Gadgetory

the young shared information and discuss what was happening through the internet it's one of the unexpected triumphs of social media when a people rise up against their government they do it on the Internet on Facebook Twitter and public blogs and sometimes after that happens the government tries to shut the internet down what it has been blocked by the cold we've seen it happen over and over from Egypt to Venezuela if activists are relying on Twitter a country's central telecom can block Twitter's IP addresses suddenly your phone can't reach the server and if they want to stop online activism at large they can cut off the internet completely this blue dot is Syria's exclusive state-run telecom on May 7 2013 it started cutting off the traffic routes one by one until there was no way left to get data in or out of the country central web blocks have also happened in Turkey Ukraine Egypt Syria and Iran the question is once the connection shuts down how do you fight back in the case of a total web blackout the kind you've seen in Iran and Syria simple redirect tricks won't work in that case you need something stronger like a mesh network it looks like this each dawn is a router and each line is a working connection there's no need for a central hub or an ISP no-one's ever deployed a network like that in a real crisis but there are lots of people who'd like to today we're gonna see what it would look like New York art space called IBM is hosting a mock internet blackout kind of a fire drill for the web inside there's no outside connectivity of any kind the internet is down and we're gonna see what kind of network we can put up in its place the big problem with an isolated mesh network is you can't download anything that isn't already there but our group came prepared we're all connected to the local Wi-Fi which lets us plug in an IP address and connect to a local repo of apps using f-droid incur plap we can download the apps we need to start actually talking to each other of course we're all still in the same room feeding off the same Wi-Fi network so once that's done it's time to make the network bigger everything is running on this or reprogrammed commotions rather it doesn't connect to the internet it just connects to other routers with enough of them together that's all the internet you need the new network takes some getting used to there are no centralized services so instead of Facebook or Twitter you'd publish using a local WordPress app instead of whatsapp you use a decentralized chat service like chat secure WeChat instead of Skype there's lengthe after a while our network broke down people walk too far away and lost connectivity unsure of where to set up or how to communicate with the group simple coordination is a real problem and the process is still going through some growing pains but the idea works this kind of small scale network can be useful even if you aren't fighting an internet back up mesh is a big deal in Europe with immense networks already constructed in Berlin Athens and Barcelona for the most part there are way to connect to the internet for a little less money but they're also vibrant networks in their own right with files and programs swapped between thousands of different nodes it's a different kind of web than were used to scrappier and less centralized but that's the whole point the network in Chicago might look completely different from the one in New York and surveillance agencies have to move against all of them at once if they want to listen it it doesn't replace the main internet it just grows up alongside it with services that never leave blocked from a global perspective that's a powerful thing as this technology spreads the power of the network gets stronger maybe it won't be in New York or Berlin but the day will come when a government reaches to turn off the internet and finds out they can