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I've always thought the world needs a project to provide guerrilla internet connectivity to a large area using cheap, common hardware like a Raspberry Pi for si
by sph 10mo ago
I've always thought the world needs a project to provide guerrilla internet connectivity to a large area using cheap, common hardware like a Raspberry Pi for situations like these which are increasingly common.
Basically a 12V battery-powered Wifi+3G(+Wimax maybe) antenna for clients and an outbound Ethernet port to plug to some illegal internet socket. Make it open-source, able to be built with a little ingenuity and low cost.
- Telemakhos 10mo agoStarlink now offers direct-to-cellphone 4G coverage, no extra equipment needed.
- pelagicAustral 10mo agoYou do still need an ISP playing ball with Starlink for that to work.
- hdgvhicv 10mo agoYou need Musk to play ball. Starlink worked fine when Afghanistan turned off the internet. There’s a lot of rhetoric about the evil musk internet there - the government don’t care about things like vsat, it’s very specifically framed as anti America and anti Musk Remember the people enforcing it (going to businesses and checking their connections) are thick as two short planks. Iran I expect has a more effective enforcement than the taliban, but the principal is the same - starlink works fine in these countries and downlinks elsewhere (Europe in the case of Afghanistan). GEO providers like Inmarsat downlink in places like the Netherlands. It’s all rather meaningless as only a tiny number of people have access to these systems, compared to access to the Internet via phones.
- lostlogin 10mo agoMusk has to agree though - and he was shutting this down at various points in Ukraine over his support for Russian. Ideally Starlink wouldn’t be involved.
- stevenhuang 10mo agoThe situation was more complicated than that, there was pressure from the US gov (itar) and desire not escalate the situation at the time. Now that the geopolitical situation has changed and funding concerns mostly alleviated, there are 200k terminals in use in Ukraine. https://circleid.com/posts/starlink-in-ukraine-what-three-years-of-wartime-connectivity-taught-us https://circleid.com/posts/starlink-in-ukraine-what-three-ye...
- lostlogin 10mo agoHe took a very public approach to navigating that and while that would be on brand, it’s wild. He seem to have been directly communicating with Putin. Disconnecting Ukraine at key points in battles would fit with the current administration’s flip flopping approach, but again he is at the front of it and on Twitter slagging off supposed American allies. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/why-is-elon-musk-talking-to-vladimir-putin-and-what-does-it-mean-for-spacex/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/why-is-elon-musk-talki... This may all get weird again as the US seems to have blundered into conflict with Russia over Venezuela so maybe the Ukraine may see some support.
- nicepost 10mo agoWould starlink be reliable in countries where it's leadership wasn't politically aligned though?
- lostlogin 10mo agoThis has already been established with Ukraine. It’s weird there and seems to be running now. Though Russian troops have been pictured with it too.
- heraldgeezer 10mo agoIf the device is in Ukraine, how would it distinguish between russians or ukranians using it in the same country? Like, decide.
- lostlogin 10mo agoThat’s very clearly a problem. But that wasn’t the one Musk weighed in on, he just blocked Ukraine at some points in time.
- anabab 10mo agoA government may introduce a list of identifiers of devices allowed to operate in their territory. With relatively frequent verification to prevent the use of captured devices.
- aspect0545 10mo agoStarlink is Musk. That‘s not reliable
- lucasRW 10mo agoI know you hate it, but X and Starlink are the only channels giving us information on Iran right now. If X was censored (like many leftists are advocating), we wouldn't know anything about those riots.
- djeastm 10mo agoWhat are Iranians posting on X that the left would want censored?
- lucasRW 10mo agoPeople rising against a regime that the left sympathizes with, obviously. Iranians describing how Isam destroyed their country within one decade (the UK establishment is very unconfortable with that truth, for some reaslon...). Iranians calling on Trump and thanking Elon. That tends to make leftists mad.
- djeastm 10mo ago>That tends to make leftists mad. Being mad is one thing, but demanding X censor that speech is another. I'm not really involved in this debate so I haven't seen anything like that. Can you provide some examples of any prominent people on the left calling for X to censor that speech?
- lucasRW 10mo agoStarmer, T.Breton (former EU commissioner, the one who got denied VISA to the US going forward), google them with "X ban" and you'll have all the results you want. Similar with many other EU political figures.
- frrn 10mo agoAn extremely centralized network like Starlink depending on the wishes of its owner is the opposite of freedom. We need sovereign alternatives.
- mixermachine 10mo agoDon't get me wrong, but somebody has to operate an exit node and somehow there needs to be a consensus on the protocol + routing. If the network is only earth bound fixed wireless, the distance might be small enough that the state comes for the operator itself... This raises the cost of running this network from just money to life threat. Getting many open source satellites up in orbit might not be feasible.
- frrn 10mo agoAgreed that nothing is fully trustless on Earth. The point isn’t eliminating operators, it’s avoiding single points of coercion and failure. One exit can be shut down but many exits and type of networks (includong more alternative infra like the Guifi.net’s meshnetworks in Spain for example) across jurisdictions raise the cost from “call a CEO” to sustained political pressure or directly a CEO that has control over an entire network and its also a billionaire CEO with a messiah complex, far-right leanings and tendency to drug abuse. Absolute decentralization is impossible. Reducing capture and increasing resilience is not. That’s a meaningful difference. Said that, I’m happy with Starlink as an extra actor for a healthy mix of ISPs and networks that brings resilience.
- hdgvhicv 10mo agoSovereign like one controlled by the Iranian government?
- frrn 10mo agoThat’s a false dichotomy. Saying Starlink isn’t sovereign doesn’t imply support for state-controlled networks. Criticizing corporate centralization ≠ endorsing government control. The goal is systems where authority is fragmented enough that capture (by states or corporations) is structurally hard
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- girvo 10mo agoIt's apparently being jammed in Iran from what I've heard/read, though I don't know how reliable that is.
- heraldgeezer 10mo agoCant be jammed. The dishes can be found and disabled ofc. If it could be "jammed" like that Russia would "jam" the Ukranian ones.
- lostlogin 10mo agoPutin found a way of achieving that at a couple of points in time.
- ninjagoo 10mo agoWhy can't it be jammed? Can't any radio signal can be jammed by a stronger one?
- slumberlust 10mo agoThe way it's been presented in other threads is that the narrow beam makes it quite difficult to jam at scale.
- girvo 10mo ago> If it could be "jammed" like that Russia would "jam" the Ukranian ones. They did, though, in a few places? It was reported as such anyway, again this is not something I'm an expert on.
- IlikeMadison 10mo agoalso mesh networks
- elbci 10mo agomesh networks! peer-to-peer, not (oligarch/gov/corporation)-to-(gullible maneuver mass)
- ninalanyon 10mo agoSurely the real cost of such a device is not the hardware or the software but the organizational effort required to install it and make it useful without anyone involved getting caught.
- XorNot 10mo agoAnything persistent at all is downright unusable - they'll be tracked and destroyed, people near them arrested etc. We're basically talking attritable devices being needed and protocols which make them useful - i.e. something you can release that stands a chance of getting information out before its destroyed and where the users are nowhere near it when it's launched. EDIT: I mean realistically you basically would want to just toss a handful of cheap USB memory sticks out across a city. So if we're being realistic it's just more USB-C OTG devices. Ideally what you want is it to become standard for USC-C memory sticks to have a USB-C port on them so they can be daisy chained and copied stick to stick if given a power source so they're easy to copy and spread.
- ninjagoo 10mo ago> Anything persistent at all is downright unusable - they'll be tracked and destroyed, people near them arrested etc. That's a really good point. Maybe the tech needs to be in reasonably widespread use prior to when it's needed, then it becomes harder to strangle in the moment. A product in everyone's home and office. Wi-fi routers with long-range capabilities and automatic mesh fallback in case of isp outage?
- sph 10mo agoThe target audience is people fighting for their lives. When you've lost connectivity and everything around you is on fire, you don't have much time to faff about with designing such a system. This is why I believe it should be a premade and tested open-source kit for preppers and people in high-risk areas.
- ninjagoo 10mo agoperhaps it needs to be tech that is useful in daily life, with the ability to switch channels automatically when the main isp is unavailable. An example is the HNT helium network - an alternative data transport mechanism. Not saying that is what should be used - that's a crypto thing - but the principle is the same. thinking about it in terms of "getting caught" might be the less ideal way to approach it - think of it in terms of building a more reliable system, which is a goal everyone can get behind.
- alexey-salmin 10mo agoSurely governments will not see any issues with this project whatsoever. Though in US I think you can try publishing the code and blueprints as a book and claim the First Amendment, following the PGP story. May or may not work.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- femto 10mo agoThere are a number of projects that do this, using mobile phones to form ad hoc / mesh networks. https://www.open-mesh.org/ https://www.open-mesh.org/ https://briarproject.org/ https://briarproject.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_ad_hoc_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_ad_hoc_network The original but now defunct? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serval_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serval_Project
- stogot 10mo agoI assume that these are blocked by sanction-following CDN firewalls? The first link paused to “check if I’m a bot” and I’m sure they check if I’m from Iran too
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10mo agohttps://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat Seems similar to Briar but it has an iOS client.