5 ms·

Since there are lots of hobbies that sometimes overlap with community service I'd love to see a club that focuses on being prepared to reestablish intra-communi

by goda90 10y ago

Since there are lots of hobbies that sometimes overlap with community service I'd love to see a club that focuses on being prepared to reestablish intra-community communication in case the Internet goes down. Yes, it'd be great if everyone was self hosting, using distributed services and involved in a mesh network now, but without motivation it won't happen. So this club could focus on developing the resources that a few individuals in a community could use to set these things up after the network is already down. They could have offline caches of Wikipedia and Openstreetmaps, copies of firmware, apps and instructions for attaching consumer routers and other Wi-Fi devices to a mesh network, systems for registering people with a locally functioning email address, etc. User friendly portals could be made that provide the basic instructions for people who stumble on a mesh network access point with their otherwise disconnected smartphones. All of the tech exists in some form or another, but if it were well packaged, it's not hard to see there being a sufficient distribution of members to get people connected easily.

norea-armozel 10y ago
I'm definitely interested in such an idea. I might have to check around the MPLS area to see who's doing any sort of DIY electronics and other such meetups here.
kej 10y ago
The amateur radio community already has the technical know-how and disaster readiness to do most of that, and I'd be willing to bet there's enough overlap between them and the meshnet crowd to take care of the rest.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  A good friend of mine has been into ham radio since he was a young guy, and this is definitely true. In fact a lot of people in that community play a role in plans for a disaster that would knock out other communications, integrated with some local, and state governments. I'm not sure about the federal level, but I'd guess it's integrated there too. And there are a lot of them, and at this point if you're into ham radio, it's for the love and you tend to be pretty proficient.
- justifier 10y ago
  combined with a project like this: http://icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter http://icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry... and you've basically got the web ;p at least a one way communication network form
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  KG6YHQ here. It's doable, but if the wired net becomes unusable and you have to rely wholly on the RF spectrum, bandwidth would be stupendously tiny. Forget about sending anything else but, basically, text-based messages. Perhaps in an event like that a decision would be made to temporarily open up the spectrum, but even then there are only so many of us, only so many transceivers out there. I feel the HAM net would be more useful after a natural catastrophe, where the infrastructure would be destroyed physically. Which is exactly what a lot of us are preparing for.
  - harshreality 10y ago
    Wouldn't SDRs be a lot more useful for creating higher-bandwidth wireless networks in the sort of disaster where the FCC opens up other frequency ranges? The amateur radio regulation regime and common ham radios work well for small numbers of small messages sent around in a well-regulated way, without the government initiating a frequency band jubilee. But beyond that, HAM radios are limited, even if they're modded, and the cheap SDRs are even cheaper than baofeng handhelds, so where does that leave amateur radio in a real frequency free-for-all? I think what would matter is, as mentioned above, availability of SDRs, and secondly, parties of people tracking down transmitters that are messing up the ad-hoc sdr wireless nets.
    - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
      Sure, but everything has to be ready, prepared and exercised before anything happens. Whatever plan you may conceive, you have to do plenty of test runs in advance. After it happens, it's chaos, it's too late to start new initiatives. And there are caveats anyway. For local connections, some kind of WiFi mesh might still be the best option. For long distance, I don't think you can currently use anything but proper HAM equipment, and fairly large power at that. For a reliable connection, especially at good bandwidth, you need lots of power and a good antenna. But if you blow standards out of the water, and start pumping out huge bandwidths at huge powers, you run again into a tragedy of commons - you're taking up large chunks of spectrum over entire continents. There is no free lunch.
- superuser2 10y ago
  The amateur radio community can't use encryption and, for the most part, is happy about this restriction. A zero-privacy internet might be better than nothing, but I'm not 100% sure of that.
  - WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
    but its only relevant in the disaster-recovery situation anyhow; should be quite decent for that use. And otherwise, you have regular Internet access, and its hardly realistic a small hacker community can do anything to replace it.
matt4077 10y ago
There should be a term for "overprepping for disaster because it's so exciting to think about".
- rexfm 10y ago
  "Preppers" ?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  engineering?
- rabidrat 10y ago
  You mean, like this guy? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall--village-left-untouched-tsunami.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese...
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    The man lived through a tsunami in the area, that was hardly a matter of exciting thoughts, but a desperate desire to prevent a predictable tragedy. By contrast people prepping for the end of days in whatever form, often nuclear, strike me as mad. If there's a nuclear war, I want to be in the hypocenter of the first detonation, because we're not climbing out of that hole as a species in any meaningful way. I suppose that reality is why so many have turned to fantasies of a worldwide EMP of some exotic type which is at least survivable in their imagination. Me? I've read my history, if civilization comes tumbling down, my plan is to eat a gun. Meanwhile I'll live my life without terror, and plan only for disasters that can reasonably be managed without dedicating my limited lifespan to it.
    - WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
      Agreed, if civilization does come tumbling down. However, as far as I could read, for it to survive a nuclear exchange is quite possible, even probable. Blasts themselves seem relatively harmless, beyond the hundereds of millions they just outright kill that is, radiation we're just characteristically paranoid about, but can actually deal with at least in many remaining areas, and the main issue at debate is whether a nuclear winter of substantial duration would be formed or not. Which depends on the scope of the fires, so flammability of urban environments and the like. We can't pretend to know a real answer, but its certainly possible. And then there's the issue of whether the south hemisphere could avoid that fate even in such a case, due to weather patterns, provided there's no detonations there (as there are no weapons there). Now that doesn't seem substantially different from any large-scale warfare civilization easily survived previously, like world war II; urban devastation and millions of dead. Hardly a civilization-ending event.
rfrank 10y ago
things along those lines are already happening in oakland and a number of other cities across the country. https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh
- busterarm 10y ago
  Seconded. Definitely look into meshnets. There's one in Red Hook (brooklyn) that's been up and running for a long time.
thinkmassive 10y ago
I recently discovered a startup called Endless that appears to be working on the content/caching side of this problem. They're for-profit but seem to have good intentions between releasing their OS as open source and creating affordable hardware targeted at emerging markets. https://endlessm.com/ https://endlessm.com/
jcl 10y ago
There are educational projects that focus on providing the benefits of the internet to communities that have poor or no connectivity, like: http://internet-in-a-box.org/ http://internet-in-a-box.org/ While internet failure mitigation isn't an explicit goal of such projects, their resources might make a good starting point.
davidhyde 10y ago
This guy in Spain created his own internet infrastructure: https://backchannel.com/forget-comcast-heres-the-diy-approach-to-internet-access-ef1e37bc09e1#.z2xn9wg57 https://backchannel.com/forget-comcast-heres-the-diy-approac... It's been running successfully for years and has grown quite a bit.

by goda90 10y ago

norea-armozel 10y ago

I'm definitely interested in such an idea. I might have to check around the MPLS area to see who's doing any sort of DIY electronics and other such meetups here.

kej 10y ago

The amateur radio community already has the technical know-how and disaster readiness to do most of that, and I'd be willing to bet there's enough overlap between them and the meshnet crowd to take care of the rest.

M_Grey 10y ago
A good friend of mine has been into ham radio since he was a young guy, and this is definitely true. In fact a lot of people in that community play a role in plans for a disaster that would knock out other communications, integrated with some local, and state governments. I'm not sure about the federal level, but I'd guess it's integrated there too. And there are a lot of them, and at this point if you're into ham radio, it's for the love and you tend to be pretty proficient.
justifier 10y ago
combined with a project like this: http://icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter http://icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry... and you've basically got the web ;p at least a one way communication network form
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
KG6YHQ here. It's doable, but if the wired net becomes unusable and you have to rely wholly on the RF spectrum, bandwidth would be stupendously tiny. Forget about sending anything else but, basically, text-based messages. Perhaps in an event like that a decision would be made to temporarily open up the spectrum, but even then there are only so many of us, only so many transceivers out there. I feel the HAM net would be more useful after a natural catastrophe, where the infrastructure would be destroyed physically. Which is exactly what a lot of us are preparing for.
- harshreality 10y ago
  Wouldn't SDRs be a lot more useful for creating higher-bandwidth wireless networks in the sort of disaster where the FCC opens up other frequency ranges? The amateur radio regulation regime and common ham radios work well for small numbers of small messages sent around in a well-regulated way, without the government initiating a frequency band jubilee. But beyond that, HAM radios are limited, even if they're modded, and the cheap SDRs are even cheaper than baofeng handhelds, so where does that leave amateur radio in a real frequency free-for-all? I think what would matter is, as mentioned above, availability of SDRs, and secondly, parties of people tracking down transmitters that are messing up the ad-hoc sdr wireless nets.
  - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    Sure, but everything has to be ready, prepared and exercised before anything happens. Whatever plan you may conceive, you have to do plenty of test runs in advance. After it happens, it's chaos, it's too late to start new initiatives. And there are caveats anyway. For local connections, some kind of WiFi mesh might still be the best option. For long distance, I don't think you can currently use anything but proper HAM equipment, and fairly large power at that. For a reliable connection, especially at good bandwidth, you need lots of power and a good antenna. But if you blow standards out of the water, and start pumping out huge bandwidths at huge powers, you run again into a tragedy of commons - you're taking up large chunks of spectrum over entire continents. There is no free lunch.
superuser2 10y ago
The amateur radio community can't use encryption and, for the most part, is happy about this restriction. A zero-privacy internet might be better than nothing, but I'm not 100% sure of that.
- WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
  but its only relevant in the disaster-recovery situation anyhow; should be quite decent for that use. And otherwise, you have regular Internet access, and its hardly realistic a small hacker community can do anything to replace it.

matt4077 10y ago

There should be a term for "overprepping for disaster because it's so exciting to think about".

rexfm 10y ago
"Preppers" ?
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
engineering?
rabidrat 10y ago
You mean, like this guy? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall--village-left-untouched-tsunami.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese...
- M_Grey 10y ago
  The man lived through a tsunami in the area, that was hardly a matter of exciting thoughts, but a desperate desire to prevent a predictable tragedy. By contrast people prepping for the end of days in whatever form, often nuclear, strike me as mad. If there's a nuclear war, I want to be in the hypocenter of the first detonation, because we're not climbing out of that hole as a species in any meaningful way. I suppose that reality is why so many have turned to fantasies of a worldwide EMP of some exotic type which is at least survivable in their imagination. Me? I've read my history, if civilization comes tumbling down, my plan is to eat a gun. Meanwhile I'll live my life without terror, and plan only for disasters that can reasonably be managed without dedicating my limited lifespan to it.
  - WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
    Agreed, if civilization does come tumbling down. However, as far as I could read, for it to survive a nuclear exchange is quite possible, even probable. Blasts themselves seem relatively harmless, beyond the hundereds of millions they just outright kill that is, radiation we're just characteristically paranoid about, but can actually deal with at least in many remaining areas, and the main issue at debate is whether a nuclear winter of substantial duration would be formed or not. Which depends on the scope of the fires, so flammability of urban environments and the like. We can't pretend to know a real answer, but its certainly possible. And then there's the issue of whether the south hemisphere could avoid that fate even in such a case, due to weather patterns, provided there's no detonations there (as there are no weapons there). Now that doesn't seem substantially different from any large-scale warfare civilization easily survived previously, like world war II; urban devastation and millions of dead. Hardly a civilization-ending event.

rfrank 10y ago

things along those lines are already happening in oakland and a number of other cities across the country. https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh

busterarm 10y ago
Seconded. Definitely look into meshnets. There's one in Red Hook (brooklyn) that's been up and running for a long time.

thinkmassive 10y ago

I recently discovered a startup called Endless that appears to be working on the content/caching side of this problem. They're for-profit but seem to have good intentions between releasing their OS as open source and creating affordable hardware targeted at emerging markets. https://endlessm.com/ https://endlessm.com/

jcl 10y ago

There are educational projects that focus on providing the benefits of the internet to communities that have poor or no connectivity, like: http://internet-in-a-box.org/ http://internet-in-a-box.org/ While internet failure mitigation isn't an explicit goal of such projects, their resources might make a good starting point.

davidhyde 10y ago

This guy in Spain created his own internet infrastructure: https://backchannel.com/forget-comcast-heres-the-diy-approach-to-internet-access-ef1e37bc09e1#.z2xn9wg57 https://backchannel.com/forget-comcast-heres-the-diy-approac... It's been running successfully for years and has grown quite a bit.