Re: <nettime> Community WiFi in UK and Germany, a round-up

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>]

What is supposed here, to put it in precise terms, is that "whitening" of the
access patterns, by end-users (from telco's POV) providing further access and
blurring the traffic, can be a cure for last mile monopoly behaviour. But that
can not work. End user is end user, legally, and whoever ends up using a
particular consumer-grade link will run into the same barrier (non-neutral
'net, banned P2P etc.) Telcos were the primary driver in scaring wifi access
point owners into securing them (and it worked ... these days I have to try 5-6
APs while in some public space to find the unsecured one.)

If "community mesh" purchases T1 or T3 link directly to the backbone, then
someone will have to pay for that $0.5-4K/month. However, displacing ISPs with
community networks that buy from wholesalers can happen. It happened with
electricity and gas. A possible solution is that citizenry provides
infrastructure and maintenance, and city pays the backbone bill.

Gnutella operates on regular Internet AFAIK, so it doesn't change anything.
Carriers can choke it. There are at this time dozens of products targeted to
ISPs whose only function is to block P2P traffic. And they sell well.

[note to moderator: feel free to delete the stuff below.]

It seems that you are insinuating that there is something wrong with wanting to
mingle with people of similar cognitive and other capabilities? Or should we
all be politically correct and dumb down to the average amoeba level? Or are
you peddling some cheap "all humans are equal" populism franchised from
politicians? I'm a card-carrying elitist and proud of it. It is a tragedy that
consummerism spilled over to Internet and made it braindead. These days it's
more likely to encounter intelligence in the meatspace with all of its
limitations (physical mobility etc.) than on the most advanced public access
global communication network that ever existed. Is it the ultimate
demonstration of limits of technology? 

> I agree here mostly, but isn't community wi-fi, based on mesh networks,
> a way to begin (2) by going around the phone companies? it seems to me
> that with net neutrality in question, the phone companies are the real
> threat, even bigger than google, since they're even more invisible but
> we're all totally dependent on them. it seems to me that currently our
> best chance at (2) is to have lots and lots of local community mesh
> networks and then figure out a good way to route between them quickly.
> for that, some of the best work done in projects like the gnutella
> network, using emergent super-nodes and hash file searches might be
> really useful.
> 
> > I'm looking forward to the first year on
> > this inter-net, where the amount of intelligence and interesting people
> > will
> >probably equal that of mid 90s, before unwashed retards discover it.
> > Will it
> > happen? Will the exclusivity, the knowledge that your packets are being
> > switched in a special way, that there is no yahoo or google there, be
> > impressive enough? I don't know. Maybe it's too late.
> 
> now there's some elitist crap if i've ever heard it. not very morlock if
> you ask me.

end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org