problem with the Internet as-is is the fact that a small cartel of telecoms owns the physical infrastructure, and if they drop packets to tor/i2p/freenet or wherever, then you really can't do anything about it.
Yeah that's what I mean. If you do that shit on the regular in the US you're bound to get a visit from law enforcement and get your shit pushed in in federal prison. Even the Brazilian government has been pressured into arresting people. Now with commercial satellites there's probably less enforcement (unless they decide to throw the computer fraud act at you if they're really pissed off), but the tx frequencies aren't easy to find (for rx freqs just point a dish at it and scan the spectrum on an sdr), and it requires better equipment than satcom which is designed to be able to be reliably talked into with a potato.
