[Mesh] Meeting Minutes 5/9 + Hacking Tomorrow @ sudo

Sorry these are so late, y'all! We're meeting up tomorrow (Thursday) @ 6pm, sudo room to play with new routers and install OpenWRT + batman/babel/what-have-you. Reposting these to our wiki under 'Meeting Minutes': https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh =Attendees= *alex, substack, juul, yardena, jenny, miguel, forrest =Fundamental Questions= ==Why be on a local network?== *Overcoming alienation, loss of community *Supporting local organizations and businesses *Emergency communications (natural disaster, censorship, etc) =Things we need= *Ladder *Binoculars *Let's make a wishlist! =Ideas= *Omnidirectional on the hilltops with directional antennae, buy 1 donate one to 510pen *Mapping collective houses and apartment buildings with rooftop accesss *College dorms who'd want a secure network for file-sharing =Notes= “TCP/IP was designed to work over any kind of layout and not just the booming voice of the master, which is what we currently have” -yardena *meshing protocol handles the routing *master mode only useful if you want to appear as a wireless access point *ARP (address resolution protocol) cache which identifies the network cards on machines **^data link layer *delivery is much less efficient due to needing to broadcast *delivery speed is highest to its adjacent neighbors *message queues through key value stores *bootstrapping list =Low Bandwidth Emergency Communications Project= *talk to juul, legind or jerkey (often on irc) *Played with it Sunday and Monday – what kind of transmitter do we build? The cheap USB sticks don't go above 64 mHz *Trying to find a cheap transmitter that can do more than 9600 baud *APRS weather stations and some ham operators are already operating at that level **NarrowBandFM – use with 50 watt transmitters (5600?) **GPS transmits position, with repeaters operated by amateurs until it reaches an internet gateway in Finland which has a map **not very disaster proof, only 1200 baud *>1mbps OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, similar to CDMA) modulation, which is also used for wifi – spread spectrum technique that uses frequencies which are orthogonal, so you won't get any noise from the adjacent channels (less interference) *<$150 transmitter *can be tuned into legal frequencies later *“ssh is the first thing i'd want in an emergency' *→ but most nodes are just going to be receivers *49 mHz, kind of abandoned territory – 49 is analog - *transmit-capable SDR on new 4G devices *build the transmitter, and use the audio port – seeking to design that =relaychum: friend-to-friend darknet= *https://github.com/substack/relaychum *every message goes to every node, but the senders are completely anonymous (as are the recipients), *still needs crypto and signing, then a mailbox system *indexdb: permanent storage in a browser *compensates even on a crappy network *once back online, can propagate out to the network *written in node.js *partition-tolerant darknet *public keys from chums *chum rings! and also bigger rings *every node is relaying traffic, so the identity of the originator can't be traced *liquid chat room *inspired by homestuck comic - 'pesterchum' *creating a trust network *by writing it in node it can also run in browsers *pushing out public keys to the network **don't want that information contained in the key itself **could hash the keys *=Funding=* *What are our costs? *Routers, minimum specs: **4MB+ & OpenWRT compatible **check seattle meshnet wiki for hardware specs *Router donation drive *Which protocol? **batman-adv vs babel vs. cjdns **open-mesh.org – has the documentation for batman **Babel seems easier **Still need to play with cjdns *Captive portal *Serving less than 1kb locally =Rad Routers= *WRT54G – rev 2 (NOT rev 3 or 4) *Asus RT n10+ series routers are highly reliable *WR703N router – half watt routers =Divergence into political philosophy= *“the whole stupid is greater than the sum of its stupids” *amplification of the spectacle *the best response is finding alternatives to fear – eg joyful emotion and communitas *the generative internet rather than walled, open architecture & decentralized human and machine apis *digital citizenship movement *redefining the commons *revived calia proposal *destabilizing foreign governments does go hand in hand with CISPA-type proposals *Border routers in Australia =Action Items= *Meshathon! (future event) **Get 3 routers and get them talking to each other. **Setting up a tiny mesh can take less than 4 hours *David Gothberg talk, “Peer-to-peer Under the Hood”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNzMNjW8oGs *Awesome Foundation proposal to fund initial hardware *Everyone should buy a router (or several) for themselves to play with =Next Meeting= *Thursday, 5/16, 6pm @ sudo room *Playing with new routers, installing OpenWRT and possibly batman-adv, babel