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In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam

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Re: In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam

#5
No offense to the "reddit meshnet project", but the last I checked (this could have changed) what they're proposing isn't possible with the team that they have right now.

There are a couple of problems:

1) They don't have a solid hardware platform to work on, and the feeling I've gotten from talking to some of the people on /r/darknetplan is that they really don't have the proper understanding of wireless tech to make something like this happen. People are proposing cheap commodity wifi gear for this.

While it's certainly possible to do a very high density area with that, it's certainly not feasible to cover an area like a city, at least not without a considerable investment, and an understanding that network performance is going to be abysmal. (And at that point, just use ham radio...)

(Something like what they're proposing might work in an office, not so much in a neighborhood).

So is a problem, but hypothetically you could just toss hardware at it until it went away.

2) It's the addressing, stupid. http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/m2nd5/its_the_a...

I am definitely the last person to discourage people from "doing it wrong" (http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/ - http://thingist.com/t/item/19766/ - http://thingist.com/t/item/21434/), but people running this, prepare yourselves for the reality that you could fail.

Re: In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam

#6
post #5

No offense to the "reddit meshnet project", but the last I checked (this could have changed) what they're proposing isn't possible with the team that they have right now. There are a couple of problems: 1) They don't have a solid hardware platform to work on, and the feeling I've gotten from talking to some of the people on /r/darknetplan is that they really don't have the proper understanding of wireless tech to mak…

From what I heard in the IRC group when I was hanging out, the group is mostly made up of people who think it's a nice idea but have absolutely no idea what they're doing.

My prediction is this movement fails flat on its face, as the people with the knowhow to develop the new protocols for this network are uninterested in joining a mass of lemmings who are more interested about what the project is going to be called than if it will work.

Here's a fun issue: security and stability in BGP. As we've seen many, many times over BGP is a completely insecure protocol with persistant problems with blackhole and cyclical routes. Many people inside IRC have proposed BGP as the routing mechanism for the mesh network, but have no proposals on how to deal with a completely decentralized network of high latency connections.

Re: In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam

#7
post #5

No offense to the "reddit meshnet project", but the last I checked (this could have changed) what they're proposing isn't possible with the team that they have right now. There are a couple of problems: 1) They don't have a solid hardware platform to work on, and the feeling I've gotten from talking to some of the people on /r/darknetplan is that they really don't have the proper understanding of wireless tech to mak…

At this point, it really is a collection of hobbyists who want to help but can't offer much, however every day we acquire one or two more skilled, dedicated engineers/techs to help. IRC user Tanuki is currently running a meshnet project in Australia with 150 users over 200 KM. He was just offered satellite time for distant sites!

Re: In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam

#8
I think it comes down to what the goals are.

If the goal is to connect peer to peer with a small group of people you know in person and can trust, I see great potential. People congregate in small groups. Facebook friends, Skype contacts, etc. The advantage here is that third parties like Facebook, Microsoft and a gazillion advertisers are not involved. If it's small like that, it's doable as an overlay without using wireless as long as at least one person has a reachable IP and can act as the keeper of everyone else's address info.

If the goal is to create some sort of www replacement that must scale to global internet sizes, where any stranger can connect, and where kids are allowed to do all the things they're not allowed to do legally on the www, I see big problems.

Re: In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam

#9
post #7
post #5

No offense to the "reddit meshnet project", but the last I checked (this could have changed) what they're proposing isn't possible with the team that they have right now. There are a couple of problems: 1) They don't have a solid hardware platform to work on, and the feeling I've gotten from talking to some of the people on /r/darknetplan is that they really don't have the proper understanding of wireless tech to mak…

At this point, it really is a collection of hobbyists who want to help but can't offer much, however every day we acquire one or two more skilled, dedicated engineers/techs to help. IRC user Tanuki is currently running a meshnet project in Australia with 150 users over 200 KM. He was just offered satellite time for distant sites!

Over 200K what?

Re: In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam

#10

I think it comes down to what the goals are. If the goal is to connect peer to peer with a small group of people you know in person and can trust, I see great potential. People congregate in small groups. Facebook friends, Skype contacts, etc. The advantage here is that third parties like Facebook, Microsoft and a gazillion advertisers are not involved. If it's small like that, it's doable as an overlay without using…

Here is a distinction I've been trying to make clear over the past couple of days.

While our "vision" of the absolute end goal sounds slightly more like the second, our actual goals are to produce the first. This is a much more realistic plan than our vision, and is what the project really aims to do. The vision just aims to bring everyone together about a set of issues that have been very much discussed in recent times.

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