If you need something to cleanse your information palette...
Blockchain and crypto-currency is super hot here, read this it's very
entertaining:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/technology/cryptocurrency-puerto-rico.ht…
.
This is relevant for us because, if there are are technologists that can
help me, they will be attending the explosion of Meetups taking place.
Plus, I skimmed an article that mentioned using block-chains for energy,
instead of a currency it entitles the bearer to actual energy. I haven't
checked, but it makes sense too for Internet, the implications are a little
scary.
Any way, back to the regular programming
--
Kevin Shockey
Artist, Scientist, Activist
Twitter <https://twitter.com/shockeyk>& Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/shockeyk/>
Just started laying the ground work for a mesh network here in Puerto Rico.
Love what Sudo Room has accomplished so far, I look forward to
collaborating.
We'll need to dive wide and deep to explore post-disaster recovery in
Puerto Rico.
There is sooo much to document, sooo much more to learn. I started a new
Git Hub repository, https://github.com/mistribus/Puerto-Rico-Mesh, to keep
track of everything. I hope to suck everything into
https://github.com/mistribus/Puerto-Rico-Mesh/wiki dor documentation.
What have you heard about the communications challenges after the
hurricane? Any questions?
--
Kevin Shockey
Artist, Scientist, Activist
Twitter <https://twitter.com/shockeyk>& Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/shockeyk/>
How de we get here??????
Disclaimer: I've been in Puerto Rico for 23 years, more than any other
place I've ever lived, even good ol'e Kokomo. I've visited back to the
states as often as I can, but living on a retired veterans income places
it's own limitations on mobility. So this is all I really know. I know
other places share similar behaviors and traits. My frustrations are the
same as the FUD resistance for any community. Oh yeah, please don't judge
me if my observations are harsh. Sometimes science can be cruel.
A brief riff on FLOSS, community, and the IT industry in Puerto RIco
Let me preface this by saying that I believe that science is the route I
will follow at the beginning of this. The post-Maria disaster presented
some very significant findings and they must be documented to move things
forward.
So, here we go, take a deep breath. We're about dive into a hard answer.
Lately I've been trying to look at my observations from some very open
places, so that I may gain some perspective. So this is the first forum
where I'm trying share this new view.
I believe that there are some very strong communities on the island, but
only a few are what we might call technology communities. Let's take car
enthusiasts as an example, the coherence within these groups is high, they
meet regularly and openly share tech, ideas, values, etc. They are active
online and connect regularly. Coming from the Midwest, racing and cars are
common. Enthusiasts pursue a strong community for the love of racing and
cars. Some can make a career and/or profit off of the base, most do it
because, as we say here they are "fiebru." Translated it basically means
they have a fever for the topic of their obsession. I believe that these
groups are the future of community in Puerto Rico.
Now let's look at the tech arena. To my knowledge, there only a couple of
"open" communities. One is the social media arena, but they don't have a
core group, more like a core group of people from varying orgs. Some groups
have come and gone, but none has withstood the inherent pressures of being
the "lead" group. there some quazi-tech groups which are parts of other
purpose groups, like a local sales and marketing association.
The other group has an information security focus and they have been
operating for about 6 years now. They are a talented group and I'm sure
they will help. I know the founders so, I hope that we're good (more on
them later). In the 23 years I've been here groups come and go, but most
(all?) fell prey to market forces. My new theory is that these types of
communities fail because of the intersection between business/career
interests and the welfare of the community.
An associate of mine from the prPIG days shared this observation recently.
Only 3.5 million peeps, and dropping quickly, live on the main island.
Maybe 1.5 million households. We are just too small to have any technology
niche.
Negative forces on community:
1) Due to our small population, just how muchy technology talent do we
have? With low high-school graduation rates, it probably at the low end of
any national norms.
2) PR has a very low incoming migratory rate. As opposed to the 48
contiguous states, you just can't drive to relocate here. Most immigration
we have is from the Dominican Republic.
3) PR has a very high migration out of island, the infamous brain drain.
Yes the hurricane has accelerated the process but we retain very few of the
most talented of our new graduates. They are heavily recruited on campus.
Outside the scope (or is it?) of this research is the brain drain within
the medical community. We face an uncertain public health issue with the
very real lack of doctors. Many have not reopened after the hurricane and
have relocated. It is unknown if they will return to their practices
4) Many participants within technology communities are more interested in
personal advancement. No different than most places, but bear with me.
5) Finally, if you accept that a community is strongest when it is driven
for the love of it, and not merely to advance the community, then what
happens when the leaders of the organizations, which are meant to address
deep social problems (literacy, media literacy, a free and open Internet,
the digital divide, etc) siphon off the energy from their communities for
personal reasons? Happens everywhere right, but what if this behavior was
systemic.
After applying all of these forces, we are limited to a very small
population of technology enthusiasts who are just not enough to keep a
community alive (the negative forces grind them down until they move on to
something else). It is not unheard of someone coming into a community to
spread FUD within the ranks, especially when the advancements of the
community would have threatened an established player.
Bottom line, my theory is, to get enough nodes to create a viable network,
it will come from a community of communities (collective of collectives).
I further believe that public safety might be the in for this rich tapestry
of fiebrus across the island. Sorry if this was too long, but there are no
easy answers when it comes to community in Puerto Rico.
BTW, IMHO for the gold-standard metric of our IT industry, look at the
Puerto Rico economy at a glance.
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet It goes back to 1990. If you
will notice, the size of out IT industry has been in sharp decline for a
while. Without effective leadership we will have nearly erased all of the
job growth back to when I first came in 1995. Meaning, there are no more IT
jobs today than there were back in the mid 90's
PS: Eve, I would love to hear more about the ham relay system. Since I'm
still doing research so I don't know enough yet, but I've heard of ham
radio based tcp/ip, which sounds very promising.
--
Kevin Shockey
Artist, Scientist, Activist
Twitter <https://twitter.com/shockeyk>& Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/shockeyk/>
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Virus-free.
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Hey mesh people,
Thanks to everyone who showed up to the first BYOI office hours on Sunday
afternoon. It was great to see lots of new, excited faces.
I wanted to report back on a fun afternoon of crimping, flashing, and
talking, (we didn't quite make it to mounting). There were lots of great
thoughts shared about organizing node mounts, performing outreach, and
communicating with node owner and operators. We laid out a spread of all
the equipment needed for a mount and talked about other equipment we could
use. Joanna took lots of pictures that can hopefully be compiled into a
wiki or webpage. Jonathan took some notes on the conversation we had as we
went through the "start-to-finish" process of mounting a node, from the
"who, what where, when" to getting on the roof to the long-term maintenance
of the node. I will add a link to these notes ahead of Tuesday's meeting in
peoplesopen.net/notes.
I also created an collaborative spreadsheet to organize upcoming office
hours,
https://ethercalc.org/byoi_office_hours
If you are available and willing to keep office hours on a Sunday
afternoon, feel free to add your name to the list. Once we schedule a node
mount for a week, the point of contact should add their name to the "Point
Person" field for that week so that the office hours keeper knows who to
connect node mounters with. Finally, if you have a skill to share relevant
to computer networking, human networking, or the People's Open project in
general, please sign up to lead a skill share session.
Unfortunately, today, we didn't get to scheduling the next node mount. I
hope to spend some of tomorrow contacting potential node locations. If any
wants to help, I'll be at the Omni most of the evening tomorrow or contact
me directly so we can coordinate outreach.
Thanks again!
-grant_____/@paidforby
> PS: Eve, I would love to hear more about the ham relay system. Since I'm
still doing research so I don't know enough yet, but I've heard of ham
radio based tcp/ip, which sounds very promising.
Hello Kevin,
I just got the 'Technician' license, but it will take me a while to
actually have a clue about operating.
Here's a ham club in Puerto Rico: prarl.org
An article about hams helping out after the storm:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/27/us/puerto-rico-maria-ham-radio-operators-trn…
Hey there! I successfully flashed a home node and am able to connect to the
private SSID, SSH in as root, and poke around. When I connect my home node
to my home router, I am able to access the internet via the private SSID.
However, I don't think I'm actually connected to the mesh. Am wondering if
something is going wrong with the tunneling.
Some notes:
0) tunneldigger is running:
root@pattyspuddles:~# ps | grep tunnel
2900 root 5312 S /usr/bin/tunneldigger -u
ecd1b967-16e5-4c08-b738-bf83b82f559c -i l2tp0 -t 1 -b 45.34.140.42:8942 -L
1000kbit -s /opt/mesh/tunnel_hook -I eth1
1) In /var/log/messages I see:
Sun Feb 4 10:16:49 2018 daemon.info td-client: Performing broker
selection...
Sun Feb 4 10:16:52 2018 daemon.info td-client: Selected 45.34.140.42:8942
as the best broker.
Sun Feb 4 10:16:56 2018 daemon.info td-client: Tunnel successfully
established.
Sun Feb 4 10:16:56 2018 daemon.info td-client: Requesting the broker to
configure downstream bandwidth limit of 1000 kbps.
2) ping 8.8.8.8 works
3) ping -I mesh5 8.8.8.8 does not work
4) ping -I l2tp0 8.8.8.8 does not work
5) I see 2 public SSIDs *peoplesopen.net <http://peoplesopen.net> 65.28.1*
and *peoplesopen.net <http://peoplesopen.net> 65.28.1 fast*, but I do not
see plain ol' *peoplesopen.net <http://peoplesopen.net>*. Is this expected?
6) If I'm connected to either *peoplesopen.net <http://peoplesopen.net>
65.28.1 *or *peoplesopen.net <http://peoplesopen.net> 65.28.1 fast*, I
cannot access the internet.
Any suggestions for how to continue debugging would be awesome!
--Benny
You might be wondering just who is this crazy gringo?
I was born and raised in Kokomo Indiana. Went through Ball State to get by
Bs in Cs and my second lieutenant bars in the Army. Was stationed in
Maryland, where I was medically retired for Crohn's. Finished my Ms in
InfoSci and starting working in Wash D.C.
Met my Puerto Rican wife at a seminar for the GRE in Wash Dc. Some love
story stuff, ba da bing, ba da bam. I'm a father of 3 daughters living in
Gurabo, PR.
Worked until 2006, when my condition forced my full medical retirement.
FLOSS veteran on the island and elsewheres since 2003. Started SNAP
Platform(OSS Java) and prPIG and did that for a few years, then I went into
a little hibernation. Maria woke me up.
--
Kevin Shockey
Artist, Scientist, Activist
Twitter <https://twitter.com/shockeyk>& Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/shockeyk/>
Hi Folks,
A while back I posted a repo
<https://github.com/aetilley/wifi_localization>that
I had been working on to estimate geographic coordinates from nearby MAC
addresses and their corresponding signal strength.
https://github.com/aetilley/wifi_localization
I recently added a Jupyter notebook to this repo to help people more easily
test this code on their own local MAC addresses.
I'd be interested to hear what you find when running this notebook (called
localize_from_nearby_wifi.ipynb
<https://github.com/aetilley/wifi_localization/blob/master/localize_from_nea…>).
For me, I found that, of all the MAC addresses my wifi interface could see,
only one of them was in the database, but had three records, two in SF and
one in Oakland, putting my estimated location somewhere in the middle of
the SF bay.
yours,
Arthur
Let me explain. All of questions are great, it's that to explain some will
require books, those are hard and there are no simple answers. Others are
easier to put into context.
Let's take state of preparation. I've been through a handful of serious
hurricanes, but everyone I know thought this would be like those before.
Unfortunately the magnitude of devestation compared other storms was
nothing close to the collective known experience, so few prepared
sufficiently, across the board government, utilities, private sector,
citizens.
So the go!den question, knowing what we know now, will for the next one
will we be better prepared. That's a more complicated yes and no. For the
entities that can afford it, sure. Those that can not afford it, will not.
