@hirojin heck please

@b peer to peering 😮

as i understand it you can buy racks at places with peering agreements of their own and use those racks as gateways for traffic between your web and the web

but you can also have your web stand alone, such as by mesh 📡

@wraidd @garbados aw nuts. frequency multiplexing to increase bandwidth?

@wraidd @garbados nothing important happens on the Internet, Ajit Pai says so

@wraidd @chara encryption is banned but stenography isn't ;)

@wraidd @chara i talked with some amateur radio folks about this and

1) the rules on encryption have largely gone unenforced, not that's it's necessarily a great idea to rely on that non-enforcement

2) these rules have gone unenforced because it is difficult to distinguish any permutation from encryption. ex: a vocoder mutates signal, but is not illegal

you can use these practical caveats to establish a system of signal stenography that masks a message inside a message

@wraidd @chara it has been speculated that some number stations serve this purpose, where the numbers announced during ordained periods actually contain coded messages. it's quite practical to do this, even electronically. especially where crypto will flag you for surveillance, steno is your friend ✊

@garbados @wraidd think you mean steganography. stenography would be hard to do on the radio.

@chara @garbados not really without stepping on existing frequency allocations. Personally I’m of the opinion that the telecom companies shouldn’t be allowed to hog the airwaves for their overpriced paid services when we could have a free/cheap coop based mode instead, but our current FCC is so corrupt that they won’t even enforce net neutrality anymore.

@chara @garbados You could potentially just say fuck the FCC and set up a federation of pirate internet nodes, because the FCC does their enforcement and would struggle to take down the whole network, but you won’t find many licensed operators in support of this because it’s in direct violation of their licenses and for better or for worse amateur radio is still beholden to government licensing.

@queerhackerwitch @garbados I wouldn't try. I know a guy who got found out in short order for trying to run his transmitter at twice its max allowed power, and they sent round a van to confiscate his equipment

@chara @garbados I mean it depends a lot on the circumstances, whose spectrum you’re stepping on, and how obvious you are. You’re more likely to get that action if you’re doing something stupid like stepping on military/aviation space or transmitting at 1kW which is noticeable from a long way off.

@chara @garbados a thought I just had: I wonder how cheaply you could pick up WiMAX base stations now that the Clearwire/Sprint network shut down. If nothing else that spectrum (2.5GHz, so you could probably modify WiFi transceivers to use it) probably isn’t currently being used for anything.

@queerhackerwitch @chara you can use wifi bandwidths for decent range without needing to get a license, and with specialized equipment (ex: directed antennae, towers) you can pump the range to a few km. in an urban environment, you can produce wifi mesh nodes pretty cheap. ex: freedombone

@garbados @chara My biggest concern is 2.4GHz is pretty congested with existing tech. Mesh traffic can probably tolerate it well enough, but for backbone links it’d be preferable to have a better SNR.

@queerhackerwitch @chara absolutely. i look to guifi.net in this regard, which spans a mesh across numerous mediums: cable, radio, wifi, etc., in order to establish pretty astounding range and redundancy using commodity equipment and community labor

@queerhackerwitch @garbados we just need to destroy existing tech first. who wants to make the EMP weapons

@chara @garbados could we not? As someone who lives and breathes tech to the point that I’m basically a technomage, I really don’t want to see an arms race with EMP weapons.

@queerhackerwitch @garbados but just think of all the existing devices out there gumming up the EM spectrum, all that internet of shit stuff

wouldn't it be great to wipe the slate clean

@chara @garbados the problem is weaponized EMP tech would affect everything semiconductor related, not just old tech

@queerhackerwitch @chara @garbados sorry Chara, we can't just wipe out the existing infrastructure, even if it's hopelessly corrupted

@kara @queerhackerwitch @garbados aw you're no fun

@chara @garbados I’d really like to not have to build a faraday cage to keep my tech safe from EMP attacks.

@queerhackerwitch @chara @garbados I need to build one anyway for scientific work

@kara @chara @garbados The most inconvenient part is power isolation, you can’t just run power lines into a cage because they’d act as an antenna bypassing the mesh.

@queerhackerwitch @chara @garbados *nods* for the electrochemical work I'm envisioning, I'd try to make all the equipment battery operated, and use a laptop for data acquisition

@kara @chara @garbados Data Transfer is easy enough with fiber optics, power is just the major challenge. Best bet (at least for my design) is hot-swappable battery banks on carts you can wheel in and out while maintaining cage integrity.

@chara @queerhackerwitch @garbados NO, NO IT WOULD NOT. I’m a gd street spirit worker who lives in Utah, the internet as flawed as it is, has helped me find people to keep living for and have hope in humanity

@Kyna @queerhackerwitch @garbados *sticks hands in pockets, looks grumpy* we need better infrastructure though

@chara @queerhackerwitch @garbados yes we do

@Kyna @chara @garbados we do, but a scorched earth tactic is just as likely to be used against us by the governments and megacorps

@queerhackerwitch @Kyna @chara which is also really worrying!

@garbados @Kyna @chara it really is, which is why we don’t want to encourage weaponization of that attack style. Large institutions also have more resources to safeguard against such attacks.

@Kyna @chara @queerhackerwitch ya cyborg reporting in, please dont melt my external organs