3 Projects to Create a Government-less Internet, and Why It’s Needed [w/ updates]
Original post: Jan 29, 2011; last updated: Feb 4 [update follows original post]
There are 3 projects 4 projects 9 projects underway to effectively create a government-less Internet. This is badly needed …
[EDIT: See updates for additional projects]
This happened in Egypt on Thursday Jan 27th; at 22:34 UTC the Egyptian Government effectively removed Egypt from the internet. Nearly all inbound and outbound connections to the web were shut down. The internet intelligence authority Renesys explains it here and confirms that “virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.” This has never happened before in the entire history of the internet, with a nation of this size. A block of this scale is completely unheard of, and Senator Joe Lieberman wants to be able to do the same thing in the US.
Yes this could happen here in the U.S., or in the UK, or in Australia, or anywhere else in the world.
Last year Senators Lieberman and Collins introduced a fairly far-reaching bill that would allow the US Government to shut down civilian access to the internet should a “Cybersecurity Emergency” arise, and keep it offline indefinitely. That version of the bill received some criticism though Lieberman continued to insist it was important. The bill, now referred to as the ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act’ (PCNAA) has been revised a bit and most notably now removes all judicial oversight. This bill is still currently circulating and will be voted on later this year. Lieberman has said it should be a top priority.
As Sean Bonner observes in a recent post at Boing Boing:
It’s worth noting that the US sends $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt. That makes the US the primary benefactor of the current Egyptian government. Vice President Joe Biden stated in an interview with Jim Lehrer on Thursday that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has held that office since 1981, should not be considered a dictator. His opinion is not shared universally.
Mother Jones has a fantastic play-by-play explaining the situation right now in Egypt, and there are reports that some people using Tor are able to skirt around the governmental blocks.
In other words, most of the U.S. political class seems totally cool with such measures; and supports other government doing the same. Btw, Finley also has an article about Tor being used in Egypt to get around the government blocks.
The Internet Society issued a statement on the Egyptian government’s auto-unplugging: “Cutting off a nation’s access to the Internet only serves to fuel dissent and does not address the underlying causes of dissatisfaction.” Related update on that story today from Wired News: the state shut down the ‘net with a series of phone calls. [Via Boing Boing.]
So what about these 3 projects to create a government-less Internet? From his article:
In Cory Doctorow’s young adult novel Little Brother
, the protagonist starts a wireless ad-hoc network, called X-Net, in response to a government crack-down on civil liberties. The characters use gaming systems with mesh networking equipment built-in to share files, exchange message and make plans.
…
Here are a few projects working to create such networks.
Wireless ad-hoc networking has been limited in the past by a bottleneck problem. Researchers may have solved this issue for devices with enough computational power. The U.S. military is also investing in research in this area.
The OLPC’s XO has meshnetworking capabilities. And some gaming systems, such as the Nintendo DS, have mesh networking built in. But we want to look at projects that are specifically aimed at replacing or augmenting the public Internet.
Openet
Openet is a part of the open_sailing project. Openet’s goal is to create a civilian Internet outside of the control of governments and corporations. It aims to not only create local mesh networks, but to build a global mesh network of mesh networks stitched together by long range packet radio. See our previous coverage here.
Netsukuku
Netsukuku is a project of the Italian group FreakNet MediaLab. Netsukuku is designed to be a distributed, anonymous mesh network that relies only on normal wireless network cards. FreakNet is even building its own domain name architecture. Unfortunately, there’s no stable release of the code and the web site was last updated in September 2009.
OPENMESH
Not to be confused with the mesh networking hardware vendor of the same name, OPENMESH is a forum created by venture captalist Shervin Pishevar for volunteers interested in building mesh networks for people living in conditions where Internet access may be limited or controlled.
Pishevar came up with the idea during the protests in Iran in 2009. “The last bastion of the dictatorship is the router,” he told us. The events in Egypt inspired him to get started.
It’s a younger project than Openet and Netsukuku, but it may have more mainstream appeal thanks to being backed by Pishevar. It’s not clear how far along Openet is, and Netsukuku’s seems to be completely stalled so a new project isn’t entirely unreasonable.
Such projects will prove to be invaluable to freedom of speech, freedom of commerce, and in emergencies such as natural disasters as well.
I’m definitely going to read up on those projects — especially OPENMESH, which from what Finley wrote, seems the most promising at this point.
Also, I learned quite a bit just by reading the comments to a posting of the ReadWriteWeb article over at Hacker News. Some great points are brought up there, and responded to by others. So after you read Finley’s article and find yourself wanting to know more (like me); read the great comments after the article and then head over to that discussion at Hacker News.
For example, while reading it I wondered if Freenet could have a role to play in a Government-less Internet. Someone brought that up in the comments at RRW; to which Roch replied: “The freenet is a way to hide/encrypt/distribute data anonymously but it still needs the “governmental” internet to connect peers together.”
I have a feeling that with recent events in places like Iran, and current events in Egypt, a decentralized Internet is going to be in huge demand. Especially if the government of bigger countries, like the U.S., get their ‘off-switch.’
UPDATE: LifeHacker has a great article titled “How To Foil a Nationwide Internet Shutdown.” In the article, Adam Dachis reminds us that there’s still old-school dial-up connections … unless all the phone-lines are cut.
UPDATE:
Tonika
Petar Maymounkov brought a “4th project” to my attention, via the comments section; so I wanted to add this into the article right away. His comment:
I’d like to politely point you to a “fourth” project, Tonika, athttp://5ttt.org. This project is new but maturing quickly and it supersedes the aforementioned three projects in both technical as well as econimic/incentive design. Albeit not superbly documented just yet, it is worth keeping an eye on.
This is getting more thrilling by the day!
UPDATE:
B.A.T.M.A.N.
The website for that project is www.open-mesh.org, where they explain that B.A.T.M.A.N. is a routing protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks.
Andrew de Andrade commented:
You should check out B.A.T.M.A.N. (Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) and the Babel protocols. Both are mesh-networking protocols that have been successfully implemented on more than 4000 autonomous nodes. They are an improvement on OSLR.
Andrew also says that “every year in Europe there is a BattleMesh meetup where all the people working on mesh networking protocols get together to compare protocols.” Battlemesh sounds like a sweet meetup, and what a great way to stimulate productivity in this area!
Freifunk
Michael K commented:
Moin,
you might also add Freifunk, a mesh network based on OpenWRT, that is up and running in several German cities.
/server irc.fu-berlin.de
/join #freifunkThe chat is in german, but most germans can speak english, also.
ciao,Michael
According to the current Wikipedia entry:
Freifunk.net (German for: “Free radio”) is a non commercial open initiative to support free radio networks in the German region. Freifunk.net is part of the international movement for free and wireless radio networks. For more information on such projects around the world, see wireless community network.
To support the fast deployment of free radio networks, Freifunk uses a specialized firmware for WRT54G devices. With this firmware, it is relatively easy to bring up new wireless mesh networks using ad-hoc WLAN communication and layer 3 routing with OLSR. More information can be found on the firmware’s homepage.
Here’s a semi-related article: List of ad-hoc mesh network routing protocols that can be used during an “internet kill switch”. OPENMESH, Netsukuku, B.A.T.M.A.N., and others are linked up there too. The list they posted is also in response to “recent events in Egypt and the speed of the shutdown. Most of these projects are open to contribution and further development.”
Thanks, all, for the continued comments and feedback!
UPDATE — Feb 4:
Klint Finley was on a web tv show called The Week In Cloud Computing talking about Egypt and his original article about government-free mesh networks. He’s on at about the 11:57 mark, but listen to the news bits at the beginning of the program. They help further illuminate the need for a government-less Internet, and make for a great set-up for the conversation.
Finley also followed his article up with another. He writes at his blog:
I did a follow-up to my story last week about wireless mesh network projects, adding four more projects to the original list of three.
ReadWriteWeb: 4 More Projects to Create a Government-less Internet
He added Freifunk to the list, which also came up in the conversation here. Also added to the list:
Daihinia
“Daihinia is a commercial project that provides software that essentially turns Windows PCs into wireless repeaters. The company’s software makes it possible to use a desktop or laptop with a normal wireless card to “hop” to a wireless access point while out of range of that access point. There’s no Macintosh version, but it’s being discussed.”
Digitata
“Digitata is a sub-project of open_sailing’s Openet, which we mentioned in the previous installment. Digitata is focused on bringing wireless networks to rural areas of Africa. The group is creating open source hardware and software, including its own own IP layer for mesh networking called IPvPosition (IPvP).”
wlan ljubljana
“… is a wireless mesh network in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In addition to providing its users with Internet access, it appears to also feature a local network. wlan ljubljana is working with volunteers in other cities in Slovenia to create more local networks, and has created its own firmware package for routers called nodewatcher. Like Freifunk, nodewatcher is based on the embeddable Linux distribution OpenWrt. nodewatcher is designed to be easy to use for a non-technical user.”
Full article at ReadWriteWeb; and it includes a great list of resources.
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