[Freedombox-discuss] Routing around nationwide and international Internet blocks

[Matt Joyce]

That would be perfect but integrating with cheap cellular phones as opposed
to 600 dollar phones may prove difficult.

-Matt

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 3:29 PM, stillyet at googlemail.com <
stillyet at googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 27 February 2011 21:37, Anthony Papillion <papillion at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> So I've been thinking about the recent Internet situation in Egypt where
>> the Mubarak government shut down the Internet in that country and I'm
>> wondering how the Freedom Box could have helped there.
>>
>> As I understand it, Freedom Boxes are able to communicate directly with
>> each other. But since this requires a network connection, what happens
>> if the network is turned off?  Now, I can see how the boxes would
>> continue to work if the network disconnect simply capped it at national
>> borders (intra-country communication between boxes would not be
>> affected) but what happens if the entire network both is truly shut off
>> and there is NO INTERNET either within the country or past borders?
>>
>> Are there contingency plans being built into the box for this scenario?
>> What are the options for handling something like this? Is anyone
>> currently working on this area?
>
>
> Ian Clarke ('Sanity', of FreeNet fame) is working on a distributed
> Twitter-replacement called Tahrir; he's very interested in making it cope
> well with network disruption and he and I have discussed how
> store-and-forward could be integrated into its architecture.
>
> The user-story I put to him was this:
>
> "Consider this user story. The protesters are in the square, and people
> are being shot. Ali takes a picture of a dying woman and posts it to
> Tahrir. Because all the Internet connections are down, his message doesn't
> make it out of the square. Bahiya is also in the square. Her phone is in her
> pocket, and she never takes it out. She leaves the square and goes to the
> airport, where she gives her phone to a tourist fleeing the country. The
> tourist flies home. Bahiya's phone is now able to communicate with other
> Tahrir nodes, and passes on all the posts it has collected - including
> Ali's photograph. Bahiya has never met Ali. She didn't see the person
> killed. Bahiya hasn't done anything at all with her phone - she hasn't had
> to. Store-and-forward technology built into her Tahrir client
> implementation has automatically collected the messages generated in the
> square and has held them until it can pass them on."
>
> Ian's response is that pictures are an inefficient thing to handle when
> bandwidth is critical, which is true, but he took on board that the
> highest-bandwidth way out of an area where network access is cut or
> monitored may be by physically moving some actual store.
>
> I'm proposing to co-operate with Ian on his project, but I'd like to do it
> in such a way that the store-and-forward layer could subsequently be adapted
> to work with e.g. Diaspora.
>
> Cheers
>
> Simon
>
> https://github.com/sanity/tahrir
>
> --
> Simon Brooke :: http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/
>
>         ;; Semper in faecibus sumus, sole profundum variat.
>
>
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>
>
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