Mesh/09 May 2013

Attendees

• alex, substack, juul, yardena, jenny, miguel

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