<story><title>In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/11/23/wary-of-sopa-reddit-users-aim-to-build-a-new-censorship-free-internet/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>blhack</author><text>No offense to the &quot;reddit meshnet project&quot;, but the last I checked (this could have changed) what they&apos;re proposing isn&apos;t possible with the team that they have right now.&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of problems:&lt;p&gt;1) They don&apos;t have a solid hardware platform to work on, and the feeling I&apos;ve gotten from talking to some of the people on /r/darknetplan is that they &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; don&apos;t have the proper understanding of wireless tech to make something like this happen.  People are proposing cheap commodity wifi gear for this.&lt;p&gt;While it&apos;s certainly possible to do a very high density area with that, it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;certainly&lt;/i&gt; not feasible to cover an area like a city, at least not without a considerable investment, and an understanding that network performance is going to be abysmal.  (And at that point, just use ham radio...)&lt;p&gt;(Something like what they&apos;re proposing might work in an office, not so much in a neighborhood).&lt;p&gt;So is a problem, but hypothetically you could just toss hardware at it until it went away.&lt;p&gt;2) It&apos;s the addressing, stupid.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/m2nd5/its_the_addressing_stupid/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/m2nd5/its_the_a...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; the last person to discourage people from &quot;doing it wrong&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://thingist.com/t/item/19766/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://thingist.com/t/item/19766/&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://thingist.com/t/item/21434/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://thingist.com/t/item/21434/&lt;/a&gt;), but people running this, prepare yourselves for the reality that you could fail.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Locke1689</author><text>From what I heard in the IRC group when I was hanging out, the group is mostly made up of people who think it&apos;s a nice idea but have absolutely no idea what they&apos;re doing.&lt;p&gt;My prediction is this movement fails flat on its face, as the people with the knowhow to develop the &lt;i&gt;new&lt;/i&gt; protocols for this network are uninterested in joining a mass of lemmings who are more interested about what the project is going to be called than if it will work.&lt;p&gt;Here&apos;s a fun issue: security and stability in BGP. As we&apos;ve seen many, many times over BGP is a completely insecure protocol with persistant problems with blackhole and cyclical routes. Many people inside IRC have proposed BGP as the routing mechanism for the mesh network, but have no proposals on how to deal with a completely decentralized network of high latency connections.</text></comment>
<story><title>In Response to SOPA, Reddit Meshnet Project picks up steam</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/11/23/wary-of-sopa-reddit-users-aim-to-build-a-new-censorship-free-internet/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>blhack</author><text>No offense to the &quot;reddit meshnet project&quot;, but the last I checked (this could have changed) what they&apos;re proposing isn&apos;t possible with the team that they have right now.&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of problems:&lt;p&gt;1) They don&apos;t have a solid hardware platform to work on, and the feeling I&apos;ve gotten from talking to some of the people on /r/darknetplan is that they &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; don&apos;t have the proper understanding of wireless tech to make something like this happen.  People are proposing cheap commodity wifi gear for this.&lt;p&gt;While it&apos;s certainly possible to do a very high density area with that, it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;certainly&lt;/i&gt; not feasible to cover an area like a city, at least not without a considerable investment, and an understanding that network performance is going to be abysmal.  (And at that point, just use ham radio...)&lt;p&gt;(Something like what they&apos;re proposing might work in an office, not so much in a neighborhood).&lt;p&gt;So is a problem, but hypothetically you could just toss hardware at it until it went away.&lt;p&gt;2) It&apos;s the addressing, stupid.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/m2nd5/its_the_addressing_stupid/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/m2nd5/its_the_a...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; the last person to discourage people from &quot;doing it wrong&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://thingist.com/t/item/4372/&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://thingist.com/t/item/19766/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://thingist.com/t/item/19766/&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;http://thingist.com/t/item/21434/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://thingist.com/t/item/21434/&lt;/a&gt;), but people running this, prepare yourselves for the reality that you could fail.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wolfeater</author><text>The problem we are definitely running into is that as a crowdsourced project, we have a lot of people who don&apos;t know what they&apos;re talking about. However, we have a small subset that do (myself not included, I&apos;m more aiming to get the ball rolling than anything) and have been hard at work on the project. There is a lot more noise than signal right now, but that will change as a more solid technological platform for local mesh networks arises. Once we have a basic platform we will begin to address issues such as the addressing and other scaling issues.&lt;p&gt;So I guess my final point is that we ARE working on a hardware platform and then we will work to make this accessible to the average person on /r/darknetplan . There are hurdles, there are idiots, but we are working on it and I don&apos;t think it is safe to call the project failed until we&apos;ve had a chance to actually try.</text></comment>