Fixing the Internet:

The Book

First things first, let’s talk about Little Brother.

A quick summary of the novel, lovingly ripped from Wikipedia:

The novel is about four teenagers in San Francisco who, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the San Francisco — Oakland Bay Bridge and BART system, defend themselves against the Department of Homeland Security’s attacks on the Bill of Rights.

And it reads like a how-to guide for successful and effective dissent. It’s exactly the kind of book I want in the hands of the coming generation

If you’ve never read it, I recommend that you do. It’s a treat. It’s clever, well written, and incindiary. Don’t let the fact that it’s a young adult novel prevent you from picking it up. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to take part in protests. It’s also terrifyingly real. You can read it for free, here.

If nothing else, take the time to read through the introduction, which features gems like:

When I was 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers — which had been geeky and weird a few years before — were everywhere, and the modem I’d used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial online services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination with activist causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in activism — organizing — was getting easier by leaps and bounds…

And

But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love are being co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The National Security Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gotten away with it.

And

The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood.

What’s more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new kind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. A world where any measure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your hands and shouting “Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!” until all dissent fell silent.

Doctorow was saying that in 2008. In the 8 years since, things have only gotten much much worse.

The Xnet

In the novel, the main character Marcus and his friends become targets of an overzealous and power mad DHS employee. Marcus discovers that he is being surveilled round the clock, and is left to watch as his city becomes an authoritarian panopticon. Rather than accepting his fate, Marcus decides to Do Something.

I’m a big fan of Doing Something.

The something that Marcus does becomes The Xnet. A network of cheap/free game consoles/computers that connect to one another over point-to-point, encrypted, wifi. The network does not require any machines on it to be connected to the Internet at large, but does allow machines that have an Internet connection to share it with other machines in a style similar to TOR.

Marcus designs the Xnet around the concept of a Web of Trust. That is, it’s built to be cryptographically secure, and it’s built so that it is difficult for any user to impersonate another user, and it’s very difficult for anyone but the intended recipient of a message to read the message.

The XNet as described in the novel is not without it’s faults, but it is a significantly more robust, secure, and fault tolerant system than the modern Internet. (The fact that it’s decentralized, distributed, and local is also a huge plus.)

In a lot of ways, the XNet sounds like a more secure, robust, and modern version of the Bulletin Board Systems of Yore. (Of course, I’ve written about those before, and I’m sure I’ll write about them again.)

How do we make it happen?

I’m glad you asked! Within the context of the novel, the Xnet was possible because Microsoft had subsidized the cost of the newest Xbox to the point that the hardware was literally free. Everyone had one, and it wasn’t hard to make the Xbox understand that it was, in fact, a general purpose computer. Sadly, that kind of powerful, free computer has not yet materialized in our world.

We do have a few other things, though:

• Ubiquitous, cheap/second hand smartphones, often with heavy carrier subsidies (to put it another way, portable general purpose computers with multiple kinds of radios for device-to-device communication, that has on board storage, a battery, and is pocketable.)
• Raspberry Pis ($5 — $30, reasonably powerful general purpose computers.)
• ESP8266 (A low powered, Arduino compatible microcontroller with wifi. Modules can be purchased for as little as $3. I’m not sure exactly how an internet could use them, but they are certainly worth considering.)
• A plethora of routers and network appliances that are little more than general purpose computers designed for connecting devices to one another. (This model is only $20, and is fully supported by Open DDWRT)

Next Steps

The way I see it, a good, modern secure internet alternative needs:

• to be fault tolerant
• to be secure/encrypted by default
• to scale well
• to handle any/all applications currently possible over the general internet, including: Email; Websites; (distributed) social networking; gaming; VoIP; Video Streaming; File Sharing;

The limitations of a network that relies on point to point connections all boil down to density. If you’re not within range of another user, you’re disconnected from the network entirely. Thankfully, there are a lot of potential solutions to that kind of a problem as well. Think about this:

• Point to Point semi-permanent long range wifi connections.
• Long(er) range RF connections using things like XBee or GoTenna
• Sneaker-net or IP-Over-Avian-Carrier style packet routing using cellphones, including cheap/craptacular ones like this. (I feel like this needs a bit more explanation: If we can build an android/iPhone app that is aware of our network, and capable of accepting packets from it, and holding them until they are in range of a) another node on the network b) another phone running the app, we can turn all of those Pokémon Go players that are wandering through your neighborhood looking for an Arcanine into redundant viral data transmission for the network.)
• [in extreme cases] Connecting two nodes together over the existing internet using a secure VPN connection.

Around the globe, folks are working on various Mesh-Networking projects such as Hyperboria, NYC Mesh, and others. In the wake of the occupy movement, a lot of projects sprung up, though many of them have died down.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be auditing the current state of many of these projects. I am looking for information about how well they work as internet replacements, what kind of existing infrastructure they have, what their preferred solutions to common hardware and software problems are, and how readily they could adapt to the solutions described above.

From there, I hope to get together a team of likeminded folks to build and deploy replacement internets from the various open source projects and new code. It’s time to build a critical mass behind this idea. It’s time to take it to the people.

Who’s in? Get in touch! I’ll need all the help I can get.

Thanks for reading. I’m Andrew. I write about technology. You can follow my personal blog here: http://andrewroach.net