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Good luck. How do you boycott a backbone network provider thatmay ultimately service your chosen ISP anyway? Sure, you harm their consumer and residential reta

Good luck. How do you boycott a backbone network provider thatmay ultimately service your chosen ISP anyway? Sure, you harm their consumer and residential retail operations, but that won't cripple their business to business operations, which is where all the real money is anyway.

dllthomas 13y ago
Mesh networks?
- zackmorris 13y ago
  I wish Hacker News had a wiki somewhere listing the most promising solutions to the top issues hackers care about. So like, best off-the-shelf mesh network hardware, best form of encryption, best $5 microcontroller with usb and/or bluetooth and or wifi, stuff like that. If I could just get these things cheaply and easily, I would gladly use them. Right now so many of them seem more experimental than ubiquitous.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    I'm actually not convinced, myself, that they're practical at present (I know that anyone is doing anything with them in the real world, so it's not 100% theoretical, but not the extent or the difficulty or the capabilities...). Which is to say, I'd also very much like to see such a consolidation of resources.
  - uxp 13y ago
    Reminds me of just after iOS6 was released under NDA in beta, and Apple had their new Maps application. My wife and I were going somewhere at about 5PM and I went to go check the traffic on the route we were headed towards, and there wasn't a byte of data available to figure out what the traffic was like since there were maybe a few dozen phones in a few square miles of where I was that were running iOS6. I'd be one of the first people in line to install a mesh network at my residence and work, but it would be pretty useless unless there were others contributing, else I'd have a pretty lonely network.
  - tracker1 13y ago
    It seems to me that what you are really looking for is an opion based stack-exchange site. http://stackexchange.com/sites http://stackexchange.com/sites
rdl 13y ago
I think when you're boycotting a huge company, you can just avoid them where possible. If you can't tell if the company is a vendor to a vendor, that's ok. It doesn't need to be a material impact on their financials -- just the marketing and PR value which keeps the issue in place is important, and maybe it keeps smaller companies from playing along, too. I'd probably not buy transit from them, certainly not when given a choice (I'd obviously still peer/etc. if I needed routes to ATT), too.
consider_this 13y ago
You don't need to boycott AT&T, although, that would be nice. They, Google, Level 3, etc. all own so much of the network backbones...it's impossible not to route through an adversarial trunk. The answer is now encryption. End-to-end, and everywhere. Email should be considered as dead as the landline. Secure-IM and chat...along with self-hosted data services[like Owncloud] are the future. Or at least they should be. Information is power and your adversaries will not give it up, ever. The only way to take that power is to scramble the bits.

dllthomas 13y ago

Mesh networks?

zackmorris 13y ago
I wish Hacker News had a wiki somewhere listing the most promising solutions to the top issues hackers care about. So like, best off-the-shelf mesh network hardware, best form of encryption, best $5 microcontroller with usb and/or bluetooth and or wifi, stuff like that. If I could just get these things cheaply and easily, I would gladly use them. Right now so many of them seem more experimental than ubiquitous.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  I'm actually not convinced, myself, that they're practical at present (I know that anyone is doing anything with them in the real world, so it's not 100% theoretical, but not the extent or the difficulty or the capabilities...). Which is to say, I'd also very much like to see such a consolidation of resources.
- uxp 13y ago
  Reminds me of just after iOS6 was released under NDA in beta, and Apple had their new Maps application. My wife and I were going somewhere at about 5PM and I went to go check the traffic on the route we were headed towards, and there wasn't a byte of data available to figure out what the traffic was like since there were maybe a few dozen phones in a few square miles of where I was that were running iOS6. I'd be one of the first people in line to install a mesh network at my residence and work, but it would be pretty useless unless there were others contributing, else I'd have a pretty lonely network.
- tracker1 13y ago
  It seems to me that what you are really looking for is an opion based stack-exchange site. http://stackexchange.com/sites http://stackexchange.com/sites

rdl 13y ago

I think when you're boycotting a huge company, you can just avoid them where possible. If you can't tell if the company is a vendor to a vendor, that's ok. It doesn't need to be a material impact on their financials -- just the marketing and PR value which keeps the issue in place is important, and maybe it keeps smaller companies from playing along, too. I'd probably not buy transit from them, certainly not when given a choice (I'd obviously still peer/etc. if I needed routes to ATT), too.

consider_this 13y ago

You don't need to boycott AT&T, although, that would be nice. They, Google, Level 3, etc. all own so much of the network backbones...it's impossible not to route through an adversarial trunk. The answer is now encryption. End-to-end, and everywhere. Email should be considered as dead as the landline. Secure-IM and chat...along with self-hosted data services[like Owncloud] are the future. Or at least they should be. Information is power and your adversaries will not give it up, ever. The only way to take that power is to scramble the bits.