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Tor gets an upvote from the establishment. Is that furthering the cause of privacy? So we'll now get more exit nodes? Personally believe that nothing less than

Tor gets an upvote from the establishment. Is that furthering the cause of privacy? So we'll now get more exit nodes? Personally believe that nothing less than a wholesale transport-layer alternative to the internet is necessary to maintain communications freedom. Not far fetched to suggest that rooftop antennae running peer-to-peer mesh networks will gather momentum in coming years. Not to replace the internet, just as backup, to keep centralised government interests and moneymen at bay.

DasIch 11y ago
It's not far fetched to suggest people start seriously running peer-to-peer mesh networks, it's ridiculous. You won't be able to convince the people who know about them to run them and you'd need to convince far more people than that to actually get mesh networks to run reasonably well. This is ignoring the technical and legal challenges not to mention the fact that people have tried this for a very long time now and they've failed to get anywhere significant for just as long.
- vegabook 11y ago
  If your criteria for "getting anywhere significant" is to be even within two orders of magnitude as performant as the current internet, then you are correct. If however the aim is to build a distributed, no single point of failure/control, kbps-class, backup communications system, that's primarily community-based, and that is NOT controlled by any corporation, ISP, or government, then there are many such networks already in existence. They're based on wifi, and completely legal. Clearly they're hobby projects but that doesn't make them uninteresting or indeed, potentially extremely useful in low-delta scenarios of societal breakdown and/or centralised oppression.
  - DasIch 11y ago
    I'm not talking about bandwidth, I'm talking about coverage alone. Berlin for example are many people that are into Freifunk and such networks. There are many more people into technology and the culture and politics associated with it. Nevertheless they can't even get decent coverage. The network is worthless not because it works badly, they fail to create an accessible one to begin with.
    - vegabook 11y ago
      > many people into Freifunk ..... I rest my case. There is demand for such a thing even if it's far from perfect. Not everybody is willing to trust the increasing encroachment by the authorities into the mainline internet. They're willing to experiment to ensure that technologies are being worked on that permit independence from potential authoritarianism (corporate or government).

DasIch 11y ago

It's not far fetched to suggest people start seriously running peer-to-peer mesh networks, it's ridiculous. You won't be able to convince the people who know about them to run them and you'd need to convince far more people than that to actually get mesh networks to run reasonably well. This is ignoring the technical and legal challenges not to mention the fact that people have tried this for a very long time now and they've failed to get anywhere significant for just as long.

vegabook 11y ago
If your criteria for "getting anywhere significant" is to be even within two orders of magnitude as performant as the current internet, then you are correct. If however the aim is to build a distributed, no single point of failure/control, kbps-class, backup communications system, that's primarily community-based, and that is NOT controlled by any corporation, ISP, or government, then there are many such networks already in existence. They're based on wifi, and completely legal. Clearly they're hobby projects but that doesn't make them uninteresting or indeed, potentially extremely useful in low-delta scenarios of societal breakdown and/or centralised oppression.
- DasIch 11y ago
  I'm not talking about bandwidth, I'm talking about coverage alone. Berlin for example are many people that are into Freifunk and such networks. There are many more people into technology and the culture and politics associated with it. Nevertheless they can't even get decent coverage. The network is worthless not because it works badly, they fail to create an accessible one to begin with.
  - vegabook 11y ago
    > many people into Freifunk ..... I rest my case. There is demand for such a thing even if it's far from perfect. Not everybody is willing to trust the increasing encroachment by the authorities into the mainline internet. They're willing to experiment to ensure that technologies are being worked on that permit independence from potential authoritarianism (corporate or government).