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OK, plan B. First, we quantum-entangle a few billion pairs of particles... Failing that, even without connecting the hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of square miles between cities, I think there is still great potential political, economic and recreational value in decentralized Metropolitan Area Networks, despite the fact that they won't supplant the Internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A directional antenna or two with some kind of actuator might help. A couple of cantennas that could aim themselves could solve a lot of problems. But there's still a lot of problems left. Ultimately, you either get really poor bandwidth, or can only have static assets (like movie files, which don't need to change over time and can be cached by someone nearby with a few big hard drives).
Directional antennas don't help create a "mesh", since they (by definition) only connect stations in a direct line with each other -- a mesh is supposed to connect to multiple other stations, so that if one goes offline, a route can be found through another. A directional antenna will only (typically) connect to one other node.
Wireless meshes don't work. They need to be fractal - local omnis, then cantennas, then backbones. If every geek had a cantenna (plus an omni to connect to the non-geeks, and another geek with a cantenna), you could light up most cities (OK, maybe not quite a city ... I don't really know). From there, you need some super-geeks finding ways to connect the city nets (private fiber?), but you don't need many super-geeks.
This is a good article grounded in actual experience. As the former operator of the w8lvn packet radio bbs, i can heartily relate to you haven’t lived until you’ve hunted down transient connectivity problems resulting from RF weirdness in urban areas. And he details real-world experience like "omnidirectional antennas suck". Essentially, physics is not on your side here.
A directional antenna or two with some kind of actuator might help. A couple of cantennas that could aim themselves could solve a lot of problems. But there's still a lot of problems left. Ultimately, you either get really poor bandwidth, or can only have static assets (like movie files, which don't need to change over time and can be cached by someone nearby with a few big hard drives).
802.11ac devices are expected to be widely available at the consumer level within three years.
One thing the article didn't mention, which I've been considering in regards to this problem: an RF-based internet alternative would be prone to all sorts of other forms of government interference/monitoring. The U.S. government already has serious resources at its disposal for the purpose of intercepting or jamming RF transmissions. For "intercepting," this includes high-power decryption capabilities, and for "jammi…
Just to clarify: are you saying with your point #2 that the government can break any encryption currently in wide use with 802.11 networks and all popular VPN solutions? Or are you just saying that they can physically listen to encrypted transmissions? I was under the impression that encryption scales in complexity pretty much infinitely, so long as you don't care about encryption/decryption speeds.
Fifteen years ago we had proof of this after the government inadvertently showed its cards via clipper chip, the crusade against PGP, etc. We still have export controls on strong encryption, and there's a good reason for that (well, maybe not a good reason).
One thing the article didn't mention, which I've been considering in regards to this problem: an RF-based internet alternative would be prone to all sorts of other forms of government interference/monitoring. The U.S. government already has serious resources at its disposal for the purpose of intercepting or jamming RF transmissions. For "intercepting," this includes high-power decryption capabilities, and for "jammi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Directional antennas don't help create a "mesh", since they (by definition) only connect stations in a direct line with each other -- a mesh is supposed to connect to multiple other stations, so that if one goes offline, a route can be found through another. A directional antenna will only (typically) connect to one other node.
If you had an antenna and an omni, though, you could connect a local subnet to the wider area. If you had a few directional antennas in each local subnet (say, an apartment complex connected by omnis), then the subnets would connect to the rest of the world. Wireless meshes don't work. They need to be fractal - local omnis, then cantennas, then backbones. If every geek had a cantenna (plus an omni to connect to the n…
"This will never work." << lol
In scenarios where the darknet is being actively attacked, people are likely going to be less concerned with instant services than any source of reliable, uncensored information. Perhaps we need to really look into ways to get information around following these methodologies and constraints as a supplement to building darknets.
This seems to assume that the only way to use a network is the current (near)instant req/resp style networking, which is core to a lot of current protocols. One of the things a darknet would enable is a slower eventual delivery model, like email used to be. This is not ideal, but opportunistic store and forward still can move information faster and easier than no network at all. Things like freenet and freedom boxes…
I'd like to note that every single item listed in this is a technical barrier. There are no political barriers, there are no wealth or resource barriers. RF is free to use on the spectrum we need it to work on (ok, until that's illegal). It's that it's a hard, hard problem to solve and it hasn't been solved yet. Do not let that stop anyone from continuing to do work on this: maybe it will get solved.
Suppose you are able to jump the technical barriers - you make the tech happen. I believe it will be at that point when power oligarchy will erect the political, legal barriers against your successes. Worse, they'll probably use your technology against you.
I realize that it is possibly harder to change that political structure. And, that's assuming that the technical situation is hard enough. But, if you change the political structure, you have less to worry about in the long run. You don't always have to be running.
We really need to abolish IP laws in their current state. We need new IP laws that are reasonable for our current social and political structures and technological realities. Hard, hard work, yes, but otherwise, it's always going to be running for a safe place and getting squashed by the people in power.