Discussion on:

Lessons from Egypt: Kill the kill switch and decentralize the Internet

... that I want to grant the other folks on the mesh the ability to just stick things like child porn on my phone. Because that's exactly what your proposal is... a mesh network that grants write access to the local system to anonymous nodes. That's a really bad idea, regardless of the context.

Think about it... if the network's be shut off, how are these protesters going to get that app? OK, so they get it in advance... and are all walking around with it on all the time, waiting for the network to be shut off? Furthermore, mesh networking is a disaster. There are only a handful of channels for WiFi, and when access points overlap on the same channel, chaos ensues. Look at the issues with the XO computers for examples.

J.Ja

Every new thing is messy at the beginning. If this is the only option or the only alternative, however, we'll just have to live with it, and fix it. Linux was a mess at its beginnings, but it grew nonetheless, because it was the only alternative to Windows. The similar logic applies to mesh.

> child porn on my phone

Awww, c'mon, enough with that already! Child porn is just an internet variant of terrorist threat. Overblown or even phantom menace used as a pretext for increasing control and repression.

You can be 100% sure that authorities, who spy on their own citizens, centralize & control flow of information, contemplate internet kill switches etc, have something nasty to hide. They are pretty much like a gang of Fritzls trying keep the fruits of their labour the cellar secret. They probably produce & disseminate child porn in the first place. After all, all paedophile rings consist of powerful political, financial, and religious figures.

In any case- if fritzlocracy decides to stick kompromat on you, it will do it, mesh network or no mesh network. They can always plant it on your phone or computer after you get arrested. Or, simply lie about it. With information flow controlled & restricted, converting lies to truth is easy. Taking part in the mesh network can even provide you a plausible deniability in such cases ("it wasn't me, somebody planted it on my phone through the mesh").

> write access to the local system to anonymous nodes. That's a really bad idea

Of course it's a bad idea. I guess I wasn't clear enough about that in my previous post.

> OK, so they get it in advance... and are all walking around with it on all the time, waiting for the network to be shut off?

With political situation bad enough, possibility of internet shutdown, P2P filtering, monthly data caps etc, number of people willig to take part in a mesh would grow. There are also other incentives. For example, http://www.bluetoothflirt.de/ could be a good basis for a bluetooth mesh.

> There are only a handful of channels for WiFi, and when access points overlap on the same channel, chaos ensues. Look at the issues with the XO computers for examples.

I was talking about data routing through overlapping WLAN router signals, not WiFi access points. WLAN home routers could be reprogrammed/reconfigured to route data between neighbouring routers, independently of LAN traffic.

I'm not going to get into the social/government stuff above... let's just say that I don't agree with your view of the situation, and leave it at that.

But...

There are only a handful of channels for WiFi, and when access points overlap on the same channel, chaos ensues. Look at the issues with the XO computers for examples.

I was talking about data routing through overlapping WLAN router signals, not WiFi access points. WLAN home routers could be reprogrammed/reconfigured to route data between neighbouring routers, independently of LAN traffic.

That's a more workable solution. It's still only application in urban areas, and is dependent upon a huge percentage of the population being willing to do this, ready to do this, and technically capable of doing this.

Remember, the American Revolution was initially supported by about a third of the county. Another third were Loyalists and the rest were just hoping to get back to normal life planting crops and making shoes. Good luck getting numbers like that in the US.

J.Ja

Besides free booze, that's the best way of mobilizing the people's masses. People are, by their very nature, lazy. As long as corporate/government internet functions as it does now, they won't take part in the mesh. If ISPs start to annoy customers with, data caps, content filtering, DRM control, and such, more and more people will risk that 5 minutes to reprogram their old Linksys, and/or $10-$100 for yagi antenna.

> I'm not going to get into the social/government stuff above... let's just say that I don't agree with your view of the situation, and leave it at that.

Social/government stuff is important design parameter here, and it can't be ignored. In the situation, when the killswitch is contemplated, implemented, and activated, the established social norms probably won't apply anymore. The repression will either cause, or be result of some sort of social collapse, or both- a situation and circumstances most people find very hard to imagine & contemplate. I guess nothing I might write here will change your mind, so I can only urge you to do your own research. If you want to understand (and not necessarily agree with) my point of view, this book would probably be the best starting point:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1926/repression/index.htm

It's one of the rare non-BS, practical, experience based texts about the government repression & spying on its own citizens, and how to deal with it. Technology changed a lot since the book was written, but the basic principles still apply. Oh, and... please try to ignore the communist stuff in there.

Looking from this angle, it's quite OK if the mesh grows up on pirated & illegal stuff, in the grey area where the law ends. Since the motive behind strangulation of the internet is control of information, the mesh will eventually be outlawed for the same reason. The pretext will be the usual bovis stercus- terrorism, child porn, etc. That way, mesh will be more immune to shutdown attempts when SHTF.


> That's a more workable solution.

Yeah, for starters. IMHO, spread spectrum radio is definitely the next thing worth trying. Mostly unregulated, and, most importantly, hard to detect if operating below noise level.

This gets interesting.. I have both small town and big city in me now (yeah, not special I know.. 'git 'er done' to the rest of ya small town folks).

So the big city is covered. Folks start re-flashing home routers with dd-mesh or whatever. Mobile devices would simply incorporate mesh support. Mesh devices, knowing the limits of channel saturation, would manage that just fine within local broadcast distances. This is not an unsolvable problem and one which wireless Hackers (and giften engineers who usually rank within Hackerdom) would be all over. So, urban areas are covered with devices that can be aware of when a channel is supported or on the verge of saturation. (Michael's HAM skills me correct me on this)

Let's look at the small town folk. In a small town, you already have the Townies and the Country folk; yes, a five minute bike ride makes someone a Country Folk if it leaves the town limits. For our purposes, lets' say "town" ends and "country" begins when one passes beyhond the range of simple house-hopping through the mesh.

I see opportunity for the town based ISP that bridges that mesh for the farm folk. Mesh is slow, modems probably keep up just fine. And, if your down to local mesh networking for lack of broadband solutions, fetching your porntube download in a timely fashion is not likely a concern. In a small town, it's probably going to be a Townie effort the country folk are uninterested in anyhow; lack of Internet does not shut down a farm unless it's an overly modern industrial factory of a thing.

Even now, most country folk are not getting mesh network speeds even with what few broadband options exist outside town infrastructure. The devide between Townie and Country Folk remains painfully clear.

Actually, now I'm thinking dish antena. If I can fire one of those suckers an hour drive three towns across; I'm pretty sure we can mesh network the sht out of non-townie folk given five minutes or less drive from farm to farm.

Now, the legal side; yeah, some bad person may pass data over your node. The law, assuming government ever accepted the lack of control over mesh networks being the norm, would have to change to recognize the difference between data over versus data requested by a node. For lack of goernment acceptance, it may be a citizen action to motivate legal recognition. Heck, being able to detect truly harmful content like childporn passing through my node along with the final destination? With Small Town folk, you might want to hope the local law knows about that destination before the folks do.. but child-porn in the area would be swiftly dealt with. Granted, encryption in transit probably quashes both the vigilanty risk and my being popped for passing harmful content on to it's requesting node.

(I hope I can find these threads tomorrow.. very interesting but I'm likely to not keep up with responses until something more effective than email and maxing out my browser RSS features.)

I've been thinking about a commercial implementation of a mega-XO network that I've been calling a locality network. Something not as full-service as internet, something that works more like DSL technically - though of course not wired. A community would basically set up a server repository and maintain a cache there with backbones distributed to the immediate surrounding communities - maybe as small as somebody's garage. Latency and bandwidth and other XO issues would present a "locality based internet" which is a very interesting opportunity both for survivability and for commercial applications. I'll let you go ahead and comment.

The Government already has 'control' of Copper, Fiber, and Air Waves, including Frequencies from Hertz to GigaHertz. Don't believe me? Read about the recent incidents (within the past week(s)) regarding the Governments OOPS, when they began 'Testing' some new Electronics, causing ENTIRE Neighborhoods, Garage Door Openers to 'Malfunction', and begin opening/closing for no apparent reason, in Connecticutt, by The Navy, as part of a 'System', they refer to as "Enterprise Land Mobile Radio system, which is used by the military to coordinate responses with civil emergency workers, said Chris Zendan, a spokesman for submarine base in Groton". They are Testing this RIGHT NOW!!! So if it's a Radio System, then it Transmits AND Receives...

Are you considering the packets passing through your mesh node as stored on your system or are you envisioning each node offering free storage to the rest of the cluster?

That's some nasty sounding legislation he's cooked up, there.
Very authoritarian, and so easy to put to the use of a would-be tyrant.
"Not subject to judicial review", that's never a good sign.

who is scared to death of communication. This is the same jerk who wanted restrictions on television programming. I can hardly wait until this POS is no longer holding office.

No judicial review. The rubber-stamp courts weren't good enough. Then there is always retroactive legalization, so nyah!

Or do you have to wait for someone to suffer in a way that the supreme court can take the law itself into it's teeth?

Many people interpret that to mean it bars ex post facto criminalization, but not ex post facto de-criminalization.

Setting up a system to screw over the world will not be an "after the fact"-law.
Or did you mean about the court kicking it out after the fact? As I understand it, the supreme court doesn't pass law, so the ex postfacto ban doesn't apply to them.

But I think there's something wrong if the system allows just any law to be applied without judicial review. It removes the judicial branch from its rightful place - checks and balances go askew.

Government should work out more proactive mitigation measures than pulling the plug. such measures just give more confidence to the attackers

First, a couple of facts. One, the critical infrastructure in the U.S. is on the Internet. In hindsight this was a dumb thing to do, but I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Two, the U.S. cannot afford to create an alternative Internet. The government is almost broke now, so there is simply no money to do this. SIPR-net is out there now, but it is used for the transmission of classified data and large parts of it run across public networks. Besides, I don't think the military would be too happy with the local electric co-op running on their secure network.

So the U.S. is faced with the necessity of protecting of protecting this exposed infrastructure and some sort of kill switch is one of the few options available. I mean seriously, it would take days for all of them to unplug their connections. An automated solution is really the only effective method.

Like any tool this so-called kill switch could be used or abused. For example, a hammer can be used to build a house, but it can just as easily crush your skull. EVERYTHING can be misused. On the surface the objective of this tool is purported to be protection of the infrastructure in the time of war, but the bill appears to be written to suppress free speech or revolution. (Anyone else detect a hint of paranoia?)

The key is to make sure anyone who misuses a tool is held accountable. That is critical flaw in this bill. The objective should be to detach the critical infrastructure from the Internet, not to kill the Internet in general.

This bill should die and a new one introduced for a kill switch with the proper objectives in mind and the requirement for an after-the-fact judicial review should it ever be used.

Yes, the killswitch is a bad idea. Yes the bill should die in Congress. But you also need to wake up and realize that the Obama Admin through the FCC is pushing this through with regulation anyway, as part of net neutrality. They tried Congress, and failed. They tried in court, and failed. If they fail through regulation, they will try through the UN.

In a free society, nothing in government should EVER be free of any checks from other branches. NOTHING should be exempt from judicial review. Our regulatory bureaucracies are unconstitutional and run largely free of checks and balances. We need to get people in power that will cut the regulators and bureaucracies down to size.

Yes, a very bad idea, the KillSwitch: nevertheless, rather than fighting a tsunami of bad policy, one bad idea at a time, the best way would be for the US to stop electing or putting very extremely stupid people into positions of power. Although stupidity in high places is a global problem, the US suffers from the dubious distinction of exceeding the planetary norms of stupidity-in-high-places by several orders of magnitude.

Join Downsize DC "Hands Off The Internet" Campaign:

http://www.downsizedc.org/etp/campaigns/128

The Internet managed to revolutionize our lives without the involvement of busy-body politicians. Instead, the Internet is entirely regulated by non-State institutions, incentives, and rules. These free market forms of regulation actually work, unlike most State regulations. The politicians find this hard to tolerate, so they're constantly looking for excuses to meddle. If you like what the free market version of the Internet has done for you, then please take action to protect it from State interference.

BTW, you need to read up on the history of the internet. The (non-existent) free market had nothing to do with it until after the fact.

You can't put a kill switch on an idea. Today's implementation is just that -- one implementation of the more general concept of connecting without depending upon providers - more at http://rmf.vc/Demystify.trc

Not only NO... But Hell NO!!!