If SOPA comes to pass, is this a technological way to get around the censorship?
Asked by
HungryGuy (
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January 20th, 2012
Okay, I admit that I don’t know how feasible or practical this is, but I have an idea…
Suppose some company manufactures a wireless router (nothing new there). The LAN side of the router (the hard-wired, and wireless-G and wireless-N that all our personal devices connect to) continues to work exactly as it does now. The WAN side of the router (the connector that you plug the cable from your cable or Fios modem into) is also replaced with a wireless repeater that uses a whole new internet protocol (ideally open-source so that other companies could sell compatible routers). When two or more such routers are in range of each other, they establish a wireless internet backbone among themselves. As more such routers come in range, this wireless backbone expands to encompass every router in the network. At first, local communities will have isolated sub-internets (not subnets which are something different). Then each large city will become an internet unto itself. But gradually, the entire nation is covered by a gazillion such wireless routers restoring the internet across the nation. Perhaps even repeaters could exist to connect countries across the Big Blue Wet Thing, to re-establish the world-wide internet. Of course, ping would be terrible and web sites would be maddeningly slow to reply. But the only way that the government could censor such an internet would be for it to send out a gazillion FCC trucks to broadcast jamming signals across the country. While this won’t stop the government from buying their own such routers and sniffing packets to find out who is using what sites, such an internet would be practically un-censorable.
Practical? Or not? If not, what other ideas can you offer?
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6 Answers
They are working on it (and have been for a while) but the processing overhead for keeping track of nearby nodes and routing packets remains non-trivial. Hell, in Shadowrun, they had dragons and spell-casters in 2011, full-immersion neural interfaces for computers in 2029, and yet despite all those things, they couldn’t make a viable, wireless distributed mesh network until 2064!
However, that was with nothing except the nodes; every commlink (the 2070 equivalent of a smartphone) was also a repeater/router. Something that has some form of infrastructure that frees the mobile device from the onerous task of routing would be far easier to implement.
Still, the multi-billion dollar internet gaming industry would suffer immensely
Why would the gaming industry suffer? To the contrary, the government can’t shut anyone down if the internet were on a wireless distributed mesh network!
Yeah i have NO idea…I would hope so. I’d be glad to contribute to whatever internet speakeasy that may emerge, if I could.
@HungryGuy Online games like Words for Friends and Zooville won’t suffer, but there are many that rely on split second timing and excellent response.
For instance, I play World of Tanks, and I average a ping of around 129ms. That means that I see where the enemy was about an eighth of a second ago, and have to aim where he will be an eighth of a second from now as there will be that much of a delay for the server to get my command to fire. While that is still playable, it means that my accuracy suffers slightly, making it much harder to target weak spots (the only way many Light tanks can hope to damage a Heavy). Now, if that 129ms shot up to even 500ms, then the game would be practically unplayable; take it out much further and there is no “practically”; it will be just plain unplayable.
Look at how many of those games are out there; I am fure you could name a few without even thinking. Now imagine what happens to the companies that make those games if people can no longer play them.
You are entirely correct that the government would not be able to shut down a decentralized network In fact, in Shadowrun, the reason they even went with the mesh network was because “Matrix 1.0” had an infrastructure similar to our own internet with centralized servers that were taken down by a terrorist group in a combination of cyber-warfare and a few strategically placed tac-nukes. (Anti-virus software won’t stop a 10 kiloton blast!) Then again, it is possible that real-world technology may outpace fantasy if there is sufficient need… and SOPA/PIPA passing would probably qualify.
Worse comes to worse, we can make our own internet in space
@jerv – Oh, when you said “gaming” I assumed you meant gambling. But yeah, MMO kind of gaming won’t be possible on a wireless backbone of ad-hoc repeaters.
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