27 Mar
2013
27 Mar
'13
6:35 p.m.
Hi Romy-
Yeah, I'd be willing to do it under whatever formalities were
appropriate, and in whatever form was appropriate, as long as the
schedule was reasonable (evenings/nights any day of the week work for
me, subject to my work schedule). The simplest format for me would be
talk + Q&A, with slides to project, and with some physical hardware to
demonstrate a few things.
I already have contact with the folks who are working on 510 because I'm
working on a community mesh network project called CTel, for Cooperative
Telephone & Telegraph (data communication is telegraphy).
CTel will be a combined worker- & subscriber-owned cooperative,
providing voice & data service in direct competition to major carriers,
and creating right-livelihood jobs from the get-go. We'll be seeking a
starting base of 2,000 subscribers to get going, but the network could
grow to tens of thousands. The project will be self-funding rather than
relying on outside capital with strings attached. It will be
structurally immune to being sold out to a large corporation or other
external ownership, thus it will always remain a community-owned network.
CTel is being designed to be user-friendly for people without technical
backgrounds, a drop-in replacement for existing landline, mobile, and
broadband. For example the young single mother trying to work and go to
college, the 80-year-old retiree, the working family on a tight budget,
the military veteran newly returned to civilian life, and Main Street
local businesses that serve the community. If we can serve those folks
successfully, we're on the right track.
CTel's worker-owners will provide regular and reliable customer support
and network maintenance, so the network keeps on working rather than
slowly pooping out after the initial excitement wears off.
The primary value of volunteer mesh projects such as 510pen is to enable
hackers/makers to experiment and develop new applications, push the
cutting edge, and try things that would be risky in a fully deployed
public network. This is the aspect that I've found most of the local
mesh activists are interested in, and they should be free to do it
without getting stuck with unpaid jobs having to operate and maintain a
network, and provide customer support to average users who don't have
technical skills.
By analogy, people enthusiastically participate in yearly "spruce up
your block" projects, but nobody wants to sweep the streets on a
volunteer basis every day of every week of the year. At first it's fun,
then it becomes "good exercise," then it becomes boring, and pretty
quickly it's a pain in the butt and people start drifting off. That's
why we have union workers to operate sweeping machines: it's a job that
needs to be done reliably every day.
And realistically, speaking from almost 30 years' experience in
installing, programming, and maintaining telephone systems for hundreds
of clients in the Bay Area, it really does get like street-sweeping
pretty quickly. It's work, un-glamorous and mostly dull, even for
someone who loves working with the technology.
What's likely to happen, as the best way forward, is for folks to do
what inspires them and motivates them, and not get stuck exploiting
themselves via some kind of "sense of obligation." (How many hackers
really want to answer customer service calls?;-) There's more than
enough open ground for lots of community gardens to bloom and bear fruit.
This also opens up the potential for collaboration between CTel and
510pen and other groups and individuals. What a lot of hackers/makers
want, is not only to create cool stuff, but to see their stuff released
to the public and put into general use by people. We can do that, and
people can get paid for the stuff they've developed. The inherent
financial openness of the cooperative business model means that those
arrangements will occur within the broader community consensus, to
ensure everyone has a fair and satisfactory outcome.
At present we have an initial test-case and demo system that interfaces
with telephones and laptops, and we're working on a routing protocol
that will provide for truly integrated voice and data addressing in the
network. I've been wanting to bring the stuff in and show it off; this
is just a matter of finding a time when the Wednesday evening meeting
agenda isn't already full with important items such as organizational
structure (and when I'm not busy with work for my clients, such as tonight).
The next step will be to set up mesh voice communication between local
hackerspaces/makerspaces. For example a "red phone" hotline between
SudoRoom and Ace Monster Toys, and another link to Techliminal, and then
(more ambitiously, this may or may not work depending on topography) to
Noisebridge in SF. Along the way we can pick up a few other SudoRoom
members' households if they're in the transmission path.
I've been funding the R&D out of pocket, which has made things go more
slowly than otherwise, but that's better than getting money with
external strings attached.
There's more to be said about all this, possibly at a meeting where
people can try out the demo system.
Meanwhile I've got a stack of tasks to do tonight...
-G.
======
On 13-03-27-Wed 9:07 AM, Romy Ilano wrote:
G, a presentation on the "hidden history "
of indie telco networks
would be really cool to me!
Would it interest one of the public school history teachers?
Then the 510 network people could show how the history is relevant to
what they're doing now.
What do ya think of that?
---
Romy Ilano
http://www.snowyla.com
romy(a)snowyla.com <mailto:romy@snowyla.com>
On Mar 26, 2013, at 23:15, Anon195714 <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net
<mailto:anon195714@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:
Yep, and I could give an all-day presentation on the topic, including
the UK and Australia as well as the USA.
The Bell System operated according to engineering standards that
called for design and installation details that were too expensive to
provide in rural areas without raising the price of service to an
unacceptable level. So the Bell stayed out of those areas at first,
and smaller independent telcos sprang up to serve them.
Farmers in some rural areas not served by Bell, set up "telephone
cooperatives" where they all bought in and paid for the equipment,
and chipped in labor or hired someone to go about setting up the
systems. The earliest implementations ran their wires along the tops
of the fences between farm properties.
Another story that's fairly well known: how the dial phone was invented.
Undertaker Almon Strowger noticed that he was losing business to a
competitor who had a relative working as an operator. When someone
said "operator, get me an undertaker," she'd put them through to her
relative. Strowger decided he'd had enough of that, and set about
inventing the Automatic Telephone. In a way, you could consider
Strowger to also be the inventor of the concept of "net neutrality."
This was the origin of the Strowger or (in Bell System lingo)
"Step-by-Step" switching system. These machines are a beauty to
behold as they go through their clever mechanical motions to connect
calls. I spent my teenage years in an area served by a Strowger
switch, and I had the chance to work on Strowger PBXs a couple of
times, as well as building some nifty stuff from Strowger
components. Most noticeable is the definite sense of being in a
distinct "place" in cyberspace, a unique route through the machine,
with subtle acoustical characteristics that a trained tech (or a
teenage phone phreak) could recognize.
Strowger switches served in the USA from about 1896 (the very first
one) to the late 1980s, and in the UK and Australia from the late
1920s or so through the late 1980s. They were immune to the
electromagnetic pulse (EMP) created by atomic bombs. And overnight
when traffic was light, they used less power than today's digital
switches.
There are oodles of stories to be told about Strowger.
For one thing, "wiretaps" required physical connections to the lines
at the exchange. In the days when the GPO (General Post Office) ran
the telephones in the UK, GPO engineers were tasked with showing
military intelligence and law enforcement where to find the correct
places to make the connections. But if they (the GPO engs.) decided
that a particular wiretap was political or otherwise an abuse of
authority, they would wait until the coast was clear and then just
disconnect it.
Today, with CALEA and Google Voice, we have no control over who gets
into the telephone switches via the back door, or who intercepts
calls from elsewhere in the network, and no way to stop them. Some
would call that "progress."
Going back to WW2, resistance members in the telephone engineering
staffs in Nazi-occupied countries figured out a clever way to "route
around the damage" of Nazi eavesdropping. I'll save that story for
some possible future presentation.
I also have a working English uniselector dial system that uses
Strowger components, that I could bring in and demonstrate at some
point if anyone's interested.
-G.
=====
On 13-03-26-Tue 10:24 PM, Romy Ilano wrote:
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss side note:
did you know the history of telephone companies in the usa? i was
reading about it. (someone smart left a book for me to read) =D
it's so fascinating. before the depression, it wasn't profitable
for major telecoms to go to rural communities, especially in the
midwest. they disrespected the farmers and thought they were yokels...
so the midwest used to be pretty left wing too (and the source of a
lot of unrest with the farmers etc), so there was this big tradition
of DIY telephone and telegraphs. someone gave me this history to
read, it was so neat! it's weird that nobody talks about this
history now. it's like it was forgotten!
it's so weird how all these rabblerousers and farmers from the
midwest are totally buried. nobody learns about it in us history,
especially kids in Kansas.
it reminds me of the indie network you are constructing at 510
On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 6:14 PM, Anon195714
<anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net <mailto:anon195714@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:
Anthony, I know you didn't mean "no grids," but I was concerned
that a quick skim of this discussion by anyone who didn't know
the material in depth, might lead to the wrong conclusions.
For an example of the danger of over-centralization:
Consider the conversion of the public switched telephone network
to VOIP, in light of the desire on the part of telcos to reap a
huge honking windfall by selling off their vast real estate
holdings. AT&T owns about 5,000 central offices, at least one
in just about every medium or larger city in the USA. Comcast
has FIVE nationwide, and AT&T would love to do likewise, and
conversion to VOIP will accomplish just that.
I'm sure you know what it's called when you centralize something
by a factor of 1,000 to 1:
"A high-value target."
Something that's just begging to be hit hard and taken out, by a
crazed dictator or an international terrorist group, or perhaps
by a few sociopaths of the same kind who run ID theft rings and
bank-card skimmer rings, or perhaps by someone out for the sheer
thrill of smashing and wrecking.
The plans for the "smart power grid" will produce more
high-value targets: regional power control systems, centrally
managed, all internet-connected and just daring the assholes of
the world to hit them.
Already, smart meters provide a tasty treat for predators. I'm
aware of a couple of vulnerabilities that haven't been
published, that would enable a single person with a grudge to
black out a neighborhood for a couple of days. This situation
will compound as smart meters, smart grids, and stupid
regulatory officials converge.
All of this over-centralization, and over-reliance on "smart"
things, is causing our entire society to crawl further and
further out on a limb that becomes more and more fragile every
day. Sooner than later, something will break, bigtime.
In a very practical sense, we have to be concerned with
resilience.
About which more in my next post.
-G.
=====
On 13-03-26-Tue 5:28 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:
To be clear, I don't mean to say "no
grids!1!!1!!!" but just
"use large-scale grids only for what they're best for in the
context of a broader heterogeneous system, not for almost
everything as they are now, and take into account in a rigorous
way overall system efficiency and other concerns like
vulnerability to failures both routine and rare and
corruptibility of the social systems that grow up around the
technical systems."
I remember discussing these points a few times in the past with
you, George, and Hol, and others around sudo room; might we
like to get some documentation together on interesting
specifics? A section of the wiki maybe, where we can throw
ideas up about the details and see what sticks?
On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Anon195714
<anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net <mailto:anon195714@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:
A lot of the arguement against power grids is ultimately
rooted in opposition to having our energy supply controlled
by distant corporations whose decisions are not sustainable
and not in our interests.
I agree that over-dependence on greedy corporations for
vital infrastructure, merely for the sake of convenience,
is a shortcut to servitude. Google is the worst offender,
with its seductive Gmail and Google Voice offering
"convenience" in exchange for intensive and intrusive
surveillance, not only of those who use the services, but
of everyone they communicate with. (Worst of all, Google
Glass: "become a volunteer surveillance drone!")
The model we should be looking toward, to manage the power
grid, is one of municipally-owned transmission
infrastructure (the wires along the streets), and
diversification of power producers (from individual
households to the existing power utilities). Everyone
would be paid the same rate for power they "upload" to the
grid, and everyone would pay the same rate for power they
"download." This would immediately level the playing field
and provide an enormous incentive for all manner of
renewable and new-tech power generation.
Further, the municipal ownership model should also apply to
the wired telecoms grid: telephone and internet. (Even
your mobile device is only "wireless" for the last half
mile at most; the rest of the way it's as wired as my
antique dial phones.) All of these things are using the
public rights-of-way along the streets; they are arguably
public rights-of-way in themselves, and as such, should be
owned by the public.
The municipal internet of electricity would entail each
local power producer (household or larger) having small
storage capacity on-site, and a switching synchronized
inverter to connect to the grid. An onboard microprocessor
with an analog voltage sensors would monitor line power to
determine when power should be uploaded to the grid or
downloaded from the grid. Simple "net metering" would keep
track of the billing.
The small decentralized battery packs would act primarily
as buffers, to level out power production and consumption
among users. Overnight and over multiple cloudy days, and
during peak demand hours, the decentralized solar would be
supplemented by other power sources such as micro-reactors
and natural gas turbines.
The uniform pricing mechanism would prevent predatory
"arbitrage" of electricity, and provide the incentive to
install solar panels on every solar-accessible flat
surface, even on bus shelters and other street kiosks.
The point-of-production microprocessors would be isolated
from the internet to prevent cyber-attacks against the
grid: the best kind of "smart grid" is one that
self-regulates locally without being vulnerable globally.
I should also mention: Yes, electric automobiles can
provide household power storage in the absence of having a
grid, but a) not everyone owns or even wants an automobile,
b) if you've drained your car battery pack overnight to
power your house, it's not available the next morning to
get you to work, and c) even if everyone could afford a new
electric car, there are good reasons to reduce car
ownership and usage in favor of bicycles, scooters,
motorcycles, buses, and trains.
Beyond that, we should not be destroying our civic
infrastructure in favor of requiring everyone to have their
own i-Things or do without. Public phones, public
bathrooms (do you really want to carry an i-Pee around?),
public drinking fountains, public benches for sitting,
public transport, etc.: are all civic goods that make the
public sphere more user-friendly and accessible. A public
power grid is another example, as with public water supply,
public sewage treatment, and refuse disposal: life without
those things would be worse than miserable.
Don't destroy it: reclaim it, revision it, and rebuild it.
-G.
=====
On 13-03-26-Tue 3:41 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:
> Production of alternative energy can be and for most
> reasons probably should be much less centralized,
> equivalently, smaller-scale, than production of energy
> mostly is now. (Off-grid, as you mention, but very literally.)
> Large-scale up front + large, complex distribution
> networks is revealed as an obsolete architecture; large
> scale distribution networks become relatively less
> important, so even if the answer to your question is no,
> which it probably isn't given crowdfunding and other
> disintermediated finance gaining momentum, it's moot, or
> at least of much less relative importance.
> Put another way, when the most important goal is maximum
> efficiency rather than maximum centralization, large
> upfront capital investment + large, complex distribution
> network is stupid; proper accounting
> <https://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com/> of
> all costs and benefits in a global rather than piecewise
> local sense reveals this now for agriculture,
> manufacturing, energy, ...
> Even now, buffering between supply and demand is a
> constraint on grid architecture leading to great economic
> demand within the current paradigm for distributed storage
> / production of energy according to someone who came
> through sudo room whose name escapes me.
> This loosely-drafted email brought to you by the slogan
>
<http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11/eaas-non-rival-goods-vs-rival-goods.html>,
> "localize production, virtualize everything else"
> <http://www.miiu.org/wiki/Resilient_Things_by_Top-Level_Category> and
> the acronym STEMI
> <http://www.accelerationwatch.com/mest.html> compression
>
<http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/11/stemi.html>.
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Romy Ilano
> <romy(a)snowyla.com <mailto:romy@snowyla.com>> wrote:
>
> Is it possible to create alternative energy
> distribution networks (biofuels/solar/ wind etc) that
> replace mainstream petrol and natural gas based energy
> without a large financial sector?
>
> the vc system that funds these alternative energy
> start-ups piggy backs off the investment banks, etc.
> and big private equity and institutional investment
> funds. vcs are like a fly on the @ss of a financial hippo.
>
> I haven't heard people discuss off-grid that much in
> the tech talks I've been to( which are excellent). Is
> there a conversation here that would show how off grid
> is a viable alternative, even if it's not a big money
> solution?
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 1:56 PM, <hol(a)gaskill.com
> <mailto:hol@gaskill.com>> wrote:
>
> this talk about imports and exports always reminds
> me of energy flow
>
> compare 2011
>
https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2012/Oct/images/25306_LLNLUSEnergy20…
>
>
> with 2002
> http://www.hubbertpeak.com/us/images/us_energyflow2002.jpg
>
> fascinating
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> sudo-discuss mailing list
> sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org>
> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> sudo-discuss mailing list
> sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
<mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org>
> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss 
