Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 21 2004 @ 06:49 AM CDT

I have been considering the possibilities of creating a wireless P2P internet for sometime (removing the ISPs from the internet), but don\'t have any experience with wireless. This sounds really awesome.

Perhaps if the author reads this, they could answer a couple questions for me or post a follow up article.

1. Is it possible to somehow integrate the freenet project with this, so that people can surf freenet and post their own websites to freenet while connected to the \"autonomous\" internet?

2. Using 2 wireless modems or routing, could a single computer act as both a client and a server for the \"autonomous internet\" so that the \"island\" grows in total signal distance as more people join the network (for example, I start a network in a park that goes as far as an apartment complex, but someone in the apart. complex joins in and their signal reaches downtown resulting in a collective signal that reaches downtown; then someone downtown joins in and their signal can reach the warehouse district etc...)

If these two things can be done, then a true alternative to the hierarchal Server-client internet can be created (at least in cities). No servers, just a bunch of people with wireless cards willing to donate a bit of their harddrive space to host the internet. The neat thing, is that theoretically the autonomous internet would grow faster as more people joined in (limited of course by the speed of the wireless card which is currently about 54mbps - which is not bad at all).

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 21 2004 @ 10:15 AM CDT

speaking of WASTE. the most anarchistic p2p / network building tool out. would anybody be interested in forming a infoshop darknet mesh so we can share and talk securely?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 21 2004 @ 12:30 PM CDT

I\'m afraid I\'m no expert on this stuff, but you might be interested in the Seattle Wireless Network, which is trying to create a similar thing (don\'t know how succesful they\'ve been). They\'re FAQ answers some of your questions (although I admit some of the answers are a bit technical for me).

http://www.seattlewireless.net/

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 21 2004 @ 09:05 PM CDT

Well, a few problems........

How do we decide what the Passphrase for the network will be? And how do we decide who is \'trustworthy\' or not?

Once someone is added to the mesh it\'s hard to get them off. And once they\'re on, any member can monitor all packets which are passing through.

It\'s just a matter of getting the network\'s passphrase and trading keys with a current member of the mesh.

WASTE is better suited to making networks between people who know each other personally and can trust the members. Plus it\'s performance scales poorly once the network/mesh gets over the magical 50 user limit. :-)

btw, I\'m on one of the larger public WASTE meshes and this can be a severe problem. If we plan to do this, we need to plan ahead and do it properly.

Anyone who\'s interested in doing this live in Southern Ontario? Because there\'s going to be a fun way for us all to meet....

email me if you want to discuss this WASTE craziness some more.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 21 2004 @ 09:52 PM CDT

I\'ll follow bluetooth as best as I can for a while, as opposed to 80211b/g. The first thing that stands out to me is that it is in the other direction - creating _smaller_, tight networks through typically a single cell. Connecting devices can be limited to ten metres or so, meaning the networked is more controlled rather than expansive. Diversity of tactics, eh?


Devices can easily interconnect too, so one trades with the internet and distributes to the other devices - like leafs in the gnutella protocol. Finally, you\'re limited to the number of devices you can connect to. But ultimately, one large group can be connected to an internet through one device (I guess you\'d call this device like a router). It can be laptop/pc independent, but doesn\'t have to be. I\'m sure others have more experience with this than I. Interactions should be as quick as possible so everyone can get what they want, therefore the fastest device acts as the wireless network server/router, something else I learned from using gnutella. (BTW, I think gnutella is great in learning how to make a network work for you instead of the other way around, but I\'m not fanatical about it.)

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 22 2004 @ 02:45 AM CDT

i disagree with the 50 users limit i too and on the stress mesh with you. and my opinion is that it is a limit of the routed listener ratio.
and that saying about packets that flow thru you being snoopable by others in the network is false.
the keys from one to the next are compared for transfers and shared sure some that are passive passive connections pass thru a active. but that doesn\'t mean you can grab a persons private keys / passwords and recreate the virtual connection and decrypt it.
if you don\'t trust somebody it\'s as simple as don\'t accept a public key from them
as far as creating a wireless network goes i would not rely on centralized messaging systems and that\'s still y i choose WASTE. that is completely free from hierarchy and where you can control every aspect of control and access to yourself.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 22 2004 @ 02:51 AM CDT

First off, this would only work in an area with high wireless density, like some large cities. And depending on how the routing was set up (decentralized) , it would be just as good as freenet, and people could provide their own crypto. i think this would be a great idea. the only problem being that keeping it off the internet would not be possible, as one could always connect their node and make it a proxy. check out my link for a good similar project (Shhh!! its not public yet ;-) but based on the wired net

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 22 2004 @ 11:20 PM CDT

As I saw on Internet and in some business solutions is Serbia (2.4GHz 80km), more or less cheep wireless networks are possible; but... If we want to make something like that, we need to work on it very sirious:

1. We need solutions: What hardware do we need? Solutions in Serbia assumes Cisco motherboards with price 800 EUR for each, 1600 EUR for link; I saw a lot cheeper solutions on Internet, but only if you eat popcorn i USA ;-)

2. How to make connections? We do not need targeted links, we need fuzzy links... How to make interconnections for our network?

3. If there is no anarchists in Greenland, we need some connection between Americas and Euroasia-Africa. We need some Internet tunnels to communicate between distant LANs/WANs.

I suggest making some kind of forum or mailing list for that purpose if it doesn\'t exist. So we can start to study that problem.

In USA it is more easy then in other parts of the world. And we need to make solutions for the most part of the world.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, April 25 2004 @ 10:25 AM CDT

Excellent article 10/10!

Anyway to get this working on Linux or Windows too? It seems Mac is quite a head in making autonomous networks.

Please do a follow up article on this subject, a organization of people running their own wireless networks for a national or international independent internet is very kool.

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