Given thesetwo bits of news, I plan on accelerating my plan to deploy censorship- and surveillance-resistant wireless mesh networks in and around Baltimore. The networks will be available for either free or low cost to underprivileged or unfairly treated populaces.
I’m hoping to model the network after NYC Mesh with a few distinct changes. Each supernode will route all traffic through Tor. To help with the load placed on the Tor network, each supernode will need to run a public relay (non-exit is fine for now). Inter-node communication will be encrypted via ipsec.
I’m hoping to get the plan in order by summer or fall of 2019. There’s lots to do and research.
The new law instead allows content owners to force individual wifi operators to block certain web sites from being reachable via their open network. The technical ‘how’ is of course left unspecified. It will be interesting to see how this rule gets applied in practice.
Sharing this because I just found out about it and it seems to be a worth while cause. If enough people joined you would be able to go without a mobile internet connection which allows cell towers to track your location as well as breaking the idea than an IP address identifies a person.
Last year, EFF began some experiments with a variant of OpenWRT that prioritizes good out-of-the-box open wireless support, in combination with simpler and more secure UI than the OpenWRT defaults. Initially we had hoped that that firmware project would […]
Given these two bits of news, I plan on accelerating my plan to deploy censorship- and surveillance-resistant wireless mesh networks in and around Baltimore. The networks will be available for either free or low cost to underprivileged or unfairly treated populaces.
I’m hoping to model the network after NYC Mesh with a few distinct changes. Each supernode will route all traffic through Tor. To help with the load placed on the Tor network, each supernode will need to run a public relay (non-exit is fine for now). Inter-node communication will be encrypted via ipsec.
I’m hoping to get the plan in order by summer or fall of 2019. There’s lots to do and research.
Germany has an equivalent called Freifunk that is quite popular.
Was it not true that it was illegal to have unsecured wifi in Germany? Or has this been overturned?
It was never illegal, but the operator was liable for all network activity. That was recently reversed.
The new law instead allows content owners to force individual wifi operators to block certain web sites from being reachable via their open network. The technical ‘how’ is of course left unspecified. It will be interesting to see how this rule gets applied in practice.
What tedu says is correct. The liability problem iis gone.
The official Freifunk firmware dodged that by routing outbound traffic through a VPN though.
Sharing this because I just found out about it and it seems to be a worth while cause. If enough people joined you would be able to go without a mobile internet connection which allows cell towers to track your location as well as breaking the idea than an IP address identifies a person.
OpenWireless.org is/was a really cool idea, but the project has been dead for over three years. See https://github.com/EFForg/OpenWireless/ and https://duckduckgo.com/?q="openwireless"+site%3Aeff.org .
I’d love to see some new life in it though, or alternative projects.
Is this the same project? The page I linked is about making public free WiFi and not about firmware.
Yep!
– https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/toward-better-open-wireless-routers [2015]
Sounds like a very different project