[spectre] Autonet - an autonomous internet

[dj lotu5]

Autonet is a project to create a wireless, global internet that can 
provide more reliability than corporate phone companies by being 
community based and freely licensed.

The cutting off access to The Pirate Bay by BT in the UK [1] is just 
another sign of the beginning of the end. The fact that the Great 
Firewall of China exists signals that the internet is already obsolete 
and that the Great Firewall of the US is just around the corner. While 
moves against net neutrality began years ago and have been fought, nasty 
laws such as HR4437 and the Total Information Awareness program have a 
way of coming into existence later in the future, slightly modified, 
under different names. The internet as we know it, as a place for free 
exchange of information, as the center of what has been called a second 
17th century with new ideas, creativity and innovation emerging daily, 
is rapidly coming to an end. We must use these last gasps of freedom to 
route around the disaster and create a truly free network.

How? Advances in wireless technology such as ubiquitous wireless 
routers, community mesh networks which are easily expandable and 
self-healing as well as long range wireless efforts such as HPWREN 
indicate a possible future for a community based internet free of the 
centralized control of telephone corporations and governments. While 
this is definitely a fork, more forks are to come and we can only hope 
that a few networks will emerge which can be broad enough to span most 
of the globe.

Major questions remain to be solved, such as speed issues, routing 
issues, DNS control, splits and neutrality. The Autonet, or Autonomous 
Internet project seems to begin to address this rapidly changing 
situation, where today Germany [2] has installed internet filtering as 
well and more countries are to come. While today those cut off are 
defying copyright laws, tomorrow any other political issue may be the 
cause for being denied access to global networks. While today the FBI is 
content to steal servers from information providers like Indymedia, 
perhaps tomorrow they will not be happy until indymedia is completely 
cut off of the network, or other open sources of information such as 
blogs, twitter accounts and social networks of dissident groups.

The popular revolt in Iran and subsequent disruption of network access 
by the Iranian government is only a glimpse of what is to come in the US 
and around the world, where the first line of attack against political 
resistance is to cut off network access. By establishing a community 
based, wireless, global network we can allow groups of individuals, not 
corporations, to maintain freedom of communication; We can create out 
right to communicate instead of asking for it, and continue to route 
around obsolete intellectual property laws which restrict our dreams and 
our creativity. Join this effort by going to http://alt-bit.org and 
contributing to this research, lets start outlining the problems, 
finding the technical solutions and work out the issues, collectively, 
as a Free Software / Open Hardware project, using open licensing.

Another urgent reason for Autonet is one that has motivated Free 
Software hackers for so long: Technological progress without a reliance 
on corporate support. Given the current financial and economic crises, 
how long can we expect dinosaurs like phone companies to survive? If one 
of these crises turns into disaster, the consequence is likely to be the 
disrution of collapse of the global networks on which we rely. I am not 
ready to give up what has been gained from these networks, including a 
worldwide communication between political actors empowered through fast 
information flows. We must start this long, difficult project today so 
that we may be ready for unexpected dangers which threaten our 
capability to communicate as a multitude, globally.

To add to the project, go to http://trac.alt-bit.org/wiki/projects/autonet

To sign up to participate, go to http://trac.alt-bit.org/register

-djlotu5 <http://trac.alt-bit.org/wiki/user/djlotu5>
-chead <http://trac.alt-bit.org/wiki/user/chead>

[1] http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/251609/bt-blocks-off-pirate-bay.html
[2] http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0906/msg00023.html