Hi!
So I posted that ticket on our wlan slovenija Trac some time ago, but I
am also writing now here because maybe there are some people who would
be also interested in more lawish approach to open networks.
So the idea I have is that what we are doing now with community wireless
networks, how we grow them and connect them is all very similar to how
Internet was build in the beginning. Mostly it all works because of the
trust and because we share similar values.
But as we will grow, we will face issues. For example, can our networks
be used for commercial uses. Can we filter some traffic we object to?
Will you transit traffic over your network from some other network with
which rules you do not agree on? In general, we will face net neutrality
issues. And instead of waiting that we get to the stage when things will
be hard to change, I was thinking that we should learn from Internet and
make one change: organic growing and interconnecting of networks is
great, but let us all have a common base of things we agree on, and let
us have a legal backing of that. Internet has no law regulating it, but
we should use law to regulate our networks so that we assure that they
are open and neutral forever. It is like using copyright to defend the
commons. :-)
(Of course we should also try to make it technologically ensured to be
so, but why not have one line of defense more? And sometimes it is good
to write things down, just so that everybody involved knows what to expect.)
We could have something similar to GPL which in short would require from
you net neutrality, if you are connecting to the network, and that
others who will connect to you, will adhere to the same agreement
(peerleft? :-) ).
I am not a lawyer, so I am not sure if "licensing" can be used in this
way. What is a difference between license and agreement? Can you give a
license to somebody that he or she is allowed to connect to your network
and spread it further under this and this conditions. And if they break
those conditions, they are lost their right to connect and are thus illegal.
Concrete proposal is here:
http://grow.wlan-si.net/ticket/1258
When drafting this idea I read many other such agreements/licenses
listed here:
http://interop.wlan-si.net/wiki/Legal/Licenses
Is there any lawyer around who would be interested in drafting such a
peerleft (beerleft?) license? Do you know about some other similar
licenses I missed?
So, this is something which is probably for you very down along the
road, initially this is probably overkill, but maybe some are interested
also in this aspects.
(For all who are maybe not familiar with peering agreements. So the idea
is that you make some type of agreement between nodes connecting, or
even networks as whole connect, about how you will transit their traffic
over your node or network. Inside one community wireless networks this
is often not a problem, but maybe you will get a person who will want to
filter all porn going over his or her node because it will be morally
objecting. How to deal with this? One way is to ignore it. Another is to
have some organization with ruling power over all nodes. The other is to
try to technically assure that this is impossible to do (which might not
be viable or even moral). And there is the thing which I am proposing
which is that all nodes are seen as individual entities which adhere to
the same license. Whoever is deploying this nodes. You don't care. If
they adhere to the license. And if they don't, you have a right to cut
them off.)
Mitar
Hey I have a bit of a technical question (let me betray my ignorance a
bit....)
I've set up one of the ubiquiti picostation nodes with the batman-adv
configuration. It seems to be working as expected. It's broadcasting 2
ssids, one 'sudomesh' as an AP, and the other 'sudomesh-backchannel' as
ad-hoc. I can connect to 'sudomesh' from a laptop and then connect to
the internet.
The question I have is: Is there a way for me to ssh into the router in
order to change configurations, etc? I pretty much followed the guide in
the wiki by the letter, but I don't know where I would find the router
itself in order to ssh in. I tried root@ the ipaddr set in
/etc/config/network as option ipaddr. In the wiki that is 10.42.10.11,
but no luck.
Can anyone give me a clue?
Thanks,
Max
Minutes as always reposted to the wiki:
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh/04_July_2013*
*
Action Items in bold below. Please take on action items and reply to this
thread accordingly! :)*
*
*
July 4th Meeting Minutes*
Welcome to the Oakland Mesh Meeting: Freedom Edition.
... liberating ourselves from the telecoms since January 2013!
*= New Action Items =*
** Reach out to the Berkeley folks to aim to reach the Internet Archive
Richmond node (jenny)*
** Blog post on our setup of the first two nodes and describing the
hardware we received (jenny)*
** Let's make a flier! Who can help? (jenny will start a thread on the list)
*
** Next reportback on an active mesh - Jenny on OTI/Commotion*
** Research resilient ethernet cable (Adrian?)
** Tune the OpenWRT settings on the new nodes for RTS / CTS and ACK timing
*
** Name brainstorm! Add to the "Naming" page here:
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh/Naming*
** Website (contingent on name)*
** Splash page design*
= Attendees =
* Max B, Juul, Jenny, Jordan, Mitar, Adrian
= Announcements =
* Crowdfunding campaign is doing great with 26 days remaining: $2,053.00
(WePay), $56.92 (BitCoin)
* Juul has started putting together bylaws for 501c3 status! -
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh/Bylaws
* International Community Wireless Summit in Berlin Oct. 2-4:
http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/
- ** Jenny submitted a workshop proposal and applied for travel funding
= Report-backs =
* Mitar from wlan-slovenia:
** Must be strategic and have many nodes
** Abundance of fiber / connectivity
** Major difficulty was getting beyond the techies and reaching the
masses
** Primary selling point was to open wireless networks and choosing how
much of one's bandwidth they can share, enabling connectivity across the
whole city.
** Protected by connecting through a *VPN tunnel* to central servers.
** Get folks to deploy their own nodes - so they don't think of the
mesh as a service provided, but rather a DIY endeavor
** Lead by example, the village / neighborhood will follow
** Point of centralization is the two guys with root access to the
server who administer the nodes, firmware upgrades, etc (plz correct if
incorrect)
** Focus on scalability
** Made a simple GUI for indicating router and getting an image
instantly created for it
= Notes =
* Brainstorm on name for the mesh!
** COM - Cutting Out the Middleman
** OWN - Oakland Wireless Network
** Mitar recommends hacing the name by unaffiliated with the hackerspace
and non-geographically-specific
* Tax Status:
** 501(c)4 - non-tax-deductible
** 501(c)3 - can't do party politics (but can be political? - EFF is a
501(c)3!)
* Social pressure to allocate bandwidth to the mesh, sharing connectivity
* Adrian suggests, owning the first 100 nodes, with gradual replacement as
the network grows to a full-on decentralized model
* Our model as a 501c3 is to serve as a facilitator for the mesh.
= Old Action Items =
* Add your potential node to the map! - http://meshmap.sudoroom.org (we now
have 23 potential nodes. keep em comin!)
* Get batman-adv running at Hearth node, mesh with LiveLabs node
* Find some tall rooftops for Adrian to test TDMA point-to-multipoint links
* Research 501(c)x statuses:
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Tax_Structure_Research - Marc did.
---------
Jenny
http://jennyryan.nethttp://thepyre.orghttp://thevirtualcampfire.orghttp://technomadic.tumblr.com
`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
"Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories."
-Laurie Anderson
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
-Hannah Arendt
"To define is to kill. To suggest is to create."
-Stéphane Mallarmé
~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
Hi!
I'm Adrian. I'm a wifi hacker. I worked at Qualcomm Atheros for 18
months on various open and closed source wifi things. I'm also the
FreeBSD wireless developer.
My main focus is FreeBSD but I know a bunch of stuff about openwrt and
the Linux wireless stack and Atheros drivers.
Right now I'm working on FreeBSD support for the latest Atheros chips
and SoCs (the AR933x and AR934x stuff), as well as finishing off the
11n support for TDMA and 802.11s mesh.
I came along to the mesh meetup because being a developer of this
stuff in a vacuum is a bit silly. I've been looking for local groups
who are interested in wifi and want to do strange things with it. This
group seems to be that way inclined. :-) I'm also looking for
victims^Whelpers to test out the long-distance side of this TDMA
support in FreeBSD. It's supposed to work up to dozens of miles, but I
just don't have access to places to mount equipment to test. I'm
hoping that I can find some people here who are willing to help me
with this. I can provide the wireless hardware; all I need here is an
internet hookup and places to mount stuff.
I'm happy to help out any way I can.
If you're all interested, I can do some talks on how this stuff works
and how long distance links work/don't work.
Thanks!
-adrian
Hello meshers!
My name is Charles Wyble, and I've been involved with mesh networks for about 10 years.
A couple years ago, I cofounded a non profit called the Free Network Foundation. We've been working on making the Ubuntu lts of mesh. We call it FreedomStack.
You can learn more at http://www.thefnf.org . We are trying to participate in every single us based mesh community, and provide assistance, connections etc. We also are securing ipv6 space and building relationships with carriers , so that mesh networks can provide internet transit if they so desire.
Very excited to be on this list. I'm based in Austin TX, our hq is in Kansas City. We helped a local non profit (connecting for good) overbuild the evil Google Fiber prisim net, with a free wifi network. It's rapidly growing to cover all of KC.
FNF doesn't operate networks, we provide operator education and development resources.
Oh yeah, we are working on the GPL for networks , called the Network Commons License. RMS is on our board of advisors.
We also are working on high altitude wifi baloons, first test launch will be August 10th out of Houston.
--
Charles Wyble
charles(a)knownelement.com / 818 280 7059
CTO Free Network Foundation (www.thefnf.org)
As my task from this past week for the Mesh group has been to do some more research on tax structure advantages and disadvantages - I wanted to share my excitement about 501(c)(7) with everyone. Social Clubs!
Check it out -- http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Other-Non-Profits/Social-Clubs.
Examples of 501(c)(7) ----
College social/academic fraternities and sororities
Country clubs
Amateur hunting, fishing, tennis, swimming and other sport clubs
Dinner clubs that provide a meeting place library, and dining room for members
Variety clubs
Hobby clubs
Homeowners or community associations whose primary function is to own and maintain recreational areas and facilities
We have the first two nodes mounted, running and connected!
On the mesh map they are "Hearth" and "Adeline Livelabs":
http://meshmap.sudoroom.org/
As you can see, the houses are almost exactly one block from each other on
opposite sides of the street. Each house has a Ubiquiti Bullet 2 HP with a
large omnidirectional antenna mounted on the roof. Unfortunately the only
easy mounting point on the livelabs roof was not near the front of the
house, resulting in the signal being blocked by two large trees on a
neighboring property. We'll move the antenna another day, but for now at
least there is a link.
The nodes are running the batman-adv mesh routing protocols, they can see
each other and we're getting a bit under 1 mbit/sec each way. This is not
great and will be improved once we get line of sight between the antennas.
Ideally we wouldn't use omnidirectional antennas for roof to roof
connections, nor would we use 2.4 ghz routers, but since these two houses
are so close we figured we'd be able to connect them like this and get some
street coverage as well. Using a smartphone we can connect to and use the
mesh from about 1.5 blocks away from each node on adeline street giving us
a four-block coverage area in the north-south direction at least.
The connection is also fine indoors on the first floors of both houses,
even
directly underneath the antenna! More testing is needed to see how well it
covers neighbors houses.
--
Marc
