Steve Schear wrote:
It would seems that the means may soon be at hand for using WiFi, or WiFi-like, equipment to create ad hoc, meshed, non-commercial networks.
The means are at hand, have been at hand for quite a few years in the form of packet radio, and now of course, as you say, wi-fi. Folks an I used to pipedream about a xtra-net or hyper-net that was completely non-commercial, completely censor-free shadow internet running on top of the internet. The idea being to tunnel IPv6 over IPv4 over packet radio and the occasional "real" internet where wireless networks can't span. Running a distributed hack of named and a shared trust base of nic records. This would use the unallocated IP space. In order to host a node you had to relay for all all nodes. In order to participate, you had to actually be familiar with and utilise netiquette. Not a big deal, Linux and FreeBSD make it all completely possible. But like many utopian visions, not too likely.