Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service.
This is what happened in Egypt Jan. 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government cut off approximately 88 percent of the country's internet access. What do you do without internet? Step 1: Stop crying in the corner. Then start taking steps to reconnect with your network. Here’s a list of things you can do to keep the communication flowing.
For those interested in alternative internet infrastructures, I’ve been assembling a list of projects and initiatives working to build mesh network solutions, as well as communities and resources around this topic. I’ve also posted this on Quora. Please feel free to add any projects I’ve missed. We’re hoping to understand the landscape of this initiative and how these projects & communities can better coordinate their efforts, in preparation for the Contact Conference in NYC this October 20, 2011.
Projects:
– Open Mesh Project – building a mesh network for Egypt
– Open Source Mesh – group looking at how to build a reliable open source meshing software
– B.A.T.M.A.N. – better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking; routing protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks
– Roofnet – 802.11b/g mesh network in development at MIT CSAIL
– GNUnet – framework for secure p2p networking that doesn not use any centralized or otherwise trusted services
– Dot-P2P – a free, decentralized, and open DNS system
– SMesh – seamless wireless mesh network being developed at John Hopkins University
– Coova – open source software access controller for captive portal (UAM) and 802.1X access provisioning
– Babel – a loop-free distance-vector routing protocol for IPv6 & IPv4
– SolarMESH – solar powered IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN mesh network and relaying infrastructure solution
– WING – wireless mesh network for next-generation internet; partially built on Roofnet
– Daihinia – a tool for WiFi; turns a simple ad-hoc network into a multi-hop ad-hoc network
– P2P DNS – building a distributed p2p DNS system
– Digitata.org – develop an inexpensive infrastructure (low bandwidth internet terminals) for basic internet exposure to children in African countries
– Netsukuku – an ad-hoc netowork that uses only WiFi connectivity and a specifically-built adddress system that allows direct communications between machines without resorting to the HTTP protocol
– Tonika – open source organic network project; administration-free platlform for large-scale open-membership (social) networks with robust security, anonymity, resilience and performance guarantees
Phase One, which we now recognize must be first, is to create the aggregate people power to overcome secular corruption that is the source of all scarcity and conflict, is the distribution of simple free open source cellular access to the five billion poor. This includes both OpenBTS as a new global standard, and solar-powered mesh Internet that cannot be shut down by governments, corporations, or predatory non-governmental organizations.
Phase Two is not smart phones–an overpriced over-complex toy for the one billion rich–but rather the creation of national, regional, and virtual call centers that can both educate the poor one cell call at a time, and harness the distributed intelligence of all humans in all languages all the time–the back office functions and the desktop analytics of this second tier of intermediate processing are critical to machine speed information sharing and sense making.
Phase Three must be the application of the Strategic Analytic Model in conjunction with the establishment of “true cost” information for every product and service, and the coincident establishment of local water, power, and currency options that begin to dismantle the dysfunctional grid that wastes half of what it moves in the movement.
Phi Beta Iota: If Trump runs on a pledge of Electoral Reform, announces a Coalition Cabinet prior to 1 September, challenges all other candidates to do the same, and then holds a balanced budget bake-off, he wins as an Independent. This is the one person we have seen who is credible and not a piss-ant wrapped up in No Labels and other similarly fraudulent schemes.
Unfortunately she is not being very well served by her staff. The Taliban have executed multiple complex attacks this year, all indicating that they have moved into Phase III of an insurgency. That happens when an insurgent feels they stand a good chance of obtaining their goals.
The linkage between AQ and the Taliban have been exposed as weak at best. AQ was allowed into Afghanistan because of a request for sanctuary under Pashtunwali. The IC has not figured that out yet since they have very little understanding of Afghanistan……
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned Taliban fighters in Afghanistan that they face a stark choice between war and peace, as US military pressure on them mounts
Phi Beta Iota: This is sad. Even if she knows this is idiocy mouthed for domestic campaign contributor constituencies, it further reduces global estimates of US intelligence (zero) and US diplomacy (not). We hope President Barack Obama is giving deep thought to changing his entire Cabinet. State used to have a moderately intelligent INR that could overcome the total ignorance of the secret world, but evidently they have either lost their innate intelligence or lost their access to the Secretary.
Phi Beta Iota: It is actually much worse than that. Our estimate of the cost of US being best pals with 42 of 44 dictators is closer to 500 billion, and that is a very conservative estimate. The cost is roughly divided between US taxpayer money being given away for the wrong reasons, and the “true cost” to the world–and ultimately to the USA–of an unethical, uninformed, unstrategic foreign policy that is in no way, shape, or form focused on creating a prosperous world at peace. Not to be naive, we realize that we have a government Of, By, and For the Banks and their Corporations. That is what needs to change, non-violently, on the basis of Internet Freedom and Freedom through the Internet. In passing, we are not amused when people steal our ideas and offer to help the US Government do for $3 million what we are doing for free. Three Internet Freedom URLs with links below the line.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed on Tuesday to invest $25 million for developers to build tools that will let online dissidents get around “thugs, hackers and censors.” It’s her attempt at giving teeth to the so-called “Internet Freedom Agenda” that she unveiled last year.
HOW TO COMMUNICATE IF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT SHUTS DOWN THE INTERNET
