Good idea or bad idea? what do you think?

The conspiracy nut in me wonders if this is what they're willing to tell us about, or is corporate grade tech, what does the military have?

"new"

In the same period, dozens of other community network projects have popped up around the country, filling in where commercial ISPs refuse to upgrade aging fiber.

That's surely copper, right? Is there anything beyond fiber available?

Because the website is cancer the content is mirrored below. If you want to read the content in it's entirety and see the photos, see here: https://archive.is/1C96d#selection-381.0-486.1

The volunteers blanketing cities with wireless internet

Before the pandemic, people found creative ways to get around big internet providers. Now they’re doing even more. by Lynne Peskoe Yang

October 21, 2020

On a crisp, sunny morning in August, software engineer Rodrigo Espinosa de los Monteros rode up 22 floors to a stranger’s rooftop in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Willem Boning, an acoustical designer and fellow volunteer for the grassroots wireless project NYC Mesh, was waiting on the roof with two backpacks full of networking equipment. Their destination was a foot-long plastic wireless antenna, shaped like a squared-off satellite dish and mounted on the roof’s edge. The antenna is a “node” in NYC Mesh—a community-owned network of devices that blankets parts of the city with free Wi-Fi.

Directly to the north of Espinosa and Boning loomed the former Verizon building at 375 Pearl Street, now owned by Sabey Data Centers and occupied by workers from the city government and the New York Police Department. NYC Mesh pays rent to data centers like Sabey for the right to build supernodes at key internet gateways, where wireless traffic links up to the rest of the Web. NYC Mesh then distributes the bandwidth wirelessly, giving new internet access options to people who live where the ISP’s service doesn’t reach or is unreliable. NYC Mesh covers its costs with donations from its users.

Without pressure from local competitors, ISPs can force customers in underserved regions to settle for unreliable connections at steep prices.

From the volunteers’ position, a supernode—a multi-­antenna monstrosity responsible for linking much of the network on the Lower East Side to nodes in Brooklyn—was barely visible atop the Sabey building. Before them, in the shadow of the supernode’s signal, lay four residential buildings too short to get an angle on the antennas above them. For the next two and a half hours, Boning and Espinosa, along with another volunteer helping remotely with configuration, would work to create a route for internet traffic to those buildings via the node on the rooftop they had climbed to. “As soon as I learned what the Mesh was,” says Espinosa, “I was like, ‘Oh, this is awesome.’” In Lower Manhattan, which has an underground fiber-­optic network, residents still rely on wireless connections to route their internet from the fiber up to their apartments. For this step, renters are often restricted by building contracts to buying service from a single commercial internet provider. “Even people who can afford their internet are unhappy,” says Jillian Murphy, a university administrator and volunteer admin for NYC Mesh. In January, the mayor’s office released an 88-page report on the “digital divide”; it estimated that some 40% of the city’s households, about 3.4 million people, lack reliable broadband access.

install of NYC Mesh Net benefit: NYC Mesh has nearly doubled in size every year since 2014 and now has 561 active nodes across the city.

COURTESY OF NYC MESH

NYC Mesh undertook its first project in early 2014. It has nearly doubled in size every year, with 561 active nodes. In the same period, dozens of other community network projects have popped up around the country, filling in where commercial ISPs refuse to upgrade aging fiber. Without pressure from local competitors, ISPs can force customers in underserved regions to settle for unreliable connections at steep prices. 40% of NYC households lack reliable broadband access

The pandemic has only intensified the need. With much of daily life forced online not just in New York but all over the US, some local communities have been blanketing their neighborhoods in free Wi-Fi to help those who need it most. In San Rafael, California, for example, the working-­class neighborhood of Canal has one of the highest case rates for the novel coronavirus in Marin County, as well as some of the spottiest wireless access. Over the summer, a coalition of activists, government officials, and corporate sponsors scrambled to construct a brand-new urban mesh network in time to bring Canal’s students to their virtual classrooms this fall. The new mesh, Canal WiFi, has since morphed into a multipurpose community platform, offering Canal’s 12,000 residents information in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese on everything from eviction protection to coronavirus tests to immigration support. A week before Espinosa and Boning met up in Two Bridges, tropical storm Isaias had pummeled the city with wind speeds comparable to those seen in Hurricane Sandy, causing massive power outages. More than 130,000 New Yorkers lost power, some for weeks. The loss of connection became its own disaster, making network resiliency all the more important. Since lockdowns began, interest “has stayed up quite a bit,” Murphy says. “Especially because a lot of people suddenly need better internet, or faster internet, or they lost their job and can’t afford the commercials ISPs anymore.”

Mozilla is just trying to squash competition to the web by using MUH EVIL TERRORIST BOOGIEMAN as an argument. It is about as reasonable as expecting a garbage fire to go out by dropping napalm into it. They are incompetent dipshits who are just trying to make a buck from a dying company.

This is the dumbest thing I've seen in a while. Firefox should be promote and encourage decentralized and P2P networks.

I've seen more vulgar stuff on the clearnet than the dark net.

dont you just LOVE the new mozilla?

Oh, those russians.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_121

A couple months ago YouTube was down for an hour or two, that's the only time I've first hand experienced it. Sometimes you'd get the page to load, but not the video, sometimes you'd just get some Google error page.

The tin foil hat in me always assumes the worse, that it's a result of some unfriendly actors because that seems more likely than a company the size of Google having single points of failure and the ability for widespread outages like this as modern as they are.

My thought exactly, most probably now they'll have a dedicated server for everything.

Why do we always blame Russia? Sure, they're a likely suspect, but I would imagine any team working for a government will also be capable to make it appear as if the attack is coming from anywhere else.

Lots of attacks from China and even North Korea, which would have a lot to gain in the information and tools they'd be able to steal. Reading about Bureau 121 is always fun.

I guess I just don't understand how you could be 100% certain in this day and age but I'm sure they have methods of analyzing traffic that is way over my head to determine the true origin.

Makes sense. Though with a company as big as Google you'd think they'd have a separate server for anything.

I remember this, and they do see to have an outage every year at around the same time, the problem with them is they rely on one server to run multiple things, as seen on a post shared here a couple days ago.

I second this, Google haven't been reliable at all this year, I'm glad my mail provider is my own as I can sort issues myself (although I've never had any outages).

What's weird is how Google seems to consistently go down at least one time per year. Remember last year when YouTube was down for everyone for like 2~ hours? A week or two ago everyone's YouTube app crashed too.

Google has had a rocky year. Interestingly enough I think someone showed/proved that one of their status pages wasn't actually reporting anything, and was just a static page displaying no issues throughout. Pretty cocky, and funny. But they may need to re-engineer that if true.

this wouldn't be a problem if gmail and microsoft weren't 90% of smtp traffic

The system, known as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, handles classified information, up to the secret level, and was shuttered for several hours.

"This has never happened in the middle of a work day," one Pentagon official said. "Updates usually are done on weekends and after hours late at night. This was done on an emergency basis."

The shutdown applied only to computers handling the classified material, and was not imposed on other computers or on phone systems.

All these issues lately have me thinking foul play.

outlook and gmail is 90% of smtp traffic.

but "they are private companies they can do what they want" lmao

Hell yeah brother.

I can't say I'm surprised with this due to all the problems PH have had the past few weeks.

Thats why you download the videos you like (porn or otherwise). Save bandwidth and just nice to have a copy.