stimoceiver

"It should be obvious, the attacks on a free and open internet will not cease. The free ride on the information superhighway is over.

The owners of the infrastructure are working very hard to see to it that their networks cannot be used any longer to organize against government or corporate injustice.

In my opinion, the reality of the growing cyberwar and the repeated and intense attacks against the free nature of the network should invite us all to consider, what evolutionary innovation to existing network technology will secure the continued availability to we who have grown accustomed to the existence of this most utilitarian technology called "the internet" - that just also happens to be an extremely potent tool of personal and collective liberation?

In my view, it is time for the citizens of the planet to construct a point to point radio MESH "outernet." I call it an Outernet in order to point to the topological factors that should fifferentiate it from the existing internet and yet at the same time retain the possibility of it including the existing internet within its bounds, as most certainly needs to be the case if it is to be widely adopted.

Strangely, the Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF and its composite membership have stalled on full blown implementation of ipv6 at precisely the point at which it could help enable, not only the years touted as forthcoming corporate sponsored "internet of devices" where your dishwasher can talk with your toaster, but also an all inclusive wireless point to point radio network mesh where one only needs to put up an antenna to begin connecting and exploring the net.

The current implementation of an ipv4 internet is seen to be infrastructure-centric. Observe the many hops in any traceroute: they represent only nameless and faceless nodes comprising the infrastructure. As it is now one connects first and foremost to the infrastructure, not to ones nearest neighbors, even when a shorter route could exist - say by virtue of proximity of coexisting WIFI networks.

I point at the existence of all these WIFI capable routers and devices in everyones homes and ask: They all talk to varying ISP providers and infrastructures. why dont they all talk, also, to each other? Why don't we have a network that routes traffic through neighboring user nodes?

As a result of all the threats of censorship and "internet kill switch" activities, not to mention boundless surveillance at the infrastructure level, today there are many projects to develop MESH networks and various kinds of darknets. Obviously, we need something like the address space of ipv6 that both includes ipv4 within it as a subnet, as well as offering enough addresses for all MESH devices to have their own unique address on the mesh. But I have yet to see a MESH project that specifies an ipv6 infrastructure. The beauty of using ipv6 lies in the ability to coexist with the existing internet. Also, given that ipv4 is a subset of ipv6, then in a sense using ipv6 really does create an "Outernet."

Another part of the answer to the question of "Why don't all these existing WIFI devices talk to each other?" is far more basic to the type of center-margin, tethered to the infrastructure style of networking paradigm we've used all our lives. We are so accustomed to the need for a firewall, that we cannot see the irony in having an apartment complex full of WIFI enabled devices that must needs go out on an infrastructure line back to a central office or even a downtown NOC just to have traffic with a node that may be a few hundred feet away. We cannot conceive of a network where each node routes traffic for neighboring nodes as a condition of having its own traffic routed.

Perhaps more importantly, we are so accustomed to the need for a firewall that we cannot see the possible utility in helping create, organize and sustain communities. If everyone is routing traffic for nearest geographical neighbors, then the obvious next step is to rework existing network communication modes to fit the new point to point network paradigm. Each node should be easily capable of something like email, instant messenging, file transfer, and even the creation of virtual subnets for the purpose of gaming. Why not give every device something like a profile page, a wall, and a file area, each of which can be restricted. The more advanced users might want to run their own web services.

But imagine the utility of such a mesh for community organizing. Say one has just moved in to a new apartment building. You put up the MESH antenna aerial and instantly you seeing all your nearest neighbors and their profile pages. You can instantly meet online everyone who wants to be met, everyone who has not enabled privacy settings. To me it seems like a no brainer. This is the next step of the evolution of community digital internetworking.

I've thought more about some of the technical aspects of such an anarchic and decentralized network and how it might utilize some of the existing ipv6 protocol stack implementations (such as NDP or DNS) in novel ways to achieve a rapid adoption, but I dont want to stray too far from the idea of cyberwar here. But when it comes to the reality of a global information war waged by corporate and governmental stake holders against the common citizens, something like the emergence a global wireless mesh could signal a turning point in community's ability to organize themselves and convey information outside the traditional corporate owned and monitored internet infrastructure."