Seems a stretch to say its untouchable. A policeman. An always show up and ask you to attach some hardware to the machine.
Or an antenna could just listen in on the signals.....
Mesh Networks
71–80 of 103 posts
Re: Mesh Networks
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My point is that if you are opposed to cables because they can be tapped, wireless poses more problems....
Re: Mesh Networks
#73I 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…
Before they radically changed direction and were acquired by Cisco, Meraki tried to target community meshes in SF and beforehand as Roofnet at MIT. They handed out/sold a lot of mesh APs. I wonder what happened to the boxes.
Several hundred roofnet devices were distributed to low-income housing in the South End and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston. The networks are still limping along with some volunteer maintenance. There are some really dedicated people working to provide for some of the technology needs of the communities, such as free computer repair and training. Check out http://cstoboston.org/ http://www.tech-center-enlightentcity.tv/
Re: Mesh Networks
#74If 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" ?
As of today I think not. Given the fact that MAN (metropolitan area networks - which is what these networks are) are way easier to monitor, because they are really small and into local police's reach (why call the feds anyway?).
The only decent point here, related to privacy is that it's way better for people to control the network instead of a police state, but you can't really be anonymous in such small MANs.
Re: Mesh Networks
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's orthogonal. Private networks can be made up from any technology, privacy is another axis.
My point is that if you are opposed to cables because they can be tapped, wireless poses more problems....
I saw the 'also' in the ggp as referring to both wireless and cable networks. So he's aware of that.
Re: Mesh Networks
#76I 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
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.
Re: Mesh Networks
#77What caught me was the localism - stunning
Re: Mesh Networks
#78It 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…
The article fails to make a good distinction for the different challenges of adhoc, infrastructure and privacy enhancing or censorship circumventing mesh networks.
Several others and I run a small (50 nodes) mesh network in my area, and it works fine for:
- enhancing WiFi access for all contributing nodes to an area which has limited or no coverage.
- providing fallback uplink connectivity for contributing nodes.
Infrastructure mesh networks are easy split into interconnected groups to avoid performance problems, and are still mesh networks, were a metropolitan area is covered by one ore more meshes to add redundancy and avoid scaling problems.
For enhanced privacy see http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-12...
Re: Mesh Networks
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm? I can see it, and I don't have "showdead" on.
I have showdead on and it was dead before, and now it's not. Maybe a mod saw it and fixed it or...?
I did give him an upvote, and maybe others did as well. Perhaps it was enough to raise rhodey from the dead? So perhaps my reports of rhodey's death were greatly exaggerated. Unfortunately I can no longer edit my original comment to reflect this.
Re: Mesh Networks
#80Don't worry, if this idea gets adopted then they will quickly label it as a 'terrorist network' ; no problem.
Besides I think since it would be quite local networks, it could be easily jammed by few NSA stations in the area.