About SCC

Our project is a model of what a community-controlled broadband ISP could be in rural Appalachia and the South. We have built a working line-of-sight broadband tower at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, that will be able to deliver 1 Gbps speeds wirelessly to anyone in a 25 mile radius. A further two additional towers will connect communities in Cosby and the Clearfork Valley. These communities will establish member-owned cooperative franchise networks and community members will be trained in connecting and maintaining their own wireless networks.

This project will empower and inspire communities by proving that it is indeed very possible for them to have affordable, equitable, and reliable broadband access; and that they can even be their own Internet service providers!

Installing a home wireless system

The post Project of the Day: Southern Connected Communities appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Anke Schwarz

PART I: Interview with members of the Tapullo collective, Genoa

29 May, 2017 — Building something together is in itself a good way to create a community

Wireless community networks have been around for a while, but are regaining some attention these days as means of strengthening local interaction and community organizing. The Tapullo project in Genoa was established in 2016 by a group of people, some of them members of the FabLab at the Laboratorio Sociale Occupato Autogestito Buridda squat, with the aim of setting up a DIY wireless community network. The name is reflective of their approach: in Genoese dialect, tapullo roughly refers to a quick and simple improvision (such as repairing a broken frame with Gaffa tape). What is interesting about Tapullo is that rather than providing internet access, it was designed as a purely local mesh network from the very beginning, hosting a local service in the form of a publicly accessible community forum. In technical terms, the network’s nodes consist of ordinary Wi-Fi routers (either the TP-Link TL-WDR3500 or the much cheaper TP-Link Archer C50 model), and a LattePanda single board computer which acts as a web server for the Tapullo forum. Tapullo’s routers run a combination of OpenWRT software, a specific Linux distribution for embedded services including wireless routers, with LibreMesh installed in top. A first access point was installed at the home of a Tapullo host in a building at Piazza dell’Erbe in downtown Genoa in January 2017, with additional nodes to follow in late 2017.

The interview with members of the Tapullo collective was conducted in written form between March and May 2017, and has been edited for clarity.

Tapulli at Piazza dell’Erbe, Genoa 2017

Let us begin with the most obvious question: Why did you opt for a purely local mesh network, as opposed to one (also) offering internet access?

We decided to avoid providing internet access because we recognize that it is already available almost everywhere in an affordable (or even free) and easily accessible manner. Our idea is to re-connect people on a local and physical level. We wanted to create a network allowing for communication on a level that is disconnected and not mediated by the infrastructures of large corporations. We also wanted to build a network that is not interested in collecting and profiling your data. By making our network from scratch, we intent to take a step back to look at what really constitutes a network and to show digital communication at its core, without 20 years of infrastructure built on top of it. Basically, it is a local, organic, additives-free network.

With respect to your programmatic name, which are the cracks in the urban fabric that you hope to ‘fix’ by implementing a local community network in Genoa’s city center?

We hope to ‘fix’ sociality at a local level, by extracting a tool (in this case, a Wi-Fi network and an internet forum) from the ecosystem of the internet, cleaning it and bringing it closer to the physical space, thus making it available just to those people who are present in a specific place in a specific moment in time. In our case, that is Piazza dell’Erbe in downtown Genoa (for now). The internet is a global discussion forum, whereas we as Tapullo hope to be a new, local forum. We believe in communication and sociality at a local level. Another issue important to explore is the medium itself, in this case the network.

How does it work? How can it be used properly? And how can we learn new tricks, to be employed elsewhere afterwards?

We take so many things for granted, but relatively few people really know and understand how our hyper-connected reality works. We want to change that by bringing infrastructure closer to the people who are using it.

Please go a bit into detail here: What exactly needs such ‘fixing’ in Genovese society? I understand that the stereotype is one of a rather introvert community – but what are the main local issues and struggles as you see it?

What we believe needs fixing is, firstly, what is already happening in every city: The isolation occurring between people even when they are physically socializing together. Tapullo allows you to de-isolate yourself using the same medium that is currently generating the isolation in the first place. It generates the possibility to interact on ludic-practical matters with the same people that you’re physically sharing a space with at that very same moment. Secondly, it tries to ‘fix’ the typical introvert/antisocial attitude of the Genoese, which is sometimes visible in the way they deal with ‘the other’, represented by people from other regions, international tourists or migrants. By making a platform that it is local yet accessible to all, we hope to bring down the barriers in our own mentality.

How far does the actual ‘power’ of a communication infrastructure go? To what extend could an instrument like Tapullo actually play a role in processes of (local) social transformation?

We don’t know yet, but we believe in the idea that building something together is in itself a good way to create a community, and by building a communication instrument like a Wi-Fi network, we want to push for something that is close to the community itself. Moreover, it can generate new interactions between different sectors or parts of society that normally do not communicate often (or at all).

Tapullo’s first node was installed at Piazza dell’Erbe in February 2017. What are you first experiences? How do you get people to use your network? Who uses Tapullo so far, and for which purposes?

At the moment, we don’t have enough data to answer this question. The project launched recently and for now, there are only a few active users. We launched Tapullo with a small campaign (stickers, postcards, word of mouth) but apparently, that was not enough to generate a critical mass. We plan to organize more events in the near future to increase the number of users and generate interest in the platform. A few of the proposals being currently discussed are an alleycat race, a treasure hunt, a photography contest, and audio/video/book sharing.

Have you thought of ‘hybrid’ strategies in which access to the internet is available, but is used in a different way (e.g. a website that can be ‘written’ by only those having access to the local network but read online by everyone)?

We are working on something similar: A public internet blog (http://tapullo.net/) where we will discuss the activities happening in the local network. This should make it easier for new people to discover Tapullo and also to keep users informed about what is going on without having to be at Piazza dell’Erbe all the time.

Will you organize any ‘physical’ events to discuss about the network with outsiders?

Yes, we are currently planning one or two theoretical and practical workshops on mesh networks. We want to discuss what these networks are and show how to build antennas and reflash Wi-Fi routers. Hopefully, that should bring more people in and also help us share the technical knowledge amongst ourselves.

As yet another social network, a critic could assume that Tapullo leads to ever more people glued to their screens, rather oblivious of their surroundings. What are your observations so far: Does communication via Tapullo and face-to-face interaction indeed blend over?

Tapullo has only a few active users for now. Yet we believe that users will not be overwhelmed by too much content, as the network is localized and only people physically present at Piazza dell’Erbe can add content. Practically, you can’t lose yourself scrolling down the page as you might in big social networks, at least for now. However, the amount of content is of course linked to the number of users and to the ease of adding new content. The fact that Tapullo is localized restricts these two factors and limits the abuse. If we consider the Internet a window open to the world, our network wants to be like a stroll: you leave the house to change your perspective. That includes an active practice (going out, walking) instead of a more passive one (looking out of a window, browsing the Internet).

How could an alternative communication infrastructure such as Tapullo support ongoing local struggles over the right to the city, for instance with respect to squats and affordable housing in Genoa?

On a philosophical level, we build a virtual space in the same way that you would occupy an abandoned building to repurpose it as a social center for the greater good of the community. In that sense, by re-appropriating them, we want to state the idea that spaces, whether physical or virtual, belong to the communities that inhabit them. Moreover, the virtual space of Tapullo itself may serve as a virtual board or display, increasing the visibility of local struggles.

Are you in contact with local ‘right to the city’ (or other) urban activists, and if yes, has it been easy to communicate Tapullo’s vision to these people engaged in similar struggles in a different context?

Over the past months, we have been talking about the project with many activists, some of them involved in urban struggles, but we haven’t yet built anything together. We do believe that it is fundamental to have a broad, diverse group of activists collaborating on the project, and that this is going to happen organically, over time, as soon as the network builds enough momentum.

You are based in Genoa’s FabLab, but how strongly is Tapullo actually about making or peer production? Aren’t you acting more like a service provider, at least in the beginning?

As we said above, we want to return to the basics of the tool itself. Obviously, our platform is open and accessible to everyone, but the main idea is to bring attention to the method and potential of the tool itself by sharing knowledge on how it works, how to expand it, how to offer more services. Offering services by making them, step by step.

The Tapullo collective is from a leftist/autonomous context, yet you deliberately adopted a neutral stance when launching the community network – rather than explicitly linking it to the FabLab, for instance. Why did you opt for this position?

We decided not to put it under the Buridda or FabLab name because that was never discussed on a general assembly in these two groups. You might say the collective doesn’t represent the whole but only a subset of it. Plus, the idea of installing the network in the city center (instead of in the squat, which is in a different neighborhood) made us think that it doesn’t make sense to directly link it to Buridda or FabLab if we wanted to give it a broader audience in the city.

In technical terms, which are the lessons learned from other wireless community networks? Why did you develop your own hardware/software set-up instead of simply implementing one of the existing concepts such as Ninux (Rome) or AWMN (Athens)?

Our setup is quite simple actually. The Wi-Fi part is handled by the LibreMesh firmware running on a TP-Link router. That same firmware is developed and used by Ninux. For the forum we are using a LattePanda board, which is slightly more powerful than a Raspberry Pi. Why that specific board? Because that’s what we had at hand without having to buy new hardware.

Please explain how you deal with the challenges of operating a wireless community network. What are your thoughts about governance issues related to data storage and private information once the Tapullo network grows? For instance, do you keep any records or user data that might be accessed by friendly or hostile third parties?

We have no plans to collect traffic data, that much is clear. All data ending up on the forum is by definition considered public and thus available to everyone to read. Also, there is no ‘real name policy’, so everyone is free to register an anonymous/pseudonymous nickname. We don’t have any privacy-sensitive service running at the moment, though we might have some in the future. We haven’t really planned much beyond this point (yet) – beside the fact that we do not want your data, now or in the future.

What next for Tapullo? What are your thoughts about the network’s future ownership in terms of its operation, maintenance, and expansion?

We would like to have more users and share the knowledge required to maintain and expand the network with them. Our dream is that Tapullo grows up over time, like a child, so that at some point in the future it becomes autonomous and independent, self-organizing – until the very moment when we can finally shut down the first Wi-Fi router without affecting the network’s functionality because the network itself will have made this first node redundant.

PART II: Remaking Genoa? Urban DIY Mesh Networks and the Right to the City

31 October, 2017

To the visitor, Genoa’s historical center sometimes resembles a confusing set of narrow, cobbled alleyways, with sky-high medieval palaces and densely arranged buildings often creating a canyon-like impression. On the ground, orientation can be difficult, with hardly any clear sky or celestial bodies in sight. Depending on the location (and perhaps more important these days), GPS and mobile internet access are also limited, disrupting digital navigation attempts. An urban environment apparently so hostile to mobile communication and digital services might somehow help keep the destructive effects of mass tourism at bay. However, it also harbors the wireless community network Tapullo. As the walls bespeak the rich social activity and urban movements the area is traditionally teeming with, this seems only logical. Until recently, street corners and sign posts in the Centro storico were covered with posters and stickers for a variety of leftist and autonomous events and causes, from punk concerts, collective dinners and workshops at one of the squatted social centers to the Movimento di lotta per la casa’s marvelous crowbar logo.

Piazza dell’Erbe

I first interviewed members of the Tapullo collective in May 2017. A first node of the prospective mesh network had just been installed in Piazza dell’Erbe, a relatively large public square in downtown Genoa, packed with bars and brimming with mostly younger people in the evenings. This seemed to be the perfect crowd to engage in a local mesh network based on both virtual and face-to-face interaction: Social-media-affine youngsters at their favorite watering hole. There was a palpable enthusiasm in the collective. Yet when I returned in October 2017, the mood had somewhat changed. In a curious turn of events, Tapullo’s one and only node had been damaged: The transformers of both the Wi-Fi router and the LattePanda single board computer had completely burned out, along with laptops, fridges, and a bunch of other electrical devices in the building where the Tapullo host lives. The damage was caused by a flawed power line installation by a technician from ENEL, Italy’s leading energy provider. Consequently, the equipment had to be removed for repairs, and the Tapullo forum was down for several weeks. This episode serves as a reminder to the multiple manners in which other urban infrastructures and social networks underpin a seemingly independent DIY mesh network. Moreover, it draws attention to the effort and time required to install and maintain such a wireless network as Tapullo moved away from its reliance on a single access point. A second phase, where the signals from individual nodes are woven into a mesh, was imminent – just as a notable shift in urban governance in downtown Genoa highlighted the need for collective social (inter)action. Ever since a change in city government in June 2017 brought an entrepreneur running as an independent candidate for the populist right-wing alliance between Forza Italia and Lega Nord into the position of mayor, a 1990s-style law-and-order approach to public space seemed to be gaining pace. After decades of social democratic rule by the Partito Democratico and its predecessors, this represented a rupture for the city home to one of the major seaports in the Mediterranean and once known as a leftist bastion. Some of Genoa’s seven occupied centri sociali may soon face the threat of eviction – and this development comes at a time when neofascists are seeking to establish two new premises in the city. Given the present political situation, it is not hard to predict an increase in urban struggles in the near future. This applies in particular (but not only) to the historical center, where a new regulation prohibiting the consumption of alcohol in public is being discussed. On a more symbolical level, the removal of political posters and graffiti is combined with a widening of an existing city marketing campaign, launched in 2014 under the somewhat comical slogan ‘Genova – more than this’. As the scraped-off posters illustrate, such attempts to sanitize public spaces and render leftist and progressive autonomous voices invisible form part of the new city government’s strategy. Meanwhile, parts of the new administration are pushing an anti-migrant and zero tolerance discourse.

Contested wall

Parts of downtown Genoa are traditionally home to poorer inhabitants and migrant communities, and apart from the centri sociali (which are typically located in derelict industrial or private buildings outside the city center) there are several ‘silent’ occupations of flats exclusively for housing purposes. The existing struggles against marginalization and displacement are captured nicely in the spirit of a graffito that reads “44.000 vacant homes, let’s occupy!”. For Tapullo, the present situation raises interesting questions over the platform’s future audience and usership in its second, increasingly more networked phase. Will it merely evolve into some kind of small, independent service provider, feeding a pattern of individual consumption – or accomplish a more collective approach?

44.000 vacant homes, let’s occupy!

If we wish to read the right to the city, at its core, as a collective rather than individual “right to change ourselves by changing the city” (Harvey 2008: 23), this is precisely where DIY mesh networks like Tapullo come into play. In the present historical situation, defending our ‘digital rights to the city’ (as a recent collection of essays edited by Shaw and Graham 2017 has it) against big tech companies and governmental intrusion alike is certainly paramount. Yet instead of evoking notions of data mining, privacy breaches, surveillance and control typically related to the most widespread information and communication technologies (ICT), such collectively owned digital platforms may well support and further different urban futures (for details, see Antoniadis and Apostol 2014; De Filippi and Tréguer 2015). As Paolo Cardullo observes in his recent study of London’s wireless community network OWN, these networks “operate by strengthening social interactions and relations on the ground, rather than in an imaginary cloud-space. The cultural disposition of people directly involved in using the wireless network is (…) the crucial element that sustained the mesh” (Cardullo 2017: 7). An insurgent peer production of the urban is nourished by social interactions in a material and virtual sense, based on common interests and/or a shared cause. Given both the existing social movements and the looming wave of contestation over public space and centri sociali in Genoa, a host of potential alliances could be activated and deepened by weaving this network tighter, and thus assembling a city for all. Not only in name, the “patchwork improvisation” (Cardullo 2017) of the Tapullo mesh network is thus both dependent on and productive of an urban commons. In October 2017, four fresh routers lay in wait to be installed as new Tapullo nodes in the city center. As members of the collective were in the process of recruiting future hosts amongst local organizations and pubs, probably one of the most pertinent questions for the near future is: Who is remaking Genoa, and in which image?

References

Antoniadis, P. and Apostol, I. (2014): The Right(s) to the Hybrid City and the Role of DIY Networking. In: Journal of Community Informatics 10 (3), http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1092/1113

Cardullo, P. (2017): Gentrification in the mesh? An ethnography of Open Wireless Network (OWN) in Deptford. In: City. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1325236

De Filippi, P. and Tréguer, F. (2015): Expanding the Internet Commons: The Subversive Potential of Wireless Community Networks. In: Journal of Peer Production #6 http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-6-disruption-and-the-law/peer-reviewed-articles/expanding-the-internet-commons-the-subversive-potential-of-wireless-community-networks/

Harvey, D. (2008): The Right to the City. In: New Left Review 53, 23-40. https://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city

Shaw, J. and Graham, M. (eds.) (2017): Our Digital Rights to the City. Meatspace Press. https://meatspacepress.org/our-digital-rights-to-the-city/

PART III: The future of Tapullo

31 January, 2018

The members of the Tapullo collective wish to continue their effort to build a local mesh network and if they succeed to keep their project running you will be hearing about their progress at:

http://tapullo.net (in Italian)

About the author

Anke Schwarz is an urban geographer and postdoctoral researcher at Technical University of Berlin. She is mainly interested in processes of urban transformation, urban infrastructures and everyday life. Her book ‘Demanding Water. A Sociospatial Approach to Domestic Water Use in Mexico City’ was published in 2017. https://ankeschwarz.net/

* All pictures by Anke Schwarz

The post Urban DIY Mesh Networks and the Right to the City: An Interview with the Tapullo Collective appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Adrien Labaeye: Here’s the problem: Internet access has become an essential part of life. However, many still cannot afford it. There are also growing concerns that internet connections could be unilaterally cut by Internet Service Providers at the request of public agencies. How do we ensure everyone has internet access?

Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: As early as 2002, the German activists of Freifunk, a noncommercial grassroots group, decided to self-organize to provide a free and autonomous internet infrastructure for all. In 2014, Münster free-internet activists from the local hacker space Warpzone decided to deploy a mesh network for their building complex. They visited a neighboring Freifunk community in Bielefeld that provided them with a crash course into the technology involved, which was mainly provided by the national Freifunk network.

The idea is that any WiFi router can be turned into an access point that communicates directly with other routers, passing along information between them, and thus forming a “mesh” of router-to-router connections. This way, people can send data from any point in the mesh without even connecting to the internet. The infrastructure is owned and maintained by the activists, who formed an association to handle legal and financial practicalities.

In 2015, Freifunk Münster joined with nearby Freifunk Warendorf to pool resources, including skilled people and IT infrastructure, and then made them available to the whole Münsterland region.

Results:

• In June 2015, the parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia (Landtag NRW) decided to support the local Freifunk initiatives by granting permission to use the roofs of buildings that belong to the state.
• In 2016, the Freifunk initiative was awarded 8,000 Euros to build a wireless backbone over the city, bringing Freifunk to places with no internet connection and connecting the scattered little mesh clouds.
• Thanks to the growth of communities in western Münsterland, the mesh reached 2,000 access points on April 20, 2016, making it the largest mesh network in Germany.

Learn more from:

• Freifunk network
• Freifunk community forum (German)

This case study is adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Get a copy today.

Header image of the Freifunk-Initiative installing WiFi-Antennas in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 2013 provided by Boris Niehaus

The post Freifunk, the German group that aims to provide free internet to all appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip, particularly among sailors. It is also the name of a peer-to-peer system ideal for social graphs, identity and messaging. Scuttlebutt was created by Dominic Tarr, a Node.js developer with more than 600 modules published on npm, who lives on a self-steering sailboat in New Zealand.

Dominic is often offline, but he’s still able to use a social network to communicate with his friends such as James Halliday (a.k.a. substack), who is also often offline. James has also authored hundreds of npm modules, such as Browserify, and is building a shack with his partner Marina on top of 300-year old lava flows in Hawaii.

Dominic and James are a few key figures in a community of eccentric open source hackers gathering in a social network independent from mainstream internet. The unique properties of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) make it possible for digital information to spread easily even in the absence of Internet Service Providers (ISP) and the internet’s backbone. What makes that possible is a decentralized protocol based on the mechanics of word of mouth.

Scuttlebutt is decentralized in a similar way that Bitcoin or BitTorrent are. Unlike centralized systems like PayPal or Dropbox, there is no single website or server to connect when using decentralized services. Which in turn means there is no single company with control over the network.

However, Scuttlebutt differs from Bitcoin and BitTorrent because there are no “singleton components” in the network. When accessing the BitTorrent network, for instance, you need to connect to a Distributed Hash Table (DHT, think of it as a huge round table where anyone can come and take a seat). However, to get access to the DHT in the first place, you need to connect to a bootstrapping server, such as router.bittorrent.com:6881 or router.utorrent.com:6881. These are very lightweight servers which simply introduce you to the DHT. They still depend on the existence of ISPs and the internet backbone. Also, those systems are concerned about public information. For instance, with Bitcoin, each peer stores the entire log of all transactions ever sent by anyone.

Secure Scuttlebutt is also different to federated social networks like Mastodon, Diaspora, GNU social, OStatus. Those technologies are not peer-to-peer, because each component is either a server or a client, but not both. Federated social networks are slightly better than centralized services like Facebook because they provide some degree of choice where your data should be hosted. However, there is still trust and dependency on third-party servers and ISPs, which makes it possible for admistrators of those to abuse their power, through content policies, privacy violations or censorship.

In Scuttlebutt, the “mesh” suffices. With simply two computers, a local router, and electricity, you can exchange messages between the computers with minimal effort and no technical skills. Each account in Scuttlebutt is a diary (or “log”) of what a person has publicly and digitally said. As those people move around between different WiFi / LAN networks, their log gets copy-pasted to different computers, and so digital information spreads.

What word of mouth is for humans, Scuttlebutt is for social news feeds. It is unstoppable and spreads fast. Once the word is out (just an arbitrary example) that Apple is releasing a new iPhone model, there is no way to restrict that information from spreading. A person may tell that piece of information to any of their friends, and those friends may in turn spread that information onwards.

With typical gossip, however, information deteriorates as it spreads and eventually becomes harmful rumor. Scuttlebutt on the other hand makes word of mouth securewith cryptography. Each Scuttlebutt account is comprised of simply two things: an append-only diary and private/public asymmetric crypto keys. An account’s identity is its public key. There are no unique usernames, because you can’t guarantee two people in separate places from choosing the same username, much like you cannot forbid the name “John Smith” to be given to a newborn in Canada if it is already taken by another person in Australia.

All information a person has published is registered in their diary. Public messages (like in Twitter) are the most common type of message in a diary, but you’ll also see “I am friends with that person” type of messages. To ‘send’ a private message to someone, I simply record a message in my diary, but encrypt it first, so the message isn’t plainly readable by anyone who gets their hands on a copy of the diary. Authenticity of diaries is preserved in that all diary entries reference the message that was written before, and then is signed. This prevents tampering and makes replication easier.

Every time two Scuttlebutt friends connect to the same WiFi, their computers will synchronize the latest messages in their diaries. Another way of synchronizing information is to connect to a common Scuttlebutt server, known as “pub”, set up by any member in the community. Pubs make information spread faster, and globally, but are totally dispensable. It’s even feasible to exchange latest news through sneakernet, using e.g. USB sticks.

This architecture is built so that network connections accurately represent the social graph and word of mouth. Typically with social networks like Facebook or Twitter, the network connections are centralized with their servers. The network architecture looks completely different to social architecture. Most users don’t care about this because the network architecture is invisible to them. However, it becomes a real problem once an authoritarian government or even the host company itself takes control over the network architecture in ways that disrupt the social architecture. It is not uncommon for a government to shut down a social network in a country for days/weeks, affecting how people communicate with each other. This has happened in Egypt, Cameroon, and Brazil.

With Scuttlebutt, the social graph is the network architecture, with peer-to-peer infrastructure accurately matching peer-to-peer interactions. It makes communication and the spread of information highly resilient, bringing improvements to freedom of speech with modern information technologies.

This peer-to-peer system has existed for more than two years and brought unique challenges and possibilities. For instance, unique usernames are impossible without a centralized username registry. On the other hand, this questions the need for a login system in the first place: why do you need to “enter” into the service? Scuttlebutt will not have a user registration flow, because such thing makes no sense in that world.

So far, the network has received a dedicated social network desktop app, a Soundcloud alternative, a Viewer webapp, and a git layer (putting “distributed” back into “distributed version control”). These work seemlessly together: a person using the git layer to push a commit will record that on their diary, which is visible also in the social network app, for their friends. Currently, the community is using this to “eat their own dog food”, coordinating team work and contributing code all on the same platform, without any intermediate company. GitHub being down will rarely be a problem for them.

The platform is being improved constantly, in areas such as: mobile support, an NPM alternative, WebRTC support for browser peers, and even legal transactions in New Zealand. It has proved to work as a platform setting the requirements and examples for a human-centered social network, as Dominic well described:

I wanted an open platform that anyone could build things on. (…) Also, we couldn’t realistically plan to just sit down and create an app that everyone wants to use, we need many experiments so that one can succeed, therefore we need a decentralized application platform more than we need any given a decentralized application.

To use Scuttlebutt, I recommend reading the ssb handbook.

If you liked this article, consider sharing (tweeting) it to your followers.

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When it comes to the internet, our connections are generally controlled by telecom companies. But a group of people in Detroit is trying to change that. Motherboard met with the members of the Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), a group that is building their own wireless networks from the ground up in order to provide affordable and high-speed internet to prevent the creation of a digital class system.

Killer video about Detroit’s Equitable Internet Initiative. Also check out the Mesh Network project in Sarantaporo, Greece.

This video was originally published in Vice, but make some time to read the related article posted in Motherboard. Here’s an extract:

Jason Koebler: The Federal Communications Commission will announce a full repeal of net neutrality protections Wednesday, according to the New York Times and several other media outlets. It is possible that a committee of telecom industry plutocrats who have from the outset made it their mission to rollback regulations on the industry will bow to public pressure before Wednesday, but let’s not count on it.

It is time to take action, and that doesn’t mean signing an online petition, upvoting a Reddit post, or calling your member of Congress.

Net neutrality as a principle of the federal government will soon be dead, but the protections are wildly popular among the American people and are integral to the internet as we know it. Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians, whose whims and interests change with their donors, net neutrality must be protected by a populist revolution in the ownership of internet infrastructure and networks.

In short, we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure. The great news is this is currently possible in most parts of the United States.

Read the rest of the article in Motherboard.

The post To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The future of the internet is in peril, thanks to surveillance, net neutrality and other assaults. But there are communities that are building their own.

Like many Americans, I don’t have a choice about my internet service provider. I live in a subsidized housing development where there’s only one option, and it happens to be, by some accounts, the most hated company in the United States.

Like its monstrous peers, my provider is celebrating that Congress has recently permitted it to spy on me. Although it pretends to support the overwhelming majority of the country’s population who support net neutrality, it has been trying to bury the principle of an open internet for years and, under Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, is making good progress.

I can already feel my browsing habits shift. I’m reigning in curiosities a bit more, a bit more anxious about who might be watching. I’ve taken to using a VPN, like people have to do to access the open internet from China. And the real effects go deeper than personal anxieties.

Although the fight for an open internet tends to have Silicon Valley tech bros at the forefront, it’s a racial justice issue; arbitrary powers for corporations tend not to help marginalized populations. It’s a rural justice issue, too.

The big service providers pushing the deregulation spree are the same companies that have so far refused to bring broadband to less-dense areas. They are holding under-served communities hostage by proposing a deal: roll back rights to private, open media, and we’ll give you cheaper internet. Trump’s Republican party is taking the bait.

This is not a deal we need to make. It shouldn’t be necessary to choose between universal access and basic rights. But this deal has been a long time coming, thanks to long campaigns to convince us there is no other way. It turns out, though, there is.

Up in the mountains west of me, a decade and a half ago, the commercial internet service providers weren’t bringing high-speed connectivity to residents, so a group of neighbors banded together and created their own internet cooperative. Big providers love making their jobs sound so complicated that nobody else could do it, but these people set up their own wireless network, and they still maintain it.

Of course, their service remains pretty rudimentary; the same can’t be said of Longmont, Colorado, a city 20 minutes from where I live in the opposite direction. There, the city-owned NextLight fiber network provides some of the fastest connectivity in the country for a reasonable price. In Longmont, all the surveillance and anti-neutrality stuff simply isn’t relevant.

“As a not-for-profit community-owned broadband provider, our loyalty is entirely to our customer-owners,” a spokesman recently told the local paper. “That will not change, regardless of what happens to the FCC regulations in question.”

Municipalities across the country, from Santa Monica to Chattanooga, have quietly created their own internet service providers – and for the most part residents love them, especially in comparison to the competition.

A major reason more towns haven’t followed suit is that the big telecoms companies have lobbied hard to discourage or outright ban community broadband, pressuring many states to enact legal barriers. It’s happening again in West Virginia. But the tide may be turning.

Consumer Reports has taken up a crusade against these restrictions. Colorado has one on the books, but jurisdictions can opt out by referendum. Following Longmont’s example, in the 2016 election, the citizens of 26 cities and countiesin the state opened the door to building internet service providers of their own.

Local government isn’t the only path for creating internet service accountable to its users. On the far western end of the state, an old energy cooperative called Delta Montrose Electric Association has created a new offering for its member-owners, Elevate Fiber. It delivers a remarkable 100 megabits per second – upload and download – to homes for $50 a month.

Electric co-ops once brought power to rural areas to people that investor-owned companies wouldn’t serve, and now they’re starting to do the same with broadband. The Obama-era FCC supported these efforts. Donald Trump has voiced support for rural broadband in general, but it remains to be seen whether that will mean subsidies for big corporations, whose existing customers despise them, or opportunities for communities to take control of the internet for themselves.

Whatever happens in Washington, we can start building an internet that respects our rights on the local level. What would be the best route for creating community broadband in your community?

In cities and towns, it’s probably through a municipal government, or even neighborhood mesh networks, which can swell across whole regions. Rural areas can piggyback on existing electric and telephone cooperatives, or start new co-ops from scratch.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance is one of the best organizations tracking these options, and its Community Networks website is full of resources about who is doing what where, and why.

It turns out that many community-based internet providers actually oppose the form net neutrality has come to take. There are troubling reasons the idea is so vigorously supported by internet giants like Facebook and Google, who also have surveillance addictions of their own.

There is a genuine debate to be had. Entrapment by unpopular, unaccountable corporations doesn’t constitute one. Those of us who rely on regulations to protect us from our providers can’t afford to budge on letting those regulations go. But when our points of access are accountable to us, the debate about the future of the internet can get a lot more interesting.

Photo by Free Press Pics

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Calling for action to protect open wifi networks, the Pirate Party’s Julia Reda writes how collectively built-up, not-for-profit wireless networks like Freifunk provide Internet access to refugees, “allow[ing] them to get in touch with relatives and friends who may still be in their countries of origin, who may be fleeing themselves or have found refuge in other cities or other parts of Europe.” In the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens, where activist-coordinated refugee solidarity groups support housing projects, there is a growing need for internet connectivity and regular maintenance. Working in a similar ethos, Exarcheia Net provides internet access and technical support to 10+ locations around Exarcheia – facilitating internet access for over 1,000 people.

Alongside this work, James Lewis, the initiator and facilitator of Exarcheia Net, is supporting community members in establishing cooperative networks. But the objectives of Exarcheia Net go beyond providing Internet connectivity to these places and include the following:

• providing internet access and service infrastructure for grassroots institutions like cooperative and non-profits,
• creating and maintaining associations to facilitate the sharing of Internet access among groups of people,
• piloting and prototyping a new type of neighbourhood/district-level community network that includes physical spaces and regular face-to-face meetings for governance, training and engaging people, cultural activities, etc ,
• demystification of technology and emancipation of citizens in building and operating their own technology infrastructures,
• using locally-run services (e.g. secure messaging, file share, video streaming, internet radio)
• organising ExarcheiaNet projects in a P2P way by facilitation rather than hierarchy and project management, building in peer-to-peer knowledge sharing peer to peer, and allowing networks to grow and connect to each other in an organic bottom-up method rather than ‘funded’ and top down.

Greece is home to a number of community network projects, each following their own governance model, such as Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN), Sarantaporo.gr, and Wireless Thessaloniki. Community network projects bring with them lower data costs, often faster internet speeds than telecom-provided internet, and benefits of privately owned infrastructure such as privacy and locally run services.

From June 12-16, you can join Exarcheia Net for a series of workshops,  where Exarcheia residents will join in on a public introductory workshop and guests from Freifunk (Germany), Altermundi (Argentina), Guifi.net (Catalonia), Ninux (Italy) and OpenFreenet (India) will lead an open debate on building self-organized community networks at the neighborhood level.

Exarcheia Net is looking for more people interested in working  “hands-on” in community networking and setting up p2p infrastructure. To connect with Exarcheia Net, check out the Wiki or join a weekly meeting by contacting James Lewis: lewis.james at gmail dot com.  

Lead image “Le libraire d’Exarchia – Athènes, Grèce” by ActuaLitté, Flickr

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tl;dr: Projects building open communications networks using custom router software are playing an important role in providing refugees with Internet access. Last year, largely unbeknownst to the public, a new EU directive was passed on the regulation of radio equipment. This directive may limit the software that can be run on WiFi routers to those certified by the manufacturer. This could keep initiatives from being able to provide such open networks in the future. Now is the time to get active in your member state to protect open WiFi networks!

In cities throughout Europe, people are seeking refuge from war, discrimination, hunger and persecution. Initiatives from civil society have been building up free Internet connections surrounding camp sites and housing projects.

Freifunk in Magdeburg Olvenstedt (Photo: Keywan Tonekaboni, CC-BY-NC/4.0)

Many had to flee from their countries in months-long trips. Free WiFi connections allow them to participate in society, in culture and everyday life, which has become unthinkable to most of us without access to the Internet. It also allows them to get in touch with relatives and friends who may still be in their countries of origin, who may be fleeing themselves or have found refuge in other cities or other parts of Europe.

In Germany, Freifunk and other initiatives have been building up free and open – that is: collectively built-up, not-for-profit – wireless networks for more than a decade. Similar initiatives exist throughout Europe, such as Guifi.net in Spain or Funkfeuer in Austria. In the current situation, Freifunk and others have committed themselves to an additional, humanitarian goal.

They provide Internet access to refugees by way of installing customized software onto devices such as routers and WiFi access points. They are replacing the software (so-called firmware) originally installed on the devices by their manufacturers. Using their own software, they can build up free and open networks more easily and automatically.

Radio equipment rules with unwanted consequences?

There are common rules for devices that communicate using radio waves in the European Union. They have been put into place to avoid devices interfering unwantedly with other devices, as well as to keep certain frequencies clear for communication of airplanes, emergency services and so on.

WiFi access points and routers are subject to these regulations. The overhaul of the old directive (Directive 2014/53/EU on “the making available … of radio equipment”) early in 2014, at the end of the last parliament’s legislative term, introduced a new requirement for hardware manufacturers to demonstrate that software running on devices comply with rules regarding the use of certain radio channels, for example. This not only applies to firmware shipped by device manufacturers but also to any kind of software installable on the devices.

In Article 3.3 (i) of the directive, it says devices need to be built in a way to “ensure that software can only be loaded into the radio equipment where the compliance of the combination of the radio equipment and software has been demonstrated”. This could be interpreted as a requirement for manufacturers to only allow certified software to run on their devices. Projects like Freifunk and others as well as commercial third-party producers would suffer as a result, lacking proper certification.

The original Commission draft of the directive (PDF), however, includes a recital (19) that explicitly mentions: “Verification … should not be abused in order to prevent [the devices’] use with software provided by independent parties”.

It is now a matter of the member states’ transposition of the directive into national law whether the recital’s intention is kept.

Will manufacturers have to verify third party software?

It is curious that according to recital (29), “conformity assessment should … remain solely the obligation of the manufacturer”. Depending on the implementation of the directive into national law, manufacturers would subsequently have to verify third party producers’ software. It is hitherto unknown if manufacturers are sympathetic to the idea of having to spend money and expertise on this process.

Governments need to make sure open WiFi projects can continue

Volunteer projects throughout Europe that are building WiFi networks for refugees, similar to Freifunk in Germany, have made headlines and earned sympathy this summer. Lawmakers in Europe need to make sure these projects can continue their work.

EU member states have until 13 June 2016 to complete their national implementations of Directive 2014/53/EU. A freedom of information request brought forward by Michel Vorsprach in Germany has already produced an answer from the ministry for economic affairs. According to their reply, the German draft law is in its final stages and implementation will happen in due time. Governments throughout Europe need to implement the radio equipment directive in a way that does not hinder the free and open internet movement.

Manufacturers must not be lured into implementing even more restrictive measures than they are already using to prevent installation of third-party firmwares. It is a basic necessity for volunteers to be able to install customized firmware onto routers. Only if they can overcome the boundaries of what hardware manufacturers had originally planned for their devices to do, can free and open Internet projects continue to flourish.

Act Now!

If you are working with an initiative that provides free and open networks that are based on OpenSource firmwares like OpenWRT or DDWRT, or if you are willing to help them continue to do so, you have to act now:

• Ask your national government how it is planning on implementing Directive 2014/53/EU in its national law and if your WiFi routers can subsequently still be equipped with customized software.
• Ask your routers’ manufacturers how they plan on handling the requirements that arise from Article 3.3 of Directive 2014/53/EU.
• Ask politicians with special expertise in all political parties about how they envision an implementation that encourages Freifunk-like projects.
• Write to [email protected] with any answers you have received.
• Translate this call to action to your native language so we can mobilise activists in all member states. We’re happy to publish translations here that are sent to us via [email protected].
• Forward this call to action to 5 friends.

Photo by slworking2

The post Free and open WiFi networks Endangered in the EU appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Mesh networks in urban spaces are on the rise and are increasingly widespread and innovative. Often built by people with an interest in community networks and the distribution of power and control within the Internet, mesh networks make for a fascinating phenomena to research in the ways they bridge the social and the political. This article presents a study of Réseau Libre, an emerging mesh network community in Montréal. Started in 2012 by a group of tech activists, its original goal was to connect peers through an independent, self-funded and decentralized wireless network. By creating an autonomous long-range wireless network outside the scope of government regulation. Réseau Libre’s project is inherently political and within the creeping reaches of the surveillance state, seen as increasingly necessary. In this article, we examine the history and organization of Réseau Libre, its organizational limits and physical realities. We analyze the project within its particular political context and provide a number of recommendations oriented around the future success of Réseau Libre and other similar projects around the world.”

This article has been originally published at the Journal of Peer Production (available here).

Find the complete special issue on “Alternative Internets” here.

The post Enmeshed lives? Examining the Potentials and the Limits in the Provision of Wireless Networks appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Quoting from the article…

While paying for services to correspond with others over long distances might make sense, modern technology gives us better and more affordable options for communicating with those close to us. If you have wireless networking equipment in your home that is capable of communicating with your neighbor’s equipment, why not just communicate directly with them?

PittMesh is a new community-owned wireless network that runs OpenWrt, a widely supported, well documented, open source firmware for embedded systems like WiFi routers. PittMesh routers are owned by individuals and configured in a way that make them work together to build a larger, decentralized network. The project was started by a wireless networking non-profit called Meta Mesh and has been developed by a world-wide coalition of programmers for well over a decade.

The PittMesh network uses a simple network routing protocol called Optimized Link-State Routing (OLSR). This protocol automatically senses other OLSR-enabled routers wirelessly and publishes routes to non-adjacent subnets on the network, which allows the routers themselves to act as the infrastructure needed to connect neighbors to one another. It also delivers Internet access from bandwidth donors.

PittMesh currently has 29 nodes hoisted.
There are 10 nodes planned for deployment.
There are 5 point-to-point links active.
Live connectivity data coming soon…

Find more about it in the full article here.

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