On 27 February 2011 21:37, Anthony Papillion <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:papillion@gmail.com">papillion@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
So I've been thinking about the recent Internet situation in Egypt where<br>
the Mubarak government shut down the Internet in that country and I'm<br>
wondering how the Freedom Box could have helped there.<br>
<br>
As I understand it, Freedom Boxes are able to communicate directly with<br>
each other. But since this requires a network connection, what happens<br>
if the network is turned off? Now, I can see how the boxes would<br>
continue to work if the network disconnect simply capped it at national<br>
borders (intra-country communication between boxes would not be<br>
affected) but what happens if the entire network both is truly shut off<br>
and there is NO INTERNET either within the country or past borders?<br>
<br>
Are there contingency plans being built into the box for this scenario?<br>
What are the options for handling something like this? Is anyone<br>
currently working on this area?</blockquote><div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>The user-story I put to him was this:</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">Consider this user story. The protesters are in the square, <span class="il" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); ">and</span> people are being shot. Ali takes a picture of a dying woman <span class="il" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); ">and</span> 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, <span class="il" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); ">and</span> she never takes it out. She leaves the square <span class="il" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); ">and</span> 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, <span class="il" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); ">and</span> 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. <span class="il" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); ">Store</span>-<span class="il" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); ">and</span>-<span class="il" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); ">forward</span> technology built into her Tahrir client implementation has automatically collected the messages generated in the square <span class="il" style="background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); ">and</span> has held them until it can pass them on."</span></span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; "><br></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">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.</span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; "><br></span></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">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.</span></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">Cheers</span></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">Simon</span></font></div>
<div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><a href="https://github.com/sanity/tahrir">https://github.com/sanity/tahrir</a></span></font></div>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div> </div></div>-- <br>Simon Brooke :: <a href="http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/">http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/</a><br><br> ;; Semper in faecibus sumus, sole profundum variat.<br>
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