On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, John Case wrote:
On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, J.A. Terranson wrote:
This seems preety hefty on ambition and pretty low on details. Is he planning on these wal-wart "servers" acting as TOR nodes? Universally accessable wifi spots? FreeNet nodes, or LAFS servers?
I think what bugs me the most here is that the basic premise appears intrinsically flawed: On Inet-1, everyone can see who you are - it's an artifact of the construction goals originally designed for.
I'd want to see some more meat and less fluff before I looked any deeper.
The (obvious) meme going around is "we'll just set up a mesh".
You can stop reading when you see that. A mesh network that does the things these people want it to do is currently rocket-science hard.
I'm tired of hearing the current calls for "mesh networks" myself. As you point out, they are *incredibly* complex, and these "wall-wart servers" aren't going to implement that kind of thing IMO. Christ, large ISPs still have trouble with simple IP, and they have "trained [or] experienced 'engineers'". It's a silly call to arms at this point. I was with a group that tried to work out a mesh implementation across a relatively small (~15sq miles) area, and it never came to fruition, despite several years of work on the problems presented.
It can be done, and I'd be the first one celebrating, but from the mouths of these morons its just mental masturbation.
I don't even see *that* coming from this particular ?press release?. Just a "build it and people will do it" [hrmm.. Build it and They will come". Where have I heard *that* before?] theme, with no particular goal in mind other than wide "implementation (which is glaringly undefined)". Whats the point, and how do I know that these guys are even competent to decide on a goal - just because they're with EFF? A lawyer who likes to code is a *long* way from the kind of talent that can make these little things useful for anything more than maybe [sntp server||dns server-small||etc.). Has anyone looked at the scaling problems of having these warts fully disseminated into the population, and "plugged in"? Like I said, it sounds like some vague, undefined project that nobody has yet actually looked at with any seriousness. //Alif -- "Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer, 1907 Speech