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Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

(bowshock.nl)
579 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | 16 Jun 25 07:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.618s | source
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__MatrixMan__ ◴[16 Jun 25 14:31 UTC] No.44289917[source]▶
I feel like the better path to resiliency is not persistent radio connections between hobbyists on other sides of the state but rather intermittent ones between people on opposite sides of the bus and an application layer that arranges for people who are heading that way anyhow to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket.

You just get a different type of threat landscape when each hop is also an opportunity to shake somebody's hand and attest that the holder of their private key is a real human. It creates a minimal trust layer you can then build on. You don't get that with a hardware address found drifting on the wind.

Both modes have some potential to attract harmful attention to network operators based on the behavior of their users, but to a very different degree. So far as I know nobody is kicking down meshtastic operators' doors looking to follow a transmission to its source, but I think that would change if the other modes of long range skulduggery were to fail.

The most resilient infrastructure would be one with no high value targets: one where each user is equally an operator.

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1. apitman ◴[16 Jun 25 22:56 UTC] No.44294144[source]▶
Maybe I'm being a little too cyberpunk but it would be cool if the system somehow rewarded people for delivering messages over a long physical distance. You could end up with a courier community where runners spend some time walking around high-traffic areas collecting sent messages then jog to the other end of town so the encrypted messages can find their recipients.
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2. __MatrixMan__ ◴[16 Jun 25 23:10 UTC] No.44294213[source]▶
At some point, somebody will set up long range wireless communications and then the reward for running a message would likely drop to so small that it wasn't worth it... but yeah that's exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind. That way if something happens to the internet, prices for running a message go up, and suddenly running messages is worth it again.

The tricky part there would be working out a partition tolerant payments system. It's one thing to go offline in the middle of delivering a message, its another thing entirely to orchestrate payment across a smattering of disconnected networks (blockchains are not partition tolerant). I think it could be done, but that's an application layer concern... gotta get the peer finding and web-of-trust stuff working first.

3. bigfatkitten ◴[17 Jun 25 00:08 UTC] No.44294508[source]▶
Then you’d end up with something like Helium, which consumes energy and occupies spectrum for no productive benefit.

https://www.helium.com/