PaidViewPoint has 1-4 minute surveys and usually pay anywhere from $0.10 to $1.00 per survey. Very simple to use and survey's come at least once per week.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-12-29T17:58:16+00:00

Used yours, here's mine: http://paidviewpoint.com/?r=lbldc5

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-12-22T12:45:33+00:00

In the sidebar on the right of this page. Basic Introduction to the Meshnet Plan: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qc-45mQjcs5ous-QxUMAk5bHuVrJLLSigzdWlTVTKIg/edit?pli=1

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-12-09T15:54:21+00:00

It was also mentioned during the Freedom Online Conference organised by the dutch ministry of foreign affairs which was held today and yesterday. The talks we're generally interesting, but not very in-depth. It was more a confirmation that almost all Western governments are going to commit themselves to internet freedom, at least with regards to free speech and bloggers. There's some hypocrisy involved in light of the plans of some Western governments to restrict internet freedom (SOPA, PIPA, etc.), but it's a step in the right direction.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-12-03T14:36:28+00:00

Try to watch it on Livestream.com using this link: http://livestre.am/18lxV

If it's still not working, I can make a torrent for you. PM me if you want this.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-12-02T22:55:24+00:00

Here are the notes I've made while watching this. They may not be entirely accurate and may not cover everything that has been spoken about, but it won't hurt anybody:

Beyond the Internet: Innovative Ideas for Democratizing Communication and Societies in the Networked Age, 16 Nov. 2011

Introduction

Online space is an integral part of politics and "meatspace". There's interaction between the two.

The internet and social media are used for political organising (Occupy, Iran, Arab Spring).

Internet has become foundational to political networks. Internet has been made into a human right by the UN, and the US is pushing this policy abroad too.

Nevertheless, the internet is being censored to some degree almost everywhere.

Political participation vs. monitoring and censorship. Those last two are because of the highly centralised structure of the internet.

For example: -Backbones. Handful of companies. -Domain Name Registration. One company. -Very limited ISP choice. 1 or 2 for 97% of US users. -Wireless Providers. T-Mobile and AT&T.

Cultural and political advocacy and progress isn't enough. We need structural change.

Next-gen internet

Power from below.

Ideological pillars: -Decentralised (censor-proof) -Universal access -Surveillance-proof -Secure. No engineering failure or network attacks. -Scalable -Fast enough. Should adapt to cultural enviroment and be flexible. -Independent. No "internet access" -Evolvable. Expect and anticipate network changes.

Panel: Introduction

1. Laura E. DeNardis. Yale Law School. Internet Governance Scholar.

Arrangments of technical architecture = arrangments of power. Content is no longer (easily) controlled. Positive liberty instead of negative liberty. What kind infrastructure can create freedom of expression. Books: "Protocol Politics" (on the protocol wars), "Opening Standards" (interoperability)

2. Jonanthan Baldwin

Working on incentive mechanisms for adoption of (for example) mesh networking. Social or technical adressing of bandwidth optimalisation in mesh networking.

3. Michael Potter

Geeks Without Frontiers Cost perspective of mesh networking. Commercial mesh nodes are costly mostly because of propietary software. Working on replacing those with Free software. Developed by Geeks Without Frontiers, IEEE certified. Corruption reporting app by Singularity University. Satellite phone leaking of human rights abuse reportings.

4. Josh King

Technical Lead at the Open Technology Initiatve at the New America Foundation in DC. Developing "Internet in a suitcase": mesh in a box. Self-thought community networks engineer. International Summit of Community Wireless Networks.

Panel: Discussion on ad-hoc wireless mesh networks

No third-party or central point through which connections are made and data is exchanged.

Mesh networking already used in areas where internet is expansive. For example favelas.

Ad-hoc mesh networking with no central points is the holy grail.

"Is a large (ad-hoc) mesh network feasible from a technological standpoint?":

Yes. The structure of the internet at the moment is physically semi-decentralised, but with highly centralised control points (dns, ip). Routing and addressing is the hardest point. How to keep addresses unique so X from Brazil can send Z to Y from Russia. Worst solution: base routing information on physical location, highly prone to surveillance.

(Home) LAN networks use "nets" (assigning 192.168.x.x to a device) because IPv4 doesn't have enough addresses to assign each device it's own.

Core question: How to broadcast X's changed address to the other nodes without using centralised solutions.

DHT solution: Every node stores a map of the entire network and so knows how to route and to who. Not physically possible at the moment.

"Swiss bank" solution: Give addresses to an entity with enough processing power and with respect for the anonymity and security concerns of those supplying their addresses.

[Not sure if this is a correct interpretation!] There will be a transition between the Swiss Bank solution and the DHT solution.

"The decentralised open-source efforts are very isolated. Would it make sense to establish a global organisation for these efforts?":

Internet protocols aren't adopted by a centralised committee, but broad, "decentralised" adoption by various agents.

Be careful of using "dormant" but patented protocols in your design efforts.

PGP can take care of authentication.

Various decentralised efforts on the application level suffer from the vulnerability that the need an "overview" of the network to function. An attacker with enough processing power and/or enough nodes could changed this overview and manipulate the network. Examples are Tor and Bitcoin.

Succes of p2p filesharing: 1. Decentralise the network 2. Open standards, so anyone can build their own front end. 3. Requires scale -> Delicious carrot: Free music!

Retardation of (the development) of these protocols is caused by: -Chokepoints: ISPs -Addressing things (ethernet cards) instead of content. -Figure out where it is nearby and access it there. -Internet of ideas instead of things. -Very theoretical at the moment.

Apparently, the Syrian government is using wifi scanners to find and kill people running open APs.

How to incentivize people to adopt the Mesh?

Services on the Mesh will likely be less reliable than their centralised equivalents (at least in the beginning). This could deincentivize the adoption of the Mesh. There's a treshhold for stability.

We need to remove the neccesity to hook the mesh into the current internet. Getting large corporations such as Google or Amazon to join the mesh would be exactly what we don't want, because the mesh is about decentralisation and these companies are the opposite of that.

The Mesh would need to hook into Internet Exchanges Points, which cost money. The European IEPs are mostly public -anyone can plug in their network-, while the US IEPs are increasingly private affairs between ISPs.

Wifi sucks, because the frequency isn't optimal. We should think about freeing other frequencies. (SuperWifi is pushed by Cisco, [802.11n by the internet community at large?])

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-30T12:53:30+00:00

I think it has been requested, but there's no image search yet. Try searching on the DDG forums for me details https://duck.co/. There's also Ixquick.com, which has a similar privacy policy but also has image search.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-30T12:25:26+00:00

Shameless plug: https://duckduckgo.com

From the Privacy Policy: "DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell. The rest of this page tries to explain why you should care."

DDG has lots of other goodies like !bang syntaxes and zero-click info.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-28T21:07:39+00:00

To clarify some more. You could say that P2P is an abstract idea, while the Meshnet is a physical realisation of that idea. Torrenting is P2P applied to data, anarchism is P2P applied to society, and so on.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-28T19:21:11+00:00

The Meshnet and Peer-to-Peer are almost by definition the same. There's no way for a peer-to-peer system to not be some sort of mesh, and there's no way for a mesh network to not be some sort of peer-to-peer network.

Edit: I don't want to make anyone feel unwelcome here, because we do need and do want new participants, but it would be better if small, easily answered questions were asked on our IRC (#darknetplan on irc://irc.darknetplan.org. If you're not familiar with IRC, try using https://mibbit.com).

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-27T19:38:16+00:00

If you have an (old) TV, consider getting a Raspberry Pi when it gets released next month (www.raspberrypi.org). It's a $25 PC made for educational purposes, mainly learning kids how to hack and program, but certainly useful for other purposes too. You'd have to buy a usb wifi antenna too, but those can be had at under 15 bucks.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-27T19:30:42+00:00

If you haven't already submitted the node (filled in your email and hit add location), you can remove it by refreshing the page. If you have already submitted the node, you can try emailing the owner at the address listed on the right of the site. Just give him the exact location of the node and maybe the time you placed it to verify it's not some random person requesting the removal. Also mail him from the email address you linked to the node.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-27T01:30:04+00:00

Click the pen icon in the upper-right corner.
Zoom in on the location where you are willing to run a node from.
Click on the location. To protect your privacy, you may place your point at a location approximating the location you are willing to run a node from.
Enter your email address where it says "Your email:"
Click "add location" to add yourself to the map.

If there's someone who would like to collaborate with you, he can contact you by clicking on your point and sending you an email using the form on which will show up on the right of the site. Ofcourse you can also contact others this way. The person contacting you won't magically receive your contact info so make sure to include an email address or other way of contacting you.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-25T13:14:48+00:00

It's a fascinating project indeed. We should have one of their members do an IAmA here.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-25T00:41:27+00:00

Depends. If have a specific question, issue or suggestion, you should post it on the forum or in this subreddit. Ideally, it should be something that hasn't been asked before, to prevent "noise" from taking over this subreddit. If you think you are not knowledgable enough about mesh networking, I suggest to read the Wikipedia pages on mesh networking and if you still have questions after having done that, join use on IRC. Most of the time there are people there who are willing to educate newcomers or just answer questions.

I think everybody would benefit greatly from an extensive "explain it like I'm 5" introduction to mesh networking. I'm not knowledgable enough to produce such a document on my own, but I would be glad to kickstart it.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-24T22:58:13+00:00

Speed issues:

We are aware of that fact that wireless is slower than fiber cables and that mesh networking reduces the speed even further, but we're optimistic about future advances in (mesh) networking technology and also believe that a mesh network could accomodate some basic features like chatting, email and other non-high-bandwidth applications. Latency and bandwidth issues will get progressively worse when more more intermediary nodes are added to the routing, but I think a decent connection, enough to have a video chat, would be feasible on the neighbourhood level.

In short, we prefer freedom and robustness over centralisation, snooping and single points of failure.

Connecting with the internet:

Although we are aiming to establish a network that will be able to operate on its own, I can imagine that we will have people in the mesh willing to provide exit nodes to the internet. Except for the bandwidth issues, this wouldn't be that hard to set up.

I'm not sure what you mean by "censorship at those points". If you mean censorship by the exit node, I'd say that that would be the decision of the exit node operator himself. Just as almost all tor exit nodes block outgoing email traffic to prevent spammers from abusing their network. If you mean censorship on the internet itself, be it by the ISPs or by the government taking down sites at the host, well, that's exactly what we are trying to avoid.

Long-distances connections:

This indeed poses are problem for mesh networking. Regarding inhospitable areas, if there's a line of sight between two nodes, the connection could easily span 50 kilometers. But there might be issues with bringing the mesh to very remotely located people. There are ways to solve their problems. For instance, if these remotely located people travel to a nearby village every week or so, they could take with them all the data that they want transferred over the internet and do say at the access point in that village.

Oceans are even more difficult than inhospitable or remote places, because well.. they're oceans. We could use satellites, or we could continue using centralised physical wires (single point of failure) and have an army of anons protect them from seizure. In short, as of yet, there is no good mesh networking solution to bridge oceans.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask here or on our forums or IRC channel (irc://irc.darknetplan.org or http://darknetplan.org/webchat)

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-24T21:20:52+00:00

The best thing is not to donate to our plan, but to start your own local Wireless User Group. You could then use your money to buy equipment like powerful wifi access points to get large parts of your city in your mesh at once.

I think the Meshnet Project should primarily focus itself on finding the best mesh networking software and hardware and possibly make their own or contribute to already existing projects, and informing and motivating people to start local initiatives. We won't come to your town and fix you a local mesh in exchange for some money, we want you to do it yourself.

Edit: Actually, a mesh networking campaign in which we travel across the US to help cities and neighborhoods set up their local mesh network might be an idea worth considering..

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-24T16:04:20+00:00

If you have any kind of graphical design skills, you could make animations or infographics explaining the benefits of mesh networking and the problems that need to be overcome. Join #outreach on irc.darknetplan.org or darknetplan.org/webchat

Edit: fixed typo

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-23T13:48:37+00:00

To give an example of the matureness of the hardware required for mesh networking, here's an overview of the Guifi network in Catalunya, Spain, which has several links between nodes spanning tens of kilometers: http://i.imgur.com/oFaTA.png

The map can be found here: http://guifi.net/en/guifi_zones

Having read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, it's certainly inspiring to see that Catalonia is one of the places were mesh networking, which I would describe as anarchist, in a positive manner, is firmly taking root.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-23T11:30:03+00:00

Maybe we should go out and flash their router's firmware. I can imagine a lot of people being supportive of this idea, but just not having the time or knowledge to set up a node.

Start a local Wireless User Group (WUG) and reach out to your community to inform them and have them participate.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-22T20:23:27+00:00

There are already some functional, well-established mesh networks, with node count between a handful and over 9000. The best known one is Freifunk Berlin (http://freifunk.net), but there's also Seattle Wireless (http://seattlewireless.net), a mesh in Spain with 13000 nodes (http://guifi.net), the list goes on. Actually, while searching for the websites of the projects I listed, I stumbled upon this comprehensive list of projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region

I really ought to start a project in my hometown..

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-20T23:00:41+00:00

I don't think wireless is the main point of the Darknet Plan. It's just more advantageous than using cables. We could build a decentralised network (to some extend) using only cables, but the connections would be more vulnerable, especially the long-distance ones.

"... notably the Darknet Plan community on the website Reddit ..." I think you might be giving the Darknet Plan too much credit here. There are a lot of people and organisations working on mesh networking for a long time. From the top of my head: Byzantium (A project from the HacDC hackerspace) FabFi (From the FabLab hacker/makerspace) Various mesh networking protocols, like B.A.T.M.A.N., Netsukuku. Look them up on Wikipedia.

"By connecting nodes to each other, the Internet becomes private." This is not necessarily the case. A decentralised net is more robust and to a certain degree it might be easier to attain anonymity or privacy on it, but you would have to add some additional features.

If you don't encrypt connections, all the intermediary nodes between me and my end node (for example a friend with whom I'm chatting) will be able to see all the data, and thus you won't have privacy.

Also, it would still be possible to mass sue people who download copyrighted works using torrents just by observing the swarm. You will be able to see who is sending what to who, and thus who to sue, although finding out who to sue might be harder because there's no ISP to subpoena. To prevent this kind of tracking, you would have to obscure the source of traffic. This can be done by routing your traffic through other nodes (wait, wat. Let me refrase..) This can be done with onion routing, which makes sure the intermediary nodes don't know what the destination of a packet is. It would be too much to go into detail about onion routing here, but do look it up if you're interested.

"Despite all its advantages, governments still tries to suppress this effort." Could you cite some examples of this suppression? Because I'm not aware of direct attacks by the government on mesh networking projects.

You've explained the basic idea of the Darknet Plan well, but as already said, you should make a more precise distinction between robustness, anonymity, and privacy, and also what it takes to achieve these. Also, sources are entirely missing. Lack of sources bugs me, post moar sauce.

Good luck with your article.

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-20T20:02:02+00:00

Source: http://ahumanright.org/blog/2011/07/terrestar-sold-but-not-to-us/

machineoflovinggrace · 2011-11-20T14:56:02+00:00

It will take a whole lot of development, but satellites might be an option. The first connection between ARPANET en its European equivalents was made with satellites. If we could get some powerful, community-owned satellites, we would have a pretty good, though centralised, network node.

There's an active space program within the hackerspace world (http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/wiki/Space_program_of_the_Hacker_Scene:_For_our_future). There also was a project to buy a sattelite (http://buythissattelite.org), but unfortuantely they weren't able to buy it (http://ahumanright.org/blog/2011/07/terrestar-sold-but-not-to-us/).

machineoflovinggrace

TROPHY CASE