Whatever it is or turns out to be it will be carefully and meticulously legal. No crossing the line into criminality or the organizer will have to shop your ass in accord with governmental regulations governing the practice of law sometimes laughingly called the bar. There is a decent-sized legal and financial (they always sleep together) industry of setting up non-profits to advance alluring agendas. All legal and financially accountable as determined by inscrutible taxation laws and those who sell scrutibility by the unlimited hours. The schemes cover the broad spectrum of left, moderate, right, extreme, covert, deceptive, manipulative, hit and run, offshore, out of this world, you want your very own why no problem provide retainer sign here be in touch soon. Head for the tracks to leverage for three lovers want their dues. Anybody with over $500,000 to squander, and they all need to do that or Uncle takes a big bite, is incessantly proffered opportunities to fund a perfect fit for the psychopathology used to attain the wealth and to battle the accompanying terror of losing it to another psycho like the government or the latest bedmate of amazing understanding of the greeder's weakness due to being a world class shit. The Internet has upchucked thousands of these NGO facilitators who spam conferences, mail lists, chat rooms, dinners, panels, and oddball conclaves of wealth managers all seeking to promote goodness to bad guys with a foot in the grave, they are reminded unctuously, would you not like to consider a heritage to whiten your name. One way to fend off these leeches is to ask about their fee, not the pro bono sham, the fees for lecturing, drafting incorporation papers, sitting on boards, doing due diligence (be very afraid of due diligence for that will get you jail time, tell'em Jim Bell), defending and offending in court, publishing how-tos, escrowing bribes and alimony, the usually panoply of self-dealing in guise of public benefit, uh, protecting the client. Another way to fend off these bloodsuckers is to ask for advice on how to engage in criminal "public benefit." Whoa, he says, whoa, whoa, now way. I could be disbarred for that. You say, what would be your fee to cover that risk. Excuse me, she will say, I need to step out for a moment. You hear a dime dropping. Not calling the cops, calling a financial advisor. None of this applies to jail house lawyers or pro se. Anybody heard from Jim Bell? Not a peep heard here in his third go around. Is he being Bradley Manning'd?

Excuse that last post. It was about architects, not lawyers. Greg Broiles is an angel, totally trustworthy. Ply him.

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

This may be of interest Abstract: Reliably erasing data from storage media (sanitizing the media) is a critical component of secure data management. While sanitizing entire disks and individual files is well-understood for hard drives, flash-based solid state disks have a very different internal architecture, so it is unclear whether hard drive techniques will work for SSDs as well. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of hard drive-oriented techniques and of the SSDsb built-in sanitization commands by extracting raw data from the SSDbs flash chips after applying these techniques and commands. Our results lead to three conclusions: First, built-in commands are effective, but manufacturers sometimes implement them incorrectly. Second, overwriting the entire visible address space of an SSD twice is usually, but not always, sufficient to sanitize the drive. Third, none of the existing hard drive-oriented techniques for individual file sanitization are effective on SSDs. This third conclusion leads us to develop flash translation layer extensions that exploit the details of flash memorybs behavior to efficiently support file sanitization. Overall, we find that reliable SSD sanitization requires built-in, verifiable sanitize operations. http://www.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf

Note: Reply made on a free form stream-of-consciousness basis. On Fri, 18 Feb 2011, Eugen Leitl wrote:

If you're talking mesh, one of the basic requirements is to get rid of central address allocation authority and establish a local-knowledge based routing.

Thats not as easy as it sounds, especially in hyperdense cities - although I will also admit that this is more a 70% administrative issue than an technical issue. It's unlikely that anyone in their right minds is going to just open up their networks to both unlimited and unmonitored connections, but even if they do, they are going to demand some allocation control and accountability. Not that it's necessary for any technical reason, but because it's required for the people who both pay the network bills and receive FBI "letters" / subpoenas: even the smallest networks have some kind of "security department", even if it's the same guy who does everything else there. This is where the idea truly breaks down. I wouldn't allow an open wifi connection when I know that any illicit activities are going to come back to haunt *me* when the FBI does their next "predator sweep". No municipality is going to allow geocoded/derived addressing for the exact same reason: they want to be able to point the finger when the time comes. They also want to know if your node is acting up, where they can go /phone to make you fix it. Mesh networks are a political disaster *before* anyactual engineering time goes in. But if you are lucky enough to get past the politics (hard. really hard.), then you start down the actual engineering pipe: traffic planning and engineering is at best difficult, at worst impossible, without centralized control. So do we just assume that the warts know not to exceed bandwidth(x), and plan for max(y) warts per square mile/kilometer? Do we assume that all these warts are going to be using passive connections for ftp? this road leads back to political questions by the way. The residential carriers will go postal if 100k home connections are suddenly offering services and draining back through the cable/dsl drains, against their AUP/ToS. If you choose to create layer 2 drain solutions you are back to tight and centralized allocation control.

If you get that far, the human operator mistakes are removed from the loop.

...

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.

Do you have a pointer to description of your project, and what went wrong?

This was a municipal project, so I can't point you anywhere: sorry. As for what went wrong: everything. Everyone who touches the mesh has questions/issues of the nature I alluded to above. Muni IT demands to be able to track back every ip to a known user, meaning any kind of geolocation solution is gone right off the bat. By the way, the reasoning here wasn't what I was expecting: they were more concerned with virus control and quarantine (which implies a separate layer 2 sandbox for infected connections, or connections carrying infected traffic where such can be accurately and reliably determined - which is about 50% of the time). The muni wanted a known IP for each user, with certain wifi hotspots exempted to local rfc1913 networks using DHCP. We had interesting times with these hotspots too! Not having enough IPs on a public wifi segment causes weird behaviour that the basic call desk cant troubleshoot, and that they don't recognize as being broken - so these spots get reputations as being "unreliable". Significant automation was assembled just to keep track of required resources vs actual available resources, with traps going out when automation sees something we dont. The traffic engineering issues are perverse. Meditate on them for a little while, and consider all of the ways you can slice your own throat. Is a steady rise in users a trend, or did the bookings for conventions just have a good year? Are you meeting peak demand, or are you oversubscribing on your backbone? *Is* there a backbone? Lots of questions at layers 1 and 2! In fact, layer 2 is where you're going to spend a *lot* of your time, unlike the operation of a more traditional IP network, where you spend the vast majority of your time at layer 3. Segregation is a necessary ingredient, as well as scanning-on-allocation to check for blatantly rooted connections. This gets tricky as hell. We were asked to plan for each muni supporting drains for the connections made within their geographic areas: oops! Looks like I want geo-derived addresses again! Except that these same munis have the additional condition of only wanting to allocate for their own taxpayers: oops! Back to centralized control and allocation... Round and round you go... Everyone here knows IP well, and can add a hundred things that I've not touched on. Every time you add a condition, you increase complexity, and these increases are *not* linear!

I can tell you one thing: Eben Moglen is not a stupid man, and he's

I never alleged that he was stupid. I know he's no moron. But he's also not thinking this through, he's looking to build the device before he knows his application. Thats fine for general purpose machinery with lots of cycles and storage to spare, but a wart is likely to be max'd out at ultra-small storage and cpu limits: virtually every wart-driven device was designed to act as a simple bridge or router, which requires surprisingly little computing power: An old 386 is massive overkill for acting as a router on lines up to about 3mbps - while these warts may have more *cycles* available than an old throwaway box, they are going to have [at best] a few hundred megabytes of flash storage: not a lot of room there for anything meaningful.

surrounded with technically capable people. If he can raise the money for 10-100 k wall wart units you can assume people will do useful things with them.

I can assume people will do *something* with them, but *useful* things, no, I cannot just assume that - that will be something I'll have to see to believe. //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

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 09:04:05PM +0000, 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

I think they're drafting up the specs. Tor would be a save idea, ip2 and LAFS-Tahoe another.

...

accessable wifi spots? FreeNet nodes, or LAFS servers?

Not necessarily WiFi, thogh if the wall wart has a radio, why not. Just another NIC.

...

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".

I think you're being too harsh here. These are wired nodes, running vanilla current p2p stuff. Tor e.g. might not scale to a meganode, but it would be fun to find out when and how it breaks.

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 notice you didn't comment on the sketch I gave you. While not a rocket surgeon, the issue of routing by itself is doable, provided you meet certain constraints. I wish I had time to write a simulator for that to prove a few points.

It can be done, and I'd be the first one celebrating, but from the mouths of these morons its just mental masturbation.

Let's compare notes. I tell you how I think it could be done, and you take it apart. Deal? -- 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