rigorousintuition.ca

I wish they would just stop pretending that we don't all know how it works, you know?

Wombaticus Rex wrote:Open network technology = utterly un-killable.

If they make the internets into a paid highway for corporate bullshit, we'll have a shadow system up and running in a matter of months. The smartest tech nerds I know are not worried about this either way, so I'm following their cue. I got ulcers already, I need to downsize my worry budget.

Wombaticus Rex wrote:Anyways, the good news is, the technology exists to rebuild a shadow internet quickly and there's an awful lot of rich tech genius types with a vested interest in making that happen ASAP. The entire internet is a repeatable process, especially with recent wireless developments. It would actually be an improvement...in addition to a great chance to force intelligence agencies to refine their surveillance techniques.

So, Mr. Smartypants Rex, Why Don't We All Just Do It Now? A: Because all that work would be a huge pain in the ass and there's no need for it.

Yet.

Welcome to our rapidly developing group!!

This group is only a few weeks old and we have over 80 members and growing!! We need more programmers and those willing to trial and test new products! We are all volunteers! So we must be keen!!

Our common goal is a reliable Open Source Meshing Software

We are looking at various routers and their software. We hope the software can work on Meraki, Foneros, MeshAP, old Compaqs....

We are looking at the CnC (Command & Control), known as the Dashboard to many! This needs to be fully configurable if required or left simple for those that want a basic freenet

We are looking at ways to allow us all to monitor as much or as little as we individually require

Currently, this isn't a silver bullet - we don't have the complete answer yet, but would welcome everyones input and expertise into the project.We have on trial different options..... We do need more technical developers....

Thanks for joining and listening!

Currently we are based in Europe and the US. We are working alongside other groups in New Zealand and Canada.

The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is one of the biggest and most influential hacker organizations. The CCC is based in Germany and other German-speaking countries and currently has over 4,000 members.

The CCC describes itself as "a galactic community of life's beings, independent of age, sex, race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for freedom of information…." In general, the CCC stands up for more transparency in governments, freedom of information and a human right to communication. Supporting the principles of the hacker ethic, the club also fights for free access to computers and technological infrastructure for everybody.

A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. Wireless mesh networks often consist of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways [1]. The mesh clients are often laptops, cell phones and other wireless devices while the mesh routers forward traffic to and from the gateways which may but need not connect to the Internet. The coverage area of the radio nodes working as a single network is sometimes called a mesh cloud. Access to this mesh cloud is dependent on the radio nodes working in harmony with each other to create a radio network. A mesh network is reliable and offers redundancy. When one node can no longer operate, the rest of the nodes can still communicate with each other, directly or through one or more intermediate nodes. The animation below illustrates how wireless mesh networks can self form and self heal. Wireless mesh networks can be implemented with various wireless technology including 802.11, 802.16, cellular technologies or combinations of more than one type.

Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish "freesites" (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in "darknet" mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect.

Tibtec.org, home-on-the-web for a wireless mesh network project aiding Tibetan refugees in Dharamshala, India, was reportedly the subject of a distributed denial of service attack today after being featured in Wired News. Snip from the update (I filed both reports):

Speaking to Wired News via Skype, project founder Yahel Ben-David said that while the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Tibetan Technology Center website appeared to come from IP addresses from a number of places around the world, they began immediately after scans from an IP address in China.

“There was no immediately evident single source for the attack, but it started right after an extensive series of China-based scans,” said Ben-David.

The tibtec.org website was featured in a Wired News story published on Thursday about the group's efforts to build a wireless mesh network serving Tibetan exiles. The site is built with Drupal, and runs on Apache.

The volunteers are building a low-cost wireless mesh network to provide cheap, reliable data and telephony to community organizations.

The Dharamsala Wireless Mesh is an example of "light infrastructure," a concept gaining popularity among tech developers: decentralized, ad hoc networks that can deliver essential services faster than conventional means.

Attempts to deploy similar community wireless networks in America have been blocked repeatedly by national phone carriers. It takes a big company like Google to build citywide Wi-Fi networks (the company launched its first in Mountain View, California, this week).

Wombaticus Rex wrote:That's a lot like saying "I fear the magazine is going the way of the book." Sure, they're both mediums that involve the same interface, but they're different types of communication. Youtube is definitively not like network teevee, and that's even with "network teevee" stations having sponsored channels there. We interact with the mediums differently, though...not saying the internet is better, just different, because the higher level of engagement probably does more cognitive damage.

I was not speaking of teevee as medium, but as message (trust me on this--McLuhan had his off days!), and as such, the message got progressively more crassly profit-oriented. The overall *shamelessness* of the programs (and I'm not talking nekkid people having buttsecks) became nauseating. YouTube has pretty much taken up where network teevee stopped. If we manage to get any dumber, then there's the danger we won't be able to operate the computers to upload the vids.

Good old days are always horseshit.

Yeah, probably, although I question the evolutionary chances of a race of animals who think (not all but all who count) it's a good idea to develop and use weapons with the potential to kill a whole bunch fellow animals, including themselves, and to destroy even the potential for life for generations. Sure, the instinct for destruction seems to have always been with us, but on this scale? Planetary, potentially even extra-terrestrial?

Anyways, the good news is, the technology exists to rebuild a shadow internet quickly and there's an awful lot of rich tech genius types with a vested interest in making that happen ASAP. The entire internet is a repeatable process, especially with recent wireless developments. It would actually be an improvement...in addition to a great chance to force intelligence agencies to refine their surveillance techniques.

So, Mr. Smartypants Rex, Why Don't We All Just Do It Now? A: Because all that work would be a huge pain in the ass and there's no need for it.

Yeah, that's the catch...it's tough to determine the proper time to check in or to check out.

Yet.

Like mu-chips, which have been used as an anti-counterfeit measure in admission tickets, the new chips have a 128-bit ROM for storing a unique 38-digit ID number.

The new chips are also 9 times smaller than the prototype chips Hitachi unveiled last year, which measure 0.15 x 0.15 mm.

At 5 microns thick, the RFID chips can more easily be embedded in sheets of paper, meaning they can be used in paper currency, gift certificates and identification. But since existing tags are already small enough to embed in paper, it leads one to wonder what new applications the developers have in mind.

FCC looks at ways to assert authority over Web access

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 15, 2010; A22

The Federal Communications Commission is considering aggressive moves to stake out its authority to oversee consumer access to the Internet, as a recent court hearing and industry opposition have cast doubt on its power over Web service providers.

The FCC, which regulates public access to telephone and television services, has been working to claim the same role for the Internet. The stakes are high, as the Obama administration pushes an agenda of open broadband access for all and big corporations work to protect their enormous investments in a new and powerful medium.

"This is a pivotal moment," said Ben Scott, director of policy at the public interest group Free Press. The government wants to treat broadband Internet as a national infrastructure, he said, like phone lines or the broadcast spectrum. But federal regulators are grappling with older policies that do not clearly protect consumers' access to the Web, their privacy or prices of service.

The issue may have reached a turning point last week when a federal appeals court questioned the limits of the FCC's authority in a 2008 case involving Comcast. The agency had ordered the Internet and cable giant to stop blocking subscribers' access to the online file-sharing service BitTorrent. But in an oral hearing last Friday, three judges grilled an FCC lawyer over whether the agency had acted outside the scope of its authority.

The appeals court is still hearing the case, but analysts predict that the FCC will lose and that the ruling could throw all of its efforts to oversee Internet access into question. A loss could undermine the legality of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's push for policies that would prohibit service providers from restricting customers' access to legal Web content -- the concept known as net neutrality -- and throw into doubt the agency's ability to oversee pricing and competition among Internet service providers.

The agency said it will continue to argue that it had the authority to rule against Comcast, but it is making plans to deal with a loss.

"If the court removes the legal basis for the current approach to broadband, the commission may be compelled to undertake a major reassessment of its policy framework . . . or Congress will have to act," said Colin Crowell, senior adviser to Genachowski. "Any policies the commission pursues for the broadband marketplace will be rooted in the pro-consumer, pro-competitive structure of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, regardless of how the court ultimately decides."

Specifically, that could mean the agency will reverse policies from the past decade that put cable and DSL Internet services in a special category over which the agency has only "ancillary jurisdiction." Those policies were intended to deregulate Internet services in order to promote competition and innovation in the young industry as it developed. Consumer groups argue that they instead reduced competition and drove prices higher.

Analysts said the FCC may look to put broadband services back into a category alongside phone services that is clearly under the authority of the government.

At issue, some FCC officials say, is the future of how Americans will communicate and receive information. One in five U.S. homes has swapped landline telephone service for wireless. Most of those phones have Web browsers that are fast enough to watch videos and navigate traffic in real time. Consumers are also adopting ultra-high-speed Internet services over fiber and cable for 3-D games and videoconferencing.

"While I am still hopeful that we'll win the case, I am absolutely certain that consumers expect protection against gatekeeper control," said Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat. "That's why we need to move forward with whatever tools we have at our disposal to ensure an open Internet."

A move to reclassify broadband services would almost certainly be opposed. The telephone category is steeped in decades-long rules that are meant to prohibit blocking of services, protect consumer prices and spur competition. Such rules would be a stark change for Internet service providers that invest billions of dollars each year in networks but also receive high rates of consumer complaints over prices and services.

"To the extent that we need more regulation, we think less is more," said Kyle McSlarrow, head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group. "The more granular and more regulatory we become with practical and legal issues, we can go too far."

The agency also could ask Congress to grant it explicit authority over Internet service providers. But that approach would also face significant barriers, analysts said.

"The odds are against it," said Paul Gallant, an analyst at Concept Capital, a research firm. "Net neutrality is the most controversial issue in the telecom media world, and even with a Democratic majority, it's not easy to pass."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 17_pf.html