People can download Wikipedia pages but weirdly they don’t. They prefer the interactive web to big downloads of static encyclopedia data, even though the latter is better and easier to distribute in a censorship-resistant manner. That’s why Tor is much more popular than high-latency censorship resistant networks that share static blobs, even though low-latency networks are relatively insecure and much easier to block. The question then is not how to save $3 of storage media: it’s whether you can simulate the interactive experience of the Internet in a satisfying way without a reliable low-latency network connection. Maybe the answer is no, maybe it’s yes. Imagine a really high-quality future LLM that you can actually interact with and ask questions about specific topics, maybe even using voice communication, and that can play games with you and generate other types of “web like” experiences. Is that really less compelling than a download of Wikipedia?
Now imagine the hardware that you'll need to run that high-quality future LLM. How many Kiwix hotspots could you set up for the same money?
Mind you, I'm not saying that there aren't compelling use cases for LLMs. It's just that it's a thing that's nice to have after you have Wikipedia etc. Indeed, ideally you'd want to have Wikipedia indexed so that the LLM can query it as needed to construct its responses - otherwise you're going to have a lot of fun trying to figure out which parts are hallucinations and which aren't.
There are places where Internet access and compute resources are fundamentally limited by lack of infrastructure. Talking about LLMs in those places doesn’t make sense. But on the trajectory we’re currently on, those places will likely become more rare while political Internet filtering will become more common.
It's a social one, because social means are what are used to enforce the lockdowns - and those social means exist because of socially justified purposes in the societies.
Unless it was literally impossible to block internet access at all (some kind of unjammable starlink with undetectable receivers/transceivers?).
Yah, these types of things would be hard to detect (just point an LNB at the southbound sky... no dish... cheap electronics...)
What it's not is turnkey or filled with a good feed of information that people would want at baseline. There's no adoption model besides being a dissident, and people tend to start planning for that too late.
It is receive only-- not an uplink.
(I'm sure a tiny bit of RF leaks out of the LNB, but that could be mitigated as it is not designed for stealth).
Any receiver using the heterodyne principle (this includes most current digital radio modems) is trivially detected by its local oscillator, often to some considerable range (potentially hundreds of metres).
In the UK, the BBC used to exploit this, with radio detection vans patrolling the streets for unauthorized receivers, to fine people for watching TV without a license. So did the USSR with shortwave receivers, where the penalty was potentially more than a fine. A satellite receiver is the same, in principle.
I'm sorry. This is not intrinsic; this is a design choice. Yes, most LOs just care about getting under legal emission masks, but there's nothing to prevent one from bringing it much lower.
Further, as I explained: the LO frequency of the LNB for the first conversion is often the exact same frequency as you'd use to downconvert digital TV broadcats.
Better testing to compliance standards has pushed LOs down way lower than they were in the 40s-60s. We have relatively cheap high quality spectrum analyzers and big integrated measurements. So-- kinda everyone pushes things down pretty low now.
> My point was merely that with an average radio, which was designed to just not be harmfully interfering, such as typical satellite TV receiver?
Yah-- this LNB looks just like a satellite TV receiver, with the exact same LO frequency. So your rogue downlink looks exactly like something that there's hundreds of innocent versions around.
Then a SDR inside your house chooses a different signal from the transponder and gets the data.
[https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/government-bans-imp...]
Of course, so are most drugs in the US.
Point taken though!
I mean, I guess it's possible. But probably not your top priority during a time of potential unrest. And it probably won't work that well as a way to find people with the links.
Such a device would likely look peculiar enough to be easily recognizable, though, so you'll need to hide it, possibly inside some innocuous-looking other device or enclosure.
The whole setup becomes somehow more involved, but still cheap enough.
Yes-- and every piece you mention is "quality radio design 101".
> Such a device would likely look peculiar enough to be easily recognizable
I'm not sure about that.
The biggest most suspicious thing is, if they're resourced to investigate everyone with a piece of coax going outside-- where does yours plug into?
Of course, if you're really dedicated-- get a satellite TV receiver, empty out the nice metal box, put the receiver inside ;).
definitely not solving the same ‘problem’ at all though.
A LNB is pretty quiet to begin with... and the LO is on the same frequency whether you're watching satellite TV or tapping into Othernet. You could, of course, make it much quieter still. Just because a lot of receivers leak a lot of oscillator and mixer frequencies doesn't mean it's intrinsic.
> and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit.
Which is why I was talking about a receive-only approach. (Well, also for reasons of scalability).
"Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links?"
- Othernet is already a system out of local control that can be received with relatively trivial equipment.
- 2000bps feels perhaps a bit too slow, but with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, you could have a -lot- of textual communication. It could carry a big cross-section of what everyone is saying and allow people to choose what they see.
- An ideal system would support multiple transports; Othernet, intermittent wifi connectivity, sneakernet, etc. It would do the best with what it can to get data in or out, and allocate the scarce resources to the traffic which is most likely to be useful to others (this is tricky, with sybil attacks, etc... but I don't think it's necessarily intractable).
That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
This already exists, it's called ham radio. There are even large communities of folks sending 'postcards' to each other on a regular basis.
I remember operating a UUCP site, and I remember how well network news gracefully dealt with quite a wide variety of sites with different ad-hoc setups. I miss that. I wish more of today's internet was a bit more like that: all the interactivity in the world when the network is good, but gracefully degrading to offline copies, snapshots, etc as the network is intermittently disconnected or one-way or whatever.
Secure ScuttleButt ("SSB") does a lot of this, but there's no real one-way provision and it's a bit wack to use and discover your way through.
It seems like an edge case either already served by existing tech except for some very, very small set of situations where most won’t consider it practical or useful anyway. They’ll just knuckle under the societal rules which forbid it, because the cost of doing it in a way they won’t likely be caught and imprisoned isn’t worth it to them.
Most people just care about having food in their belly every day, feeling safe and loved, and being able to believe that what they’re doing is okay day to day and will work out to be all good in the future.
Doing what you’re proposing doesn’t really help them with that.
Yes, it's all about the edge cases that don't affect the commercial value of the network much. It's about dealing with natural disaster, intermittent and very low quality network connections by modern standards, people in remote areas, or censorship. It may even be about space missions and distant probes in the future.
SSB is a neat system if you're on a sailboat with connectivity every few days. Othernet is a neat system for pushing what satellite communications can do to the limit. Of course, systems being technically neat is not what gets them adopted.
Networks, network capacity, and network reach have grown so much that we've forgotten about UUCP, etc. We have better algorithmic tools and more computation to build networks that tolerate disconnection, intermittency, etc. But perhaps we don't have the commercial motivation to use them, even if they would make the networks and societies that use them more robust.
You say ‘robust’ for societies as if it’s a given positive, but there is an implied statement hidden there.
Robust against what?
Robust against censorship is rarely desired by the majority (and certainly not openly), because the censorship is with the consent (and often at the request of!) the majority.
Just look at the CSAM/Kiddie Porn discussion in the US.
At least as long as the majorities interests and the gov’ts interests align enough, which is usually for far longer than anyone wants to admit.
So as long as it doesn’t step on the majorities ability to get what they want when they want it more than they are willing to tolerate, robustness against it will always be a feature with a limited market and a lot of opposition. An anti-feature in some ways, or at least it will be spun that way.
We may consider robustness against this good - and I personally do - but in my experience that is far from a common attribute, especially if you boil it down to specific examples.
Should Pakistan be able to robustly send how to bomb US targets + propaganda to everyone? Should someone be able to do the same with child porn? Or anti-Islamic rhetoric? Or anti-women’s rights? Or anti-free speech?
I think I explained "robust" in the post above pretty well. It's about making a network that works and delivers information even when things go wrong or when there's not much infrastructure available.
Primarily for the use case where there's just not much reliable infrastructure. I like the idea of getting a local snapshot of news, important source repository updates, and other things important to me during little snippets of connectivity.
But this also makes things useful for the case where the infrastructure is impaired. Perhaps by natural disaster. Perhaps by state interference. Perhaps by individual commercial actors.
Yes, "how does one determine what the network distributes broadly" is a complicated question. It should be democratic and resilient to being coopted. I understand this is very, very hard. But I don't think it's intractable, and even without it the other building blocks of a network like this are attainable (general resilience and reliability).
If a normal radio transmission is a point light of a specific color, truly random spread spectrum is a grey glow.
Direct sequence spread spectrum being many different color flashing lights here, I guess.
Currently only works in Europe and North America, but nice to know there's a middle-of-no-where service that doesn't require a sub that gives you some barebones info from the outside world.
There's a post a couple posts below on their forum with someone that put their system on the internet so you can see what it pulls in: https://forums.othernet.is/t/what-happened/7647/2
Yup! I'm looking forward to them having equipment available again (so I don't need to homebrew).
> Don't even need a big dish.
With a decent LNB, you don't need a dish at -all-.
Just FYI, somehow I'd been ending up on this page: https://othernet.is/products/dreamcatcher-circuit-board
And believing it when it said it was not available yet.
Maybe a Starlink status feed. I can imagine some Starlink customers not having any back-up link to the world in some places.
Text weather forecasts.
CBC news feed if it can fit: https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news?sort=editors-picks
Maybe just include in the North American feed.
The real question is how you do this in a way that doesn't encourage one-sided propaganda, sybil attacks, etc.
I'm reminded of systems like Secure Scuttlebutt and the Othernet satellite transport. https://othernet.is/
I know the internet is fundamentally two-way. It seems there's always a few competent users who know how to get information out of a conflict zone or disaster area... getting information in beyond a few choke points seems to be the hard part.