Mesh/4 September 2013

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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

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

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.

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