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Mesh Networks

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Re: Mesh Networks

#61

Post by krichman »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #24
pcunite wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

+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…

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.

Re: Mesh Networks

#62

Post by chrisbolt »

sandGorgon wrote: post #38

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirJaldi

Re: Mesh Networks

#63

Post by 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" ?

Re: Mesh Networks

#64

Post by dchichkov »

johnpmayer wrote: post #30
jurjenh wrote: post #25

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.

I think you'd need to add the following constraints. - Non-compromised endpoint hardware - In-person public key exchange - Onion routing

Creating non-compromised endpoint hardware is a bit of a problem. I'm actually not sure if it is possible, even in principle.

Maybe if there was an open source/open hardware router which contained a chip with secure boot, into which you yourself could burn the public key, and then it would only allow the code signed by that key... Sounds too complicated to be user friendly.

Besides, there is no way to verify that the hardware router that somebody considers to be secure was not replaced by an identically looking box that had been compromised :( .

Re: Mesh Networks

#65

Post by 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.... 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 and you can grab the paper too if you're interested: 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.

Re: Mesh Networks

#66

Post by femto »

nikatwork wrote: post #56
daurnimator wrote: post #15

Similar thing exists in Melbourne, Australia: http://www.melbournewireless.org.au/

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

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/

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

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

Re: Mesh Networks

#67

Post by deanclatworthy »

shaddi wrote: post #65

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... . 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.youtu…

I skimmed your paper, but I'm curious, based on your research into this area what an alternative would be to create private networks for citizens without laying out cable everywhere (which theoretically could also be tapped).

Re: Mesh Networks

#68

Post by GabrielF00 »

frisco wrote: post #20

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…

I have a lot of experience with roofnet, Meraki and Open Mesh. They work to some extent, but not nearly with the degree of reliability that an ordinary customer would tolerate. You are not going to get a reliable network with single-radio devices in an urban setting with lots of interference and construction materials that are not friendly to wireless signals. You can do somewhat better if you plan out your backhaul links using traditional, non-mesh technologies and only use mesh for the very last few hundred feet, and stick to dual-radio N devices. There is a lot of hype about some of these networks in Europe (Athens, Austria, Berlin, etc.) but what people fail to realize is that these networks are used by geeks who are happy to build their own antennas, mess around with a linux shell, etc. If you just hand people devices you're not going to have a network that is tolerable for most consumers. It may work okay in a developing country in the middle of a revolution where people are willing to hack something together, but for ordinary consumers who want a reliable connection and don't care about the underlying technology it just doesn't work.

Re: Mesh Networks

#69

Post by einhverfr »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #67
shaddi wrote: post #65

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... . 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.youtu…

I skimmed your paper, but I'm curious, based on your research into this area what an alternative would be to create private networks for citizens without laying out cable everywhere (which theoretically could also be tapped).

As opposed to wireless which doesn't have to be tapped (i.e. can just be listened in on with antennas)?

Re: Mesh Networks

#70

Post by jacquesm »

einhverfr wrote: post #69
deanclatworthy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I skimmed your paper, but I'm curious, based on your research into this area what an alternative would be to create private networks for citizens without laying out cable everywhere (which theoretically could also be tapped).

As opposed to wireless which doesn't have to be tapped (i.e. can just be listened in on with antennas)?

That's orthogonal. Private networks can be made up from any technology, privacy is another axis.
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