Topic: Project Meshnet: Hardware for cjdns to enable new, censorship free Internet - page 2. (Read 11692 times)

A completely free and open internet is probably the most powerful tool against oppression that has ever existed. Hopefully enough of society will recognise this for such a project to succeed.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

So bureaucracy has the power to do things that entrepreneurs can't? Lulz...


Negative? Really? Ok then, let me ask you this... Which of these two organizations are more negative:

1. The one that has murdered over 260 million people in the last century, while extorting the rest of us all with threats of violence and jailtime if we don't pay our extorted fees, all the while running global data centers that record every electronic communication that we all make.

or

2. The peace-loving one that would like to communicate freely with each other, and will even pay for every bit of it all by themselves.

?

The only reason you feel darkwebs are negative is because you still believe in the gov's propaganda.




Technology always grows to improve these things. The Spanish meshweb has over 40,000 users all connected over a very large distance, covering thousands of square kilometers right this minute... If they can do that with today's technology, In five years we should be able to do it globally.



No. For something this big to be successful, ALL it needs to do is offer a cheaper alternative to what we've got now.

At some point we'll have residential-ready, open-mesh router boxes with 1km+ range cheaply available for households with as much or more bandwidth than we can get from our dinosaur ISPs... All offering FREE internet once you buy the hardware.

How could the ISPs possibly survive that? Who would want slower tech that isn't connected 100% of the time that comes with lots of government eavesdropping and shutoff switches... That you have to pay monthly fees for? Insane.
 

Clearly you don't know what a mesh network is at all. A good demonstration of Mesh networking is presented here at the One Laptop Per Child features page:

http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/features.shtml
(Click on the "start demo" button on the left to start it up.)

That demo only has about 10 nodes in it though... We're trying to network 7 billion people here, and places like spain and athens already have 10's of thousands meshed now.



There are already lots of businesses in spain and athens using only their mesh connection to the internet to do business on. Some of those only serve customers inside the meshed community, while others use it as a gateway to the WWW so they can serve the general internet too.

...But once the mesh goes global, who would possibly want to use the old internet anymore? Barbaric.

Ok, but why re-invent the wheel? A node operator could run a transparent proxy server if he wishes to offload some traffic.

You will never get a P2P hosted youtube with your approach.

Aside from real-time communication, 99% of the data on the web is static.   The other 1% is basically used to index into static content.  For example, google searches could be done in a 'static' manner if their index were published rather than providing the 'service'. 

99% of this forum is static.
99% of changes are 'patches' to already published data. 

The key is to offload all of the redundant data, have distributed hosting indexed by distributed DNS.   Then allow servers to provide the dynamic data that will reference the static data.    If I have to have my server 'always on' to publish data on the mesh network then that is a single point of failure and I risk being identified because all traffic ultimately routes to my server. 

Great, but an increasing part of the web is dynamic content which wouldn't really benefit from caching. For bandwidth intensive thing like streaming video it's better to support multicast routing.
Caching should be part of the protocol, if somebody wants it they can use usenet, tor or freenet.

From a usage/cost perspective it is almost always better to increase bandwidth instead of caching.

The key to getting a mesh network to work is the decentralized hosting of data.   Minimize the client/server communication and turn the internet into one giant torrent.   This would allow the network to scale to any demand.

Prior to working on BitShares... I had the following ideas:
https://github.com/bytemaster/tornet

To prevent Sybil attacks and encourage long term establishment of node identities, each node is ranked by hashing its public key with a nonce, the lower the resulting hash the higher the rank. It requires significant time/cpu resources to generate a high-ranking identity.

Economic Incentive

Price negotiation is 'expensive', especially if you must negotiate with 1000's of peers and the market prices change frequently. As a general rule, most users can pay 'in-kind' by uploading as much or more than they download; however, some nodes have higher demand or are unable to serve files (because they are behind a firewall). Other services are 'asymmetric' such as routing, tunneling, etc and therefor you require more resources from a specific node than that node requires of you. Some users simply want higher speeds and lower latencies.

Therefore, each user simply picks an amount to donate to the network. This donation is then divided among all peers proportional to the amount of service they have provided.  The result of donations is higher ranking in the priority queue and therefore faster network speed and lower latencies.

Each peer extends credit to 'new peers' proportional to their rank and past payment history. Because credit is tied to 'rank' and rank requires cpu time / money to acquire it is not profitable to constantly create new IDs as new IDs have the lowest priority.

An ID that doesn't contribute resources or BTC and uses up its credit will eventually find the network unusable.

Distributed File System
Content is divided into 1 MB chunks that must meet a statistical measure of randomness.  The chunks are stored in a distributed hash table (Kad).  
Each node has a financial incentive to extract the most value out of its limited bandwidth and disk space. A node with limited bandwidth but large disk storage would want to store 'rarely' accessed files that the users looking for them will pay a 'premium' for. A node with unlimited bandwidth, but limited disk space will want to store files in high-demand until the demand for their smaller set of files equals the available bandwidth.

At the same time that nodes want to optimize profitability, we want to ensure that nodes keep content close to their ID. The closer a chunk is to a node's ID the more value that node realizes for providing it. This means that instead of optimizing on access frequency, bandwidth, and storage each node has more incentive to offer chunks near its ID than far from its ID.

The side effect of the above relationship is that each user is incentivized to find the chunk on a node furthest from the chunk ID. This encourages the use of 'binary kad search' of the network and it is this binary search that allows nodes on the network to estimate the popularity of content and then opportunistically cache content that would be 'profitable' for it to host based upon access frequency and distance from the node ID.

On the other hand, nodes that are willing to pay a 'high price' for low-latency can short-circuit the lookup process and start their query much closer to the target node. This short-circut of the lookup process 'harms' the network by hindering the ability of nodes further away to cache the content. If every node did this then they could DOS the target node. Fortunately, because it is more expensive it naturally self-limiting.

Publishing Content

The cost of publishing content on a node is proportional to opportunity cost of that node giving up a slot in its file cache for your content. After all, nodes are in this for profit so each node can multiply the access frequency for a chunk by the yield of that chunk and the determine the expected revenue per-week. A node must 'bump' this chunk in order to pubish the content.

Furthermore, each node can only publish on nodes of 'lower rank', therefore new users / IDs end up being 'beta-testers' for content and nodes that wish to publish to more reliable nodes must invest in their identity. Market forces will then ensure that 'good' content is kept, and 'bad', unused, or outdated content is dropped. Due to the large number of users with small upload speeds and large harddives, there should be significant incentive for them to speculatively store infrequently accessed chunks.


If you combine these features with a 'mesh network', then you solve many of the bandwidth problems because people can pull from nodes near them and data for popular content will be cached.   No one needs to maintain a server to 'publish their data' once it is popular enough to be self-sustaining.   Everyone gets paid for contributing resources and there is financial incentive to contribute.

That's why modulated light communication is so great.
With radio signals in wifi and co it's possible to disrupt it with jamming devices, less so with high gain antennas but it's still feasible.
Ronja on the other hand can only be disrupted at the node itself or in a direct path. The only thing that really affects it is dense mist, and to my knowledge there is no technology which could generate that amount since it is built to handle natural conditions you might encounter.
It has several advantages over wifi which would be too extensive to mention here, the best of which is that it can work as a backbone for a traditional non-directed wifi network because there is no interference.
And 10mbit/s is only the speed of a naive implementation, in theory you can reach almost fiber speeds.

That's the difficulty of developing a mesh network - getting enough people involved to make it work. If you could get the majority of the population using it, it would be incredibly resilient. I guess like most things, offering some sort of financial incentive would get things rolling - just look at the growth in hash rate of the bitcoin network...

But in a local area such as a small town how many nodes are there going to be? Surely with only one or two possible routes it would be easy to take down. Very few in one small area are likely to be activists.

Very easy to disrupt wireless, but not too hard to figure out who is doing it with the right tools.  Optical is much harder to disrupt on a LOCAL house to house level of course. 

From what I understand the point of a mesh network is the decentralization - if you have many users, taking down a few nodes won't help because you can just route around it - you would have to take down a significant percentage of nodes to disrupt the network. In terms of disrupting your signal, my knowledge isn't good enough to tell you how feasible that would be.

The wireless nature of mesh networks surely makes them useless from a censorship perspective. All the enemy has to do is disrupt your signal or take down a few nodes. At least with the internet you have the added advantage of societies dependence on the network for business, which means you just can't filter out what you like from what you don't.

A meshnet is hard to do but possible with a full time supporter,a little bit of community money and enthusiastic support from a few users in tall buildings.  Using the latest technology and a network with a separate frequency band (or optical stuff) for a backbone it can be done.  As a casual project it would probably fail. 


Yes, the max data rate makes this not a useable project for a public mesh.  A few users and you are at modem like speeds. 

I don't really think meshnets are achievable as the anarchists would like them. This is because you really need public and especially government support to pull something like this off. These projects are publicly against any form of government and sees the government as the enemy which isn't helpful. I see this as being quite dark (notice the word darknet) and negative. Usually the aims are ridiculous and unachievable such as joining routers together with your neighbor who just isn't interested in such things (!), creating networks with helicopters, secret jet-packs or lasers!

If a big project like this is to be successful it has to have something for everyone in society that they can contribute to and feel like it has their best interests at heart. I think we probably have to work together on this however difficult.

1.2 Mbps* max data rate, 1km max range

Any guess how fast it would be at the typical distance of several hundred meters? My guess it it deteriorates quickly and is prone to interference in a mesh network.

No that's not good enough.

For a serious wifi alternative look at http://ronja.twibright.com/

These Flutter gizmos sound interesting:

http://qz.com/120270/a-new-alternative-to-wi-fi-has-a-range-of-nearly-a-mile-and-wont-drain-your-battery/

http://www.flutterwireless.com/

When I deployed them the software worked but was not so good.  I also was paying $20 a month for a credit card gateway.  I was actually making a profit with them for a bit but the maintenance was a pain, mostly needing to re-boot units and help users.  Now the software works much better and a gateway is free, but I do not have the time to market/install them in houses like I did before. 

The range is about half a city block when placed OUTSIDE (in protective gear) and one or two city houses when inside by a window.  So if you got three users per city block  with outdoor you would have a GOOD network. 

Now they have 802.11n units for $60+ or so, I am sure those units do better. 

Really? Very interesting. Can you tell us about their actual range, and your experience deploying them? Any other problems with them? (Such as why you aren't using them anymore.)

Thanks!

I have a large number of 802.11g open-mesh.com units I can sell at $25 each if anyone is interested.

Anyone need some Hope about our mesh-netted future?

There are already over 100 meshnets going in as many cities around the world!

Two in particular, in Athens and Spain, have a combined 50,000 users right now, all enjoying free internet!

Two awesome articles about them, although their numbers are a bit out of date:

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/greek-off-the-grid-internet-mesh

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/mesh-internet-privacy-nsa-isp


But the mother load of mesh network listings is on wikiP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region

Very encouraging. I bet the ISPs are already sh!tting their bricks.


These are pretty sweet for local locations: http://www.open-mesh.com  -But of course only have the range of standard Wi-fi repeaters.

Enjoy!