Mesh/4 September 2013

Attendees

• Mikaela, Isaac, Jenny, Roger, Pau, Mitar, Marc, Chris, Shaddih, Nader, Miguel, Rosalie

What we've been working on:

• Presentation on Saturday was rad! We now have video documentation.
• Marc has been working on autogeneration of firmware / kit to be finished up in ~ a month; Fake captive portal by capturing inspection traffic
• Pau from Guifi.net - working on the qmp firmware - clouds of about 50 nodes working on this system. Beginning to collaborate with Argentina and Italy on a new firmware project: LibreMesh - Using batman-adv, buhttp://www.guidingtech.com/10346/transfer-android-apps-between-phones-bluetooth/t Layer 2 has problems with scalability, 30-40 nodes hit peak congestion through conflicting ARP requests. So they're using BMX6 (Layer 3) protocol to make connections between Layer 2. They discover Layer 2 clouds and join them. Layer 2 (batman-adv) still helpful to create continuity between nodes.
• Shaddih working on an OpenBTS network in Papua, isolated community - 100,000 txt messages sent since February. Using hardware from range networks. Base station cost ~$4-5k. Cost is the biggest problem.
• Isaac from Free Network Foundation/Kansas City - their community network is used daily by a few thousand people. Adapted qmp firmware to the Kansas City network. Has been playing with GNU MediaGoblin. Thinking about how to do diverse authentication. WOrking on a Network Commons license.
• Mikaela interested in sharing tokens for access to the mesh
• Nader working on building a network among the UC Berkeley co-ops
• Miguel working on firmware
• Mitar built slovenia network on top of an abundance of fiber; Nodewatcher

Funding

• http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-awards/community-grants
• OpenTechFund
• Need to procure outdoor UV-resistant cable, colocation for the VPN exit node

Legal Issues / Network Commons License

• Ownership of the actual nodes to be retained by the people themselves
• Enforceable agreement that gives the community the right to disconnect a problematic node
• Industries want security on their investments (Guifi input)
• Part 97 of FCC Rules - License by rule, any purpose that's industrial scientific or medical - 2.4 & 5.8 GHz
• Creative Commons, pros and cons:
  • Pros: Umbrella definition of a spectrum of licrnses that share some basic principles; easier to change
  • Cons: Assumption that basic Creative Commons license is enough, when it really implies a wide spectrum; keeping it simple allows room for growth

How to interconnect a free network with a proprietary network?

• Guifi.net: Internet access as a service - all services must be allowed (net neutrality) - businesses make the network sustainable, so we need to accomodate them, too.
• Organization that maintains and educates around use of this license
• Distinguishing between the Foundation and the Network(s)
• Internal Versioning Number for the NCL (Network Commons License) is at version 0.2
• Goal is to share definitions

Breakout Groups

• Present on federation
• Do you know about this: https://github.com/freifunk/api.freifunk.net
• Licensing: Marc, Isaac
• Operational: Shaddih,
• Firmware
• Communications / Remote Participation for IS4CWN
• Local DNS / Services:

Guifi.net Operational Structure

• Open project - no membership fee or policies - you're a member if you decide you are
• Ownership of the network is distributed
• License is also important
• Tries to automate as much as possible, to avoid manual intervention
• Use the tools available to solve problems, avoiding manual operation
• Nodes have a physical location, and can become supernodes
• Ad-hoc mode not really used. To propagate the network, you must have at least two radios to receive and propagate - this model is sim[ply more supported
• No central point of authority - theoretically. Source code public and open, anyone can also set up a network infrastructure
• Technology-agnostic - strives to be as inclusive as possible
• Tools to check on the statistics of the network
• Use BGP (+ OSPF)
• Have routing problems - every day, hour, minute! BGP not meant for wifi
• Funded by itself - those who want to join must pay the cost of joining it, in charge of upgrading hardware, etc
• Up to the people themselves to keep up with maintenance
• Normally if a supernode goes down, it will be fixed within the next 48 hours
• They have a fundraising option to request money from the network
• Mostly run as a web of trust - mostly one degree of separation from each other
• Monopolistic mentality is internalized in Western culture -
• When they first connected to the Internet, started receiving DDOS attacks
• Guifinet Foundation is the umbrella of many small ISPs in the network, using GuifiNet Foundation to connect to the Internet
• GuifiNet Foundation as an incubator for small businesses seeking to become their own ISPs
• Interested in cultivating a fair competition within the network
• Separating organization (run by benevolent dictator) from network (owned by community - can mutiny)
• How to deal with legal issues : Refer to EU directives; Telecom directives; referring to govs to get permission to deploy fiber - more complicated because not a traditional ISP; need to keep IP logs - data retention policy - what's the information content of that Ip address, what's discoverable from there?
• Who's the ISP, and how is that defined? Usually by size, or commercial interest

Ideas thenceforth:

• Give away nodes or sell them for $5 in exchange for attending workshop
• The bigger you are, the more weird things you're going to face
• CALEA: Comms Assistant for Law Enforcement Act -- local requirements for logging and reporting via industry best practices
• Could say we don't log NAT because the technical requirements are too high

wlan-slovenia vs guifi.net

• People own the equipment
• Slovenia has a lot of fiber
• Overabundance of connectivity led to desire to share the bandwidth
• What if someone takes my link? steals my data? makes a stupid thing on the internet and i'm blamed?
  • Solution: vpn tunnels
• When a person donates a node, he hosts bandwidth - not IP
• Had to develop their own VPN, as the throughput was too slow
• 300 vs 21,000 nodes - but slovenia is very small :)
• International link to austria and to croatia
• Longest hop is 40km

How to get wider participation?

• Reach out to networks we don't even know about yet
• Roger Proposal: Commons For Europe
• Code For Europe / Bottom-Up Broadband
• Org of Orgs - at the Euro level? nah - talked to some other communities (eg Ninux, Freifunk [difficult as they are separated by city], Funkfeur - toward creating an organization to federate amongst.
• What sort of organization do we want?
• What kind of participants?
• International agreements for participation

We concluded the meeting with a desire to set up a communications framework toward a federation of libre networks, and set up this mailing list in the interim.