Talking about privacy. Why use services like Scribd ?
A simple link to the pdf file hosted somewhere else would have suffice. I then can do my searches locally without them tracking exactly what I do (who views what, who searches what). SASS (Service as Software Substitute) is evil...
It takes about 1182 seconds for light to go from Earth to Mars. Which means that it will take about 39 minutes to see Google and this is if you already resolved the DNS.
What is the point of creating such network if it is for the benefit of just a few ?
If 1% of the population can have free speech, but the rest of them don't, nothing will change...
1. anyone can create their own meshnet. Hack37: download cjdns and find a friend and set up your meshnet of 2 people.
2. if you learn of others with meshnets, you can then peer to the other group, then you're all linked together. Repeat.
3. The steps you just did, those can be automated so that you automatically peer with the whole planet. However, that's complicated to build. But it's being built. Join HypeIRC #qmai or #cjdns to discuss. To join hype IRC you need to peer with the Hyperboria meshnet, as HypeIRC is not broadcast to the Internet. There are links to public IRCs to find peers if you know none (start at http://projectmeshnet.org). You're free to automate this with your own group of trusted peers too. Hope to see you on HypeIRC soon.
You are mistaking free speech with access to the media.
Private meshes usage doesn't grant mass media attention so I don't see why a bunch of hackers communicating freely on their little line grant them a better "free speech to change things" than the other 99%. Private meshes aren't tools to raise awareness but tools to have a different network. It all depends on the message you want to send and the recipients you want to reach.
Right now private meshes users are much less than 1% of the population anyway.
But it could grow fast in dense urban zone. I can foresee some weekends of hacking and configuring routers at home for the coming months.
More importantly, what's the point of building pipes if nothing flows through them. I don't think there is a YouTube or a HN over there. One may imagine that users may share files they have on their discs, or more generally serve stuff, but then you depend on them being up and running (and reachable) 24/7.
I can see that problem solved or attenuated if those meshes turn into some kind of distributed networks like bitmessage or bittorrent where everyone has duplicate pieces of a larger "file" thus ensuring almost 99% availability. Data put in the network would be everywhere and maybe a distribution algorithm could ensure that there's always a complete source on one node so the swarm could be rebuilt if one node goes down.
Of course the bandwidth will be nothing like what ISP can offer.
What concerns me is how highly vulnerable to RF disruption some of those projects relying on WiFi are. This is a serious problem if you are trying to communicate vital information in a country where the government is hell-bent on not letting citizens set up counter-revolt or grass-root movements because it'll actually be very cheap to disturb those signals (I may be wrong but from what I understand of WiFi freq. range it's easy to neutralize a network by flooding it with interference).
edit:
But maybe we don't need 24/7 availability for those kind of network usage. Well-organized revolutionary and underground movements might not need a youtube or facebook uptime.
> What concerns me is how highly vulnerable to RF disruption some of those projects relying on WiFi are. This is a serious problem if you are trying to communicate vital information in a country where the government is hell-bent on not letting citizens set up counter-revolt or grass-root movements because it'll actually be very cheap to disturb those signals (I may be wrong but from what I understand of WiFi freq. range it's easy to neutralize a network by flooding it with interference).
Plenty of WIFI networks are sub-optimal because the people implementing them don't know what they're doing with channels and power etc. I'm worried that meshnet activism will attract many people who are keen but not clueful.
