Internet Is Easy Prey For Governments 314
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Douglas Rushkoff writes on CNN that the revolution in Egypt starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away. 'Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points,' says Rushkoff adding that when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the US the very same government authority was used to cut off "enemies of the state" from access and funding. Rushkoff suggests that we use the lessons of the internet to build a communications infrastructure that cannot be controlled from the top. Back before the internet, many early computer hobbyists networked on Fidonet, a simple peer-to-peer network and now digital activists propose reviving such ideas with mesh networking over Wi-Fi networks that could connect inhabitants of an entire city without anyone having an internet service provider. 'Until we choose to develop such alternative networks, our insistence on seeing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as the path toward freedom for all people will only serve to increase our dependence on corporations and government for the right to assemble and communicate.'"
It doesn't have to be that way ... (Score:5, Informative)
The Internet was actually designed to be distributed ... true story.
It only happens to have a few large choke points because its economically effective to do so.
Believe it or not it is entirely possible for the Internet to be used over terrestrial radio ... in fact ... it can be done by 'amateurs'! In fact ... it already is!
Right now the Internet has these choke points because theres no reason other than FUD not to have it that way. Should the actual need for a more diverse infrastructure arise due to the government going psycho than we'll shift gears and make it go that direction. Yes, it'll suck for a period of time to start with until new links are added, and we'll probably have to lose things that consume massive bandwidth for pleasure like youtube ... but rest assured, porn will make sure we recover promptly.
Its just silly to spend a bunch of money for a bunch of links that aren't needed and all the installation costs that go with it.
The Internet works pretty much exactly like fido net when you use UUCP. The difference is simply how you dial the phone line ... the data is actually STILL traveling over the same fiber and copper as it did when you sent your fidonet mail up to your mail hub and distributed back to other nodes.
As for seeing Facebook and Twitter as a path for 'freedom of the people' ... well that just makes you sound like a freaking idiot. Neither of these sites provide anything that wasn't already done before them on the Internet as well in more traditional methods. Old idea, new theme, new fad ... not a world changer. The only difference is now we're paying attention to someone hundreds of miles away from us that has no bearing on our lives what so ever, instead of the people in our own neighborhoods. Its just a different popularity contest.
A few issues (Score:4, Informative)
First: routing will be a pain. On a small network, you can have a routing table in each host, which over time learns the shortest rout to a particular destination, but routing tables for a large network would be a pain. How do you know who to send a packet to next?
Second: Even if you solve the routing problem, at some point there are going to be huge bottlenecks. For example, the wireless routers located next to Google's headquarters are going to be vastly overloaded. And before you talk about some kind of caching mechanism, realize that Google likely has multiple OC256 lines, each of which has enough bandwidth to saturate a hundred 802.11n devices (numbers from here, sometimes my math is bad [wikipedia.org], but the point is, even if you manage to cache 95% of the stuff across the internet, it's still not enough).
I'd like to see mesh network working at a large scale, but these are some real problems that need to be dealt with.
Re:No ideal solutions (Score:4, Informative)
Freenet has improved greatly in speed in the past few years. A year ago I found it quite usable for light web browsing. Sure if you want to leek 1 TB of something it's not going to cut it, but if you haven't tried it in awhile give it another spin.
Re:HF (Score:4, Informative)
It's jammable, and has the bandwidth of a capillary. My friends who live on an oceangoing sailboat get their email over HF and data rates are so skimpy that they have to ask their friends not to quote them on replies.
Re:HF (Score:5, Informative)
HF is a very narrow, crappy channel for digital transmission. With a lot of error correction, and long blocks, and ARQ, you can get data through. But is it slow. Years ago, I used to run radio-teletype on HF. We generally held things down to 60 Baud or so because shorter symbols got smeared. And even with freqency shift keying of 170 Hz, you would still sometimes get "single tone fades" -- that is the Mark tone or the Space tone would be great, but 170 Hz away the other one would fade.
HF *can* move data -- if you use good, modern codes. But it can't move a lot of it very fast. The correct RF approach would be to go to a mesh network at UHF frequencies, like some re-farmed analog TV channels.
Re:No ideal solutions (Score:2, Informative)