[Commotion-dev] Thoughts on secondary apps

[Erich Heine]

Hi all,

I've been doing some thinking on this whole secondary apps thing. Basically,
the main idea is to have a few easy apps, and an openwrt distro that can be
put on lots of cheap boxes to create a decent mesh. If lucky, some few main
internet uplinks can be organized for information access to and from the
outside world.  Also extremely relevant: the whole point of these networks
is to subvert governments. All of this leads to some really crazy
constraints and considerations.

First of all, consider use cases, which seem to fall naturally into some
sort of priority scheme. Here is how i see it, which is by no means a
complete, or even accurate list, but we gotta start somewhere

1. Organizing the revolution (or resistance or protests or whatnot) -- this
will probably be the most important use case for those hosting the network.
They need to communicate and make sure things are properly organized. If i
were in this situation, I would consider this the utmost importance as there
are very serious consequences (prison, death, etc) attached. This needs to
happen.

2a. Keeping the world informed -- protests and such are messy affairs. Its
usually best to be very public about all happenings, particularly when your
opponent is the government. Public and international, as you want things to
remain somewhat tame, and the easiest way to do this has historically have
"the whole world is watching" situations (well better than the alternative
:( ).

2b. Keeping up on the rest of the word: Is the UN sending in blue helmets?
Will we get help coming in and when? Are we getting the right message out
about our goals?

3. Tell my family I am alive. People will want to share this info with
family and friends abroad.

So on top of these use cases we have some weird constraints here:

* Limited Internet connectivity. It's like the olden days but worse -- fast
LAN super slow WAN. Further that WAN link is probably pretty sketchy and
down and up a lot.

* Honest to goodness hop-count issues, and other weirdnesses from running
lots of traffic through small boxes.

* Trust issues like woah -- social trust issues between/about various
groups, mesh networks seem tailor made for MiTM situations, canonical naming
and other issues go out the window.

* Infrastructure setup issues -- even if we get a packet network up and
running on meshed devices, there needs to be a bunch of local services set
up to deal with the fact that 1. no one can reach standard infrastructure
reasonable (see the limited connectivity issues) and 2. many of the local
language services are probably run on servers that can no longer talk to the
network, and probably can't reasonably be expected to jump on the mesh.

Ok so there is a weird situation here! Honestly a huge chunk of it sounds
like a job for freenet -- otherwise we just end up cobbling something
together out of git, ssh, pgp. Other things to consider too tho:

* Batching communications for low priority transmission. Email can work this
way. Or we could do something a bit more sophisticated.

* Key parties: seriously, this network and situation almost demands giving
everyone a key and good key ring apps. Otherwise this whole thing is fairly
easily subvertable. Key signing should be trivial, as should web-of-trust
stuff. smart-phones can really help here, a nice android app devoted to key
exchanges really makes the whole thing reasonable.

* user education -- everything above needs to be teachable to the users in
some form, quickly and with minimal effort, because really, there are bigger
things afoot and the easier it is to get people ready to go, the better.

Things that sound like good ideas to consider, but probably are just easier
to solve socially:

* deciding what gets out over the uplink: really this will come down to the
uplink operator anyway, so there is no point trying to enforce it...

* factional disputes, trust of leaders, who gets the best info out: this
problem has existed far longer than the internet, the real problem is that
social upheaval is pretty much by definition messy, and as such there is no
fix by tech.

Anyway... My little thought experiment turned into a total brain dump. Hope
there is enough here to start a good discussion on this topic, and maybe
consider setting an agenda on it.

Regards,
Erich
(sophacles in irc)
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