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

[Paul Gardner-Stephen]

Hello All,

This is all very close to reality now.
ServalProject.org has automatic opportunistic use of internet gateways
(whether satellite, cellular or whatever) working now with
mesh-enabled mobile phones.
Store and forward and Twitter-like functionality (and infact Ushihidi
as well) is the next item on the table for us (serval) to do, and we
have set ourselves the goal of having this working to some degree by
July.
We also have a system in mind that will allow field-installation of
the client in the absence of all supporting infrastructure.
Serval's primary target market is disaster resilience/response (think
Haiti or Christchurch), which is why we are very big about making
things work without infrastructure.

Paul.

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 9:59 AM, 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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