---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Brandon Wiley <brandon@blanu.net> Date: Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 9:58 AM Subject: [austin-hacker-space] SneakerMeshes and PirateBoxes To: austin-hacker-space@googlegroups.com I've been thinking a lot about what's going on in Egypt with the Internet being cut off. (see my blog post <http://goo.gl/f2iQV> for more background info) This has led me to thinking about the formation of a file sharing network not connected to the Internet in which the connections between nodes are people. Basically mesh networking meets sneakernet, or in other words a SneakerMesh. Essentially each participating location would have a Wifi access point which provided a captive portal <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal> to a website where you could upload and download files (similar to the USB dead drop <http://deaddrops.com/> project), The interesting twist I want to implement is that instead of just uploading and downloading separately to each file repository you synchronize your phone or laptop or other wifi-enabled device to the repository. Then when you are at a different location that has an active node you can synchronize again. As long as people "check in" at multiple nodes then the nodes will be synchronized. The ultimate goal here is to build something like Internet newsgroups, only with offline storage as the mechanism of message propagation instead of the Internet (and better support for non-text files). Someone has already made a pretty nice start on this by designing the PirateBox <http://wiki.daviddarts.com/Main_Page>, which is an application for OpenWRT that turns a wireless router into a standalone captive portal for uploading and downloading files. There is even a .ipk file<https://github.com/cr/mkPirateBox>you can install on a fresh OpenWRT instance to install it. The PirateBox just needs to be augmented with an API for synchronization in order to get a basic proof of concept working. There are certainly a lot of details to work out and as with anything involving protocols there are a lot of issues which could be debated endlessly. However, let us boldly move forward anyway! So if you're interested in this, please consider joining the project. The first step is to get at least 2 wireless routers with USB storage running OpenWRT/PirateBox. I saw some wireless routers on the hack shelf. I don't know if they are OpenWRT compatible or if they have USB. I'm certainly no expert on hacking wireless routers, so if anyone knows what they're doing and what's to get involved then I think that would be great. I'll be at the meeting on Tuesday if anyone wants to discuss next steps. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ATX Hackerspace" group. To post to this group, send email to austin-hacker-space@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to austin-hacker-space+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com<austin-hacker-space%2Bunsubscribe@googlegroups.com> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/austin-hacker-space ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE