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

[Jenny Ryan]

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
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