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

[stillyet at googlemail.com]

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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