NYC Mesh connects people to “critical Internet lifeline” during COVID-19 pandemic As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, cities are slowing to a halt and millions of people are self-isolating to help slow the spread of the virus. The Internet has never been more important. It is critical for up-to-date health information and it’s a necessity …
Yet, in New York City alone, 1.5 million people don’t have access from their homes or mobile devices, largely due to high costs of connectivity.
A group of volunteers is working around the clock to change that, one antenna at a time.
NYC Mesh, a community network supported by the Internet Society, kicked into high gear earlier this month in advance of the pandemic, getting as many people connected as possible while it was still safe to do so, prioritizing those with no other Internet access. The ramp up –going from a couple of installs a week to one or more a day – was “a mad rush of logistics,” says volunteer Jillian Murphy. But Internet access is incredibly important.
“The Internet is a critical lifeline,” says Murphy, who is also a member of the Internet Society’s New York Chapter. “Lifeline is almost an understatement.”
“[The Internet is] really the ability of an individual to have information about what’s happening around them and how to stay safe,” says Murphy.
NYC Mesh was founded in 2014, but things kicked up a few notches in 2016 when the group was awarded a grant from the Internet Society to connect their network to an Internet Exchange Point (IXP). An IXP connects local networks to the global Internet. This enabled the organization to significantly expand their capacity to serve New Yorkers. Their network has been growing ever since, currently connecting over 500 households.
How does it all work? It’s nonprofit and wholly operated by volunteers. Each NYC Mesh member installs a roof-mounted wireless antenna, or node, and connects to other antennas which forms a mesh network. The antennas used, which can be purchased by anyone, can send and receive signals miles away, and expand across entire neighborhoods. That network then sends traffic to an IXP where users have direct access to the global Internet without needing to go through a commercial service provider.
Those who join receive equipment, training, and support for a marginal cost to set up their node (with subsidies available to those who need it). There’s no monthly fee, though the organization asks members to donate if they can to cover costs to keep the network running. Many members become volunteers themselves, continuing connecting the city.
NYC Mesh is just one example of the kind of community-based network that the Internet Society supports around the world. The Internet Society, is a non-profit dedicated to extending the Internet to all people. One way we do this is through supporting the development of community networks. These are small networks built by communities – like NYC Mesh. These networks are often in underserved rural, remote, and urban places, just like New York City.
A ton of Floridians are downloading Firechat while they still have Internet/cell phone reception. Firechat is a mesh network app that connects to other nearby phones directly via bluetooth and/or wifi. Unlike centralized networks like cell towers and ISPs, mesh networks become more efficient the more users are connected to them.
There are some limitations: a phone cannot send messages unless there is another phone in range (about 200ft) OR there is a connection to the Internet or cell networks. That means there needs to be a critical mass of phones in the area for it to work.
If you send a message and there aren’t any phones in your area’s network that are connected to the Internet or to the person you’re sending the message to, then the message waits until new devices come in range. As people move about, the messages are passed along until they get to the open Internet or to the recipient. Thus it works like punk mail but for text messages.
The app is pretty buggy and a bit slow. The security of it is also not perfect, although it does claim that messages are encrypted until they reach the recipient so it’s a little better than punk mail in that regard.
HOW TO SEARCH FOR CONTACTS AND FIND PEOPLE ON FIRECHAT
I had a hell of a time trying to find the contact I particularly wanted to talk to, even though I already knew his username. The “Discover people on Firechat” option seems to always return zero results no matter what. BUT there is a workaround: Search among the followers list of verfied user “FireChat”. By default every user is following FireChat’s official account when their account is created.
Go to your own profile
Tap on “following [#]”
Tap on FireChat
Tap on “Followers [#]”
Type in the username of the person you want to send a message to.
It’s a bit clunky and it took me forever to figure it out but it works!
In my last NODE update video, I mentioned that I had some bigger plans for the future, and I thought that today I'd share my ideas for where I eventually want it to go, and see what you all think.
THE MAIN IDEA
One of the goals of NODE is to help show people the track we are on as a species, especially regarding technology. It often feels like we're strapped into a roller-coaster, and impotently have to accept everything that comes our way - even if it leads us towards a nightmarish dystopia.
It is often portrayed that we have two options; the "resistance is futile" mindset, where we may feel unsettled by technological developments, but passively accept them anyway, or the off grid response, where we go live in the woods somewhere, shunning all modern technology.
I'd like to propose another way. To stay actively engaged with technological progress, but make it work for - not against - us. In other words, build the world we want to live in.
The cypherpunk, open source, free software and open hardware movements are great, but you could argue that they're so wide, and all-encompassing, that they become too fragmented and unfocused.
What if we could unleash the brilliance of all of these ideas and minds together, creating a unified movement, coupled with a practical strategy for how to tackle the challenges we currently face, and will increasingly be facing in the future?
A focused, non-political effort to change the world using technology, for the benefit of as many humans as possible.
This would all be implemented using a decentralized platform that'd be like a mix between hackaday, github, and kickstarter, allowing people to collaborate on projects in specific important areas, as well as making it easy for others to directly fund those efforts. All innovations and findings would be available for everyone to use and iterate upon.
THE PLATFORM
The idea would be to make something that harnesses all the talents of this great community, so we can spread out, and start our own projects in specific areas that interest us.
Projects could be split into 3 sections:
1. Ideas/Proposals/Prototypes. This could be a launchpad for finding collaborators, and/or looking for specific funding to take them to the next level. People could put forward their ideas, and try to persuade others to join them.
2. In Development. Once projects are underway, they will move on to this stage. Progress will be detailed much like hackaday, and similar to github, other people may make contributions. Again, funding could play a key role here, especially for certain milestones, say like paying for new hardware prototypes.
3. Finished. This will apply more to hardware projects, but this section will be all about creating detailed, well presented documentation, and how-to videos. For example, if the instructional videos were all filmed in a similar style to NODE, then aside from the simple, visual consistency, there would be a chance to add alternate language tracks over every video, so it's accessible to everyone in the world.
It's worth pointing out that there are already plenty of great open hardware projects out there, but they may not have the best documentation. This could be an extremely fruitful area to work on, basically demystifying all hardware projects, and making them accessible to people of all abilities.
Ideally the platform itself would be decentralized and easily distributed somehow, so that anyone, anywhere could access, contribute, and download the entire archive whenever they want.
So to sum up, the basic idea is to unleash the creative power of this community, so all you designers, developers and communicators can disperse into hundreds of autonomous groups to work on meaningful projects, and change the world in the process.
THE KEY AREAS
As a way to ensure we're spending our time wisely, and working on important projects, I think the categories should be limited. Here are the ones I've been thinking about, along with example project ideas:
Manufacturing. Decentralize manufacturing, by showing people how to make all sorts of machines, like 3D printers, milling machines, pick and place machines, vacuum formers, PCB fabricators, whatever. Make it so simple, and straightforward that a person of any ability could follow along and make them.
Electricity. Develop new, cheaper ways to generate electricity. Create things like an open source solar tile project for example.
Food/Water. Come up with innovative ways to use technology for growing food, both indoors and out. Develop new ways to collect and purify water. Build autonomous robots that can help facilitate farming in small spaces.
Communication. Create decentralized platforms that allow us to communicate. Explore alternative networks, and meshnets, and create hardware to enable them. Work on P2P social networks and services that are run by the users themselves.
Knowledge. Decentralize projects like wikipedia, so knowledge and history can be available to everyone, everywhere. Think of ways we can store and preserve human knowledge, and create hardware and software projects that enable this.
Scientific/Medical Equipment. Reverse engineer, and create alternatives to expensive scientific and medical machines and processes.
Privacy & Digital Security. Create hardware and software that protects our privacy and digital security in this age of massive data breaches and unlimited surveillance.
Money. Use cryptocurrencies to increase the ways humans can exchange value without needing intermediaries. Make custom hardware to enable this. Build alternative funding platforms.
Much good could be achieved by simply looking at existing solutions out there, and creating open alternatives that are as good, if not better than the originals.
ll software would be free to use, and distribute, but you could sell the hardware developed on the platform, as long as all the plans and documentation are available, so others can make and sell too if they want.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
What do you think to the idea? If the platform existed, would you use it?
Imagine the amount of good we could do in the world, if thousands of us were working in all these different areas, doing meaninful work.
There are many brilliant minds out there, working alone on their projects, and I hope something like this could help connect them, and support their efforts both with extra brain power, and financially.
Like I said, this is a long term goal, and it would be a giant undertaking. I don't have a specific timeline in mind, but I think in reality it's a multi-year kind of project. It is something I will slowly be moving towards though. Thanks for watching.
What Kills Cloud Computing? A history of timeshared computers and One Device To Rule Them All
There's a fascinating article from 2009 written by Martin Campbell-Kelly that walks through the extinction of timesharing computers due to the economic efficiencies created by the personal computer.
In the mid-1960s timesharing computers came on the scene. In these systems customers could access a mainframe computer remotely. Connected to a mainframe computer via a regular telephone line, users ran programs using a clunky, 10-characters-per-second, model ASR-33 teletype.
As timesharing services cost around $10-$20 per hour (netting out to ~$300/month), the PC destroyed the economics of the industry.
Just as Cloud Computing has similarly destroyed many economic benefits of software built on-prem with a cluster of servers and more.
If we look at the rise of cloud computing, and its increasingly widening moat, we must also look at the rise of data-intensive applications such as machine learning and more. If data is indeed the new oil, then what perhaps becomes the solar panel that renders this oil obsolete for energy and creation (not a perfect analogy)?
The rise of cloud computing benefitted heavily from drastically higher speed internet, a rise of datasets and machine learning alongside it during the second wave, and now even the utilization of purpose built chips at scale to throw compute at various problems. Perhaps however, we reach a tipping point where we look back and wonder "why the hell did we send all of that stuff up there?"
In some ways this is the promise of edge computing and smaller trends we've seen where we have purpose built chips embedded in our devices to solve certain problems. When I think of macro catalysts for how to think of the fall of cloud compute, I think about privacy (as we've seen with FaceID), efficiency, connectivity, and power.
On the privacy front, I think we'll see advances in things like federated learning or other privacy centric mechanisms that expose models but not data before we look for solutions for pure edge compute.
For connectivity - We have an impending next wave catalyst coming for 5G that only strengthens the moat that cloud computing is built on as we remove some of the restrictions of piping data back and forth on and off device.
But for power there is an interesting exercise - If today we are already on an upgrade plan for our device that comes every year from lord Apple, will we one day reach a point where we have One Chip to Rule Them All?
Put more specifically, instead of continuing to ping the cloud to run compute, could we possibly have a piece of hardware so powerful that instead we pull our updates and have various applications that sit on top of that. I realize I've just described computers and video game consoles, but there's something interesting about a personal compute server, in a world where our day to day needs possible get maxed out.
The iPad is an early indicator of this, with strong compute, another purpose built chip (i'm classifying apple A series processors as this), but seemingly simplistic devices and use-cases.
In addition, as we have more devices around us at all times (google home, alexas, apple watch, airpods, macbook, ipad, etc.) will these aggregate chips be able to cluster and provide our local compute power that disintermediates cloud compute in some ways?
This is a potential promise of the mobile cloud computing as detailed in this research survey, as well as Edge Mesh and Fog Computing.
I’m continually intrigued by this idea as many of the larger platforms have begun to build core revenue drivers and moats surrounding cloud computing and have used these platforms as tools to compete away many other parts of the developer stack while sacrificing monetization on ancillary products in exchange for compute monetization.
So do we eventually get fog computing or One Device To Rule Them All as I state above?
In the near-term, the argument is that we are now starting to understand how we can push the limits of compute in order to explore new computing platforms (like AR glasses). On the other side of the spectrum, we have companies like OpenAI running at artificial general intelligence, which have taken a clear stance that throwing compute at the problem is needed for some long period of time, despite scaling efficiency of compute in ML.
Despite this short-term bearishness, as I look at the usage stack of my parents and even most of my friends, it's not clear to me why cloud compute necessarily will be continually stretched in core computing areas until we have an entirely new compute platform emerge.
Nothing tidy to tie up this note except that I believe understanding these dynamics is going to be very important over the coming years in both thinking through emerging platforms, moats and monetization of a wave of cloud companies, as well as possibility for startups to change how we think about compute power.
Please tweet at me if you’re thinking about any of these things.
Russia Seeks to Block ‘Darknet’ Technologies, Including Telegram’s Blockchain
A Russian government agency has requested contractor bids to find ways to block censorship-resistant internet technologies, like mesh networks. The list includes messaging app company Telegram’s yet-to-be-launched blockchain.
The call for bids was published on March 3 by the General Radio Frequency Center, the agency controlling the use of radio frequencies in Russia, and first reportedby the…
Venezuelans Made Lightning-Savvy Hardware to Use Bitcoin During Blackouts
Venezuelans Made Lightning-Savvy Hardware to Use Bitcoin During Blackouts
On March 7, 2019, all the lights went out in Venezuela. Total blackout.
While the electricity crisis was already part of everyday life, the blackout still crippled communications across the country. It also inspired Venezuelan Randy Brito to focus fully on the Locha Mesh initiative, an open-source project working to enable private messages and payments without an internet connection.
