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Make the internet yours again with an instant mesh network

changelog.complete.org

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Re: Make the internet yours again with an instant mesh network

#11

Post by msla »

buzzwords wrote: post #5

Would this be useful to people in countries like Iran, where the internet is restricted and completely cut out whenever the government needs to shut people up?

No. This is useful against assholes, not fanatics.

Assholes will opportunistically shit on anything that isn't too difficult for them to worm their way into. Crapping up DNS by making all unknown domains resolve to an ad server? Sure. Making unencrypted HTTP unusable by inserting ads and blocking keywords? On it. Blocking any port they haven't heard of? Hey, who needs ports 70 or 23 anyway, am I right? Assholes can be state actors in a state which doesn't go to extremes censoring the Internet, or they can be companies or other institutions with assholes dictating IT policy.

Fanatics will poison BGP to blackhole YouTube and, if it knocks out YouTube for a couple neighboring countries, well, those countries either agree with them or are kiddie-porn-hacker-atheist-terrorists who need to be put in their place by Morally Righteous Leaders anyway. Fanatics will kill anyone who sends or receives encrypted messages the authorities can't read, just on general principles.

HTTPS and maybe some tricks with DNS will protect you from assholes. You need legitimate tradecraft to thwart fanatics, and even then you're rather likely to be killed by a government that really doesn't care enough to even stage a convincing accident.

Re: Make the internet yours again with an instant mesh network

#12

Post by karmanyaahm »

brnt wrote: post #3

Sounds a bit like Zerotier. But I'm not sure how it's different. How does it find other machines, deal with NAT, other corner cases?

Zerotier is typically used for privace networks, and AFAIK it routes through a central server whenever p2p is not possible. On the other hand, the Yggdrasil main net is a public network, and each peer is a router. You don't (and can't practically) connect to every single peer, but any nodes in the middle can route things the right direction. Also, Yggdrasil can run on top of existing tcp/ip like zerotier, but it can also run on custom mesh base protocols.

Re: Make the internet yours again with an instant mesh network

#14

Post by dymk »

commandlinefan wrote: post #10
dymk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume this is a perfect technical solution to a government that wants to censor your speech - that doesn't help much if the government has ball-pein hammers and rubber hoses, and is willing to use them on people living in houses broadcasting wifi.

> houses broadcasting wifi Cell phones are popular with drug dealers in south america because they're impossible to shut down - if the government can't shut down drug dealers, they definitely can't shut down people sharing offensive memes.

It may not be possible to target specific uses of cellphone data channels, but this isn't much of a roadblock for the Iranian government.

They'll just shut down every cell tower within their borders. Iran is already willing to impose full internet blackouts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Internet_blackout_in_Iran).

Re: Make the internet yours again with an instant mesh network

#15

Post by karmanyaahm »

mawise wrote: post #8

I like the use of IPv6 addresses as a cryptographic identity. Have there been any discussions about DNS-style layers on top of the mesh?

I believe DNS works like normal with there being AAAA records for yggdrasil's 200:: ips. y.matrix.tomesh.net vs matrix.tomesh.net is an example of that

Re: Make the internet yours again with an instant mesh network

#16

Post by hwbehrens »

commandlinefan wrote: post #10
dymk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume this is a perfect technical solution to a government that wants to censor your speech - that doesn't help much if the government has ball-pein hammers and rubber hoses, and is willing to use them on people living in houses broadcasting wifi.

> houses broadcasting wifi Cell phones are popular with drug dealers in south america because they're impossible to shut down - if the government can't shut down drug dealers, they definitely can't shut down people sharing offensive memes.

> they're impossible to shut down

They're impossible to shut down without (potentially) affecting innocent bystanders. If they don't care, they absolutely can and do shut down towers.

In this case, if they judge anyone broadcasting or using this network as subversive, then there are no bystanders, only accomplices. And, thanks to the tyranny of the inverse square law, it becomes much easier to sniff out broadcasters/uplinks as well.

The easiest way to mitigate this is to do both -- rebroadcast a cell connection over WiFi, and do so intermittently and in varying locations to complicate triangulation.

Re: Make the internet yours again with an instant mesh network

#17

Post by zinekeller »

dymk wrote: post #14
commandlinefan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> houses broadcasting wifi Cell phones are popular with drug dealers in south america because they're impossible to shut down - if the government can't shut down drug dealers, they definitely can't shut down people sharing offensive memes.

It may not be possible to target specific uses of cellphone data channels, but this isn't much of a roadblock for the Iranian government. They'll just shut down every cell tower within their borders. Iran is already willing to impose full internet blackouts ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Internet_blackout_in_Iran ).

Yeah, this is the difference.

Drug dealers are an annoyance but they aren't a direct threat to any government (as long as you let them be in peace). If it's a direct threat to you, then you do anything, even if the benefits outweigh the risks.

Re: Make the internet yours again with an instant mesh network

#20

Post by aftbit »

>Nowadays, running a website from home is just about impossible. You may not have a public IP, and if you do, it likely changes from time to time. And even then, your ISP probably blocks you from running servers on it.

I'm not sure about the author's country / ISP, but here in Midwest USA, our residential ISPs (cable or DSL, fiber if you are lucky) generally do not change IPs frequently (unless your router/modem is restarted), and generally only block port 25 (SMTP). I've been running a web/ssh server from home in some form or another since 2002, originally with DynDNS to paper over the IP changes.

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