HUMAN FREEDOM: MAIDsafe4space!

In my spare time (which is a bit of a running joke where I work since I don’t really have any) I’ve been researching a way to launch a cheap satellite that would carry/count as a few thousand nodes.

This story has been my inspiration:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Chaos-Computer-Club-Hackerspace-Global-Grid-SOPA-Protect-IP-Nick-Farr,news-13742.html

the actual open source project can be found here (it seems to have stagnated somewhat): http://shackspace.de/wiki/doku.php?id=project:hgg

Or perhaps once MAID safe becomes completed the team can switch gears get in contact with the Outernet project:
https://outernet.is/

I also have an alternative which involves beaming data packets through shortwave radio which has an extreme range, and has been already done before see: Packet radio - Wikipedia

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The only thing that could make your idea better would be LASERS. I fully support this idea emotionally

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Anything with lasers is +1 in my book.

Understandably launching a satellite might not be feasible. From my reading we would have to contract someone to carry a satellite into proper orbit :frowning:

Did you check out the outernet project? It’s already been done it’s just a matter of getting them to throw us a bone

But the packets over shortwave can be implemented with relative ease, and i’m kind of wishing I had time to get a working prototype together using raspberry pis. :\

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I have checked out the outernet when i got interested in software controlled radios, but I decided I didn’t have the time or money to get invested in it. but if MAID safe gets involved I might have to.

edit: Are short wave radios line of sight?

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No you do global due to the ionosphere and the waves bouncing

The problem I see with using long distance radio is that the safenetwork hops packets randomly across the globe due to XOR space.

Radio packets would extend the latency for the hops that went over the radio. The reason being is that the number of hops will be the same, but now the hops across radio have the additional latency of the distance the radio waves traveled. The radio is still essentially a point to point transmission. It cannot be broadcast to many nodes at once since that is not the way SAFE works (nor TCP/IP)

Also Short wave is a slow medium due to its lowish frequency. If you go higher frequency then it becomes line of sight and may as well set up a mesh network. The only time shortwave would help is if the two nodes in the hop were at the 2 points of the shortwave transmission.

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Are you thinking that you could use this kind of like a web of trust, but in space? For instance you could connect directly to a few people you know and it would be a direct encrypted connection to them, or would this be like a standard Safe Network connection?

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I don’t think a satalite or radio linkage would be practical for day to day transmisions but it might be handy for hopping the puddle or making connections between otherwise unreachable geographical areas. A satalite or radio uplink might not be the fastest connection but it would be a way to seed remote communities which could in turn then form their own local mesh networks. And the more local mesh networks form the faster the connections between areas get. Slow internet is better than no internet. You must remember there are still places even now with no, or very limited, internet access.

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Some say SAT’s still use the same tech as LORAN :wink:

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Here’s an idea that I must write down before it slips away:

It is in the plan to incentivize vaults for continuity of availability. Therefore, and I don’t know if this is the case, there is (supposed to be) no reason to make them robustly capable of intermittent connection, perhaps with long intervals between connections.

The use cases for having such a capability would include parts of the world where the Internet is so expensive, low-bandwidth, or politically controlled, that it is worthwhile for some people to carry content, on a USB drive, into that country.

Cuba and China are obvious examples. In Cuba there is an underground of people who load content (videos, movies, software, games, for example) onto drives which are then delivered by couriers. the young man who runs it has a satellite dish hidden on the roof of his apartment block. But tourists carrying USB drives might be an alternative route. The USB drives should be able to carry SAFE vaults.

EDIT: And on Cuba again, a further use case, in addition to the USB-driven sneakernet described above, is LANs that gamers (again with the gamers!) run, often by stringing network cable between apartment buildings. These networks do more than just games. There is good reason to make vaults able to manage being on such a private network until such time as they intermittently connect connect to the Internet, or new, USB-hosted, vaults appear on the LAN.

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Hey @bluebird I love your idea! I actually had the same idea 21 days ago here’s my version of it: Consider - Safedrops APP for the safe network

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I’m not sure how effective the sneakernet idea would work as if the local network was offline at any point it would “reset” and all data would be lost. Remember the main SAFE network is dependent on the internet so any purely lan mesh would become a seperate independent network. Which is fine but it would essetially be a forked network. The main SAFE network would want all nodes that had joined while offline to dump their data and reset. Am I misunderstanding something about how the whole system of vaults on the network works here?

Such resets might be how the current version would react, but robust offlining-followed-by-rejoining is implied by @Ross 's recent dev update:

Archive nodes are under the microscope again to ensure data is maintained even in a full network outage or worldwide catastrophe.

… which prompts me to find out what previous discussion has occurred on the subject of “archive nodes.”

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agreed and I’d love to see how mesh could be supported more. I just wanted to point out the hazzards one could face.