I'll toss some ideas out. Not saying any are silver bullets but they're
possibilities (all of which depend on getting enough like minded people
and the willingness to coordinate, but then find a solution that
doesn't):
* If you just want an alternative space to kick around in and not a
super-secret hide-from-the-feds alternative, who says VPNs have to
always be for logging into work or watching videos from outside their
licensed regions? Pick one of the private IP spaces and set up a
widespread VPN.
* A FidoNet store & forward system would probably be pretty trivial to
tunnel through the Internet. In fact it's my understanding that towards
the end of BBSing days that was pretty much how most of the remaining
boards on FidoNet were operating. Pick an open source web forum, bolt on
store & forward... Hey, we've just reinvented newsgroups with a GUI
slapped on top. Actually I'm kind of surprised that near as I can tell
no one has done something along these lines. If I had to guess I'd guess
that any time someone has suggested it they've either said, "That's
Usenet, who uses Usenet anymore?" or "sounds like a mailing list,
mailing lists already exist."
* As close to a silver bullet as there probably is for this matter?
Solve mapping IP numbers to a distributed directory system rather than a
master list of unique names. What I mean there is figure how to set up a
system that accepts that there are going to be duplicate names out
there. There's lots of cities with the same name, there are countless
people with the same name, work out a system that says, "Portland.gov?
Do you want the site for the city of Portland, Oregon or the city of
Portland, Maine? Perhaps Portland, New South Wales?" Also work out how
to make it resistant to intentional corruption because trolls are going
to troll. (Someone will suggest the blockchain in 3... 2... 1...*)
* If I'm going to dream, figure a wireless networking standard that can
operate at say a mile's range, even something that drops to dialup
speeds when it's unlicensed and thus you have lots of people using it.
Do that and setting up your local mesh network becomes far easier. I
recall a few years back there was discussion of trying to set up a Plug
Wifi Mesh and IIRC range was what killed it. There were people
interested but figuring out how to actually get them linked together on
a reasonable budget.
Short of that if you want a mesh network you're going to have to figure
out how to get people who otherwise don't care to get involved. Sure
Raspberry Pi 3's have built in wifi, in theory anywhere you can find an
outlet you could stick a little RPi3 box, but even they're going to be
expensive once you start talking about buying them bulk. Sure there are
even cheaper options than the RPi, but even those become "real money"
when you buy them by the case. So right now the only way I see a
freeform mesh network happening is something like the Little Brother
solution in which you convince people to get involved for reasons other
than "I want a non-government run network," (the characters in Little
Brother release a homebrew console game that did multiplayer over a
local mesh network using the wifi built into the console rather than
using the Internet over the cable/dsl connection, then by managing to
get it popular at their school the main characters a network to
communicate over that wasn't pre-bugged or as easy to shut off).
(No really, the Blockchain is cool but it's also a new fad solution like
Java, "over the Internet!" were once upon a time (really, did even a
quarter of the original dot com bubble companies have a business plan
that amounted to more than, "it's something you could do cheaper
locally, but we're offering to let you do it Over! The! Inter! Net! With
um, Java! Yeah, Java!")
On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 10:00 AM, Eric Oyen wrote:
> ok, I see some issues here.
> first off, I am a conservative. I don't hide it but, then, I don't
> trumpet it either. As far as I am concerned, politics should have very
> little to do with technology or how it gets implemented.
> Unfortunately, politics has injected itself into our very lives in the
> form of regulations, some of which govern how we can use the net. To
> my mind, that is a very bad thing. if you really want to see examples
> of how bad it can get, take a look at china, russia, the entire middle
> east, and some places in South America.
>
> now that I have dispensed with the politics, I want to get down to how
> we work around onerous control of the net. Someone else suggested a
> mesh network. That's all fine and good until you want to communicate
> outside of the local area. So, how do we expand this idea? This is
> where innovation in technology comes into play. It's purely technical
> and solves a problem (and no politics involved).
>
> so, there it is, how do we work around this problem and not get
> political doing it?
>
> -eric
>
> On Aug 29, 2016, at 9:46 AM, Nathan England wrote:
>
>>
>> Amazing how clear every thing becomes when you take a deep breath!...
>> and burry your head in the sand.
>>
>>
>> On Monday, August 29, 2016 1:43:22 AM MST stevensspam@cox.net wrote:
>>> My suggestion?
>>>
>>> Taking a deep breath, pouring the Koolaid down the drain instead of
>>> drinking
>>> it, and repeating to yourself, "I should really stop jumping on
>>> every
>>> conspiracy bandwagon I see."
>>>
>>> Seriously, I have little doubt that if we had a republican president
>>> and a
>>> democratic majority in congress was attempting to block this very
>>> same
>>> change you would see articles criticizing the block and talking
>>> about how
>>> government can't do anything right. What's going on now is that
>>> instead of
>>> a single company holding a government granted monopoly to run the
>>> DNS and
>>> numbering system there would be a group of companies and
>>> organizations
>>> doing the same thing -- with a US threat to seize control of it
>>> again if
>>> they misbehave.
>>>
>>> And as for fears this will lead to balkanization brought up in
>>> another post
>>> -- there have been threats to balkanize the Internet if control of
>>> the DNS
>>> system remained a monopoly held by a single US company or government
>>> agency. This is probably a damned it you do, damned if you don't
>>> decision.
>>> In the long run it's probably inevitable that no matter which way
>>> this
>>> decision goes there will be more fracturing. We're probably very
>>> lucky to
>>> have gone this far with as little fracturing as there has been. I
>>> can even
>>> see Moral Majority types on the right demanding tighter controls
>>> over the
>>> Internet in the US to crack down on "adult" content which would
>>> pretty much
>>> require making a US Internet with closely watched gateways to the
>>> outside
>>> (censorship and political correctness are not something unique or
>>> restricted to the right or left, there's just different names
>>> attached).
>>> Having thing not being run by one single company operating under a
>>> government granted monopoly might make it just a slight bit harder
>>> for that
>>> to happen.
>>>
>>> But really, I suppose we should panic. It's not as if the conspiracy
>>> theorists have ever been wrong. After all Texas has been under
>>> Martial Law
>>> ever since Jade Helm, every Hurricane for decades has resulted in
>>> thousands
>>> disappearing into FEMA death camps, there's all folks who lost homes
>>> to imminent domain to built the Mexi-Canadian superhighway that's
>>> exempt from
>>> US jurisdiction, and after a decade I still haven't gotten used to
>>> these
>>> new Ameros that replaced the dollar...
>>>
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