3 ms·

> The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable A LNB is pretty quiet to begin with... and the LO is on the same frequency

by mlyle 4y ago

> The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable A LNB is pretty quiet to begin with... and the LO is on the same frequency whether you're watching satellite TV or tapping into Othernet. You could, of course, make it much quieter still. Just because a lot of receivers leak a lot of oscillator and mixer frequencies doesn't mean it's intrinsic. > and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit. Which is why I was talking about a receive-only approach. (Well, also for reasons of scalability).

lazide 4y ago
Well, that is also fundamentally not an internet.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Well, I thought I made that pretty clear in what I posted. "Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links?"
  - lazide 4y ago
    Since the whole point of the internet is, you know, people can request what they want and communicate with others, and they already HAVE people shoving ‘important stuff’ their way, what exactly do you think that adds to the picture?
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > what exactly do you think that adds to the picture? - Othernet is already a system out of local control that can be received with relatively trivial equipment. - 2000bps feels perhaps a bit too slow, but with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, you could have a -lot- of textual communication. It could carry a big cross-section of what everyone is saying and allow people to choose what they see. - An ideal system would support multiple transports; Othernet, intermittent wifi connectivity, sneakernet, etc. It would do the best with what it can to get data in or out, and allocate the scarce resources to the traffic which is most likely to be useful to others (this is tricky, with sybil attacks, etc... but I don't think it's necessarily intractable). That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        > That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor? This already exists, it's called ham radio. There are even large communities of folks sending 'postcards' to each other on a regular basis.
        mlyle 4y ago
        I'm probably failing to articulate what I'm describing. Not really. I've been part of the SSTV scene. I know about packet and things like PACTOR etc too. I remember operating a UUCP site, and I remember how well network news gracefully dealt with quite a wide variety of sites with different ad-hoc setups. I miss that. I wish more of today's internet was a bit more like that: all the interactivity in the world when the network is good, but gracefully degrading to offline copies, snapshots, etc as the network is intermittently disconnected or one-way or whatever. Secure ScuttleButt ("SSB") does a lot of this, but there's no real one-way provision and it's a bit wack to use and discover your way through.
        lazide 4y ago
        The reason I think you’re getting so much confusion is it doesn’t seem to make any sense to folks what you’re proposing. It seems like an edge case either already served by existing tech except for some very, very small set of situations where most won’t consider it practical or useful anyway. They’ll just knuckle under the societal rules which forbid it, because the cost of doing it in a way they won’t likely be caught and imprisoned isn’t worth it to them. Most people just care about having food in their belly every day, feeling safe and loved, and being able to believe that what they’re doing is okay day to day and will work out to be all good in the future. Doing what you’re proposing doesn’t really help them with that.
        mlyle 4y ago
        > It seems like an edge case either already served by existing tech except for some very, very small set of situations where most won’t consider it practical or useful anyway Yes, it's all about the edge cases that don't affect the commercial value of the network much. It's about dealing with natural disaster, intermittent and very low quality network connections by modern standards, people in remote areas, or censorship. It may even be about space missions and distant probes in the future. SSB is a neat system if you're on a sailboat with connectivity every few days. Othernet is a neat system for pushing what satellite communications can do to the limit. Of course, systems being technically neat is not what gets them adopted. Networks, network capacity, and network reach have grown so much that we've forgotten about UUCP, etc. We have better algorithmic tools and more computation to build networks that tolerate disconnection, intermittency, etc. But perhaps we don't have the commercial motivation to use them, even if they would make the networks and societies that use them more robust.

by mlyle 4y ago

lazide 4y ago

Well, that is also fundamentally not an internet.

mlyle 4y ago
Well, I thought I made that pretty clear in what I posted. "Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links?"
- lazide 4y ago
  Since the whole point of the internet is, you know, people can request what they want and communicate with others, and they already HAVE people shoving ‘important stuff’ their way, what exactly do you think that adds to the picture?
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > what exactly do you think that adds to the picture? - Othernet is already a system out of local control that can be received with relatively trivial equipment. - 2000bps feels perhaps a bit too slow, but with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, you could have a -lot- of textual communication. It could carry a big cross-section of what everyone is saying and allow people to choose what they see. - An ideal system would support multiple transports; Othernet, intermittent wifi connectivity, sneakernet, etc. It would do the best with what it can to get data in or out, and allocate the scarce resources to the traffic which is most likely to be useful to others (this is tricky, with sybil attacks, etc... but I don't think it's necessarily intractable). That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      > That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor? This already exists, it's called ham radio. There are even large communities of folks sending 'postcards' to each other on a regular basis.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        I'm probably failing to articulate what I'm describing. Not really. I've been part of the SSTV scene. I know about packet and things like PACTOR etc too. I remember operating a UUCP site, and I remember how well network news gracefully dealt with quite a wide variety of sites with different ad-hoc setups. I miss that. I wish more of today's internet was a bit more like that: all the interactivity in the world when the network is good, but gracefully degrading to offline copies, snapshots, etc as the network is intermittently disconnected or one-way or whatever. Secure ScuttleButt ("SSB") does a lot of this, but there's no real one-way provision and it's a bit wack to use and discover your way through.
        lazide 4y ago
        The reason I think you’re getting so much confusion is it doesn’t seem to make any sense to folks what you’re proposing. It seems like an edge case either already served by existing tech except for some very, very small set of situations where most won’t consider it practical or useful anyway. They’ll just knuckle under the societal rules which forbid it, because the cost of doing it in a way they won’t likely be caught and imprisoned isn’t worth it to them. Most people just care about having food in their belly every day, feeling safe and loved, and being able to believe that what they’re doing is okay day to day and will work out to be all good in the future. Doing what you’re proposing doesn’t really help them with that.
        mlyle 4y ago
        > It seems like an edge case either already served by existing tech except for some very, very small set of situations where most won’t consider it practical or useful anyway Yes, it's all about the edge cases that don't affect the commercial value of the network much. It's about dealing with natural disaster, intermittent and very low quality network connections by modern standards, people in remote areas, or censorship. It may even be about space missions and distant probes in the future. SSB is a neat system if you're on a sailboat with connectivity every few days. Othernet is a neat system for pushing what satellite communications can do to the limit. Of course, systems being technically neat is not what gets them adopted. Networks, network capacity, and network reach have grown so much that we've forgotten about UUCP, etc. We have better algorithmic tools and more computation to build networks that tolerate disconnection, intermittency, etc. But perhaps we don't have the commercial motivation to use them, even if they would make the networks and societies that use them more robust.