On 01/17/2011 10:06 PM, Michael Blizek wrote: >>> Something like the above *will* happen. It's inevitable. It's not even >>> that creative. And it'll probably happen sooner than we expect. Sound >>> unlikely? Remember those researchers that cracked GSM at the CCC 2 >>> weeks ago? They did it with "Universal Software Radio Peripheral" >> >> Sounds funny... just where did you get *that* idea from? > > Thee are other projects doing this as well: > gnunet.org is building a transport as it can act as a mesh > netsukuku.freaknet.org is building a file sharing mesh network, but I doubt it > will scale very well
I think the key question, as has always been the question when it comes to P2P network, is usability. Skype "just worked" so well that it took off like mad. Same for the major pirate networks (though even those are surprisingly unwieldy). A wireless mesh will only take off if it's absolutely dead simple. In fact... I could see it leveraging some of SocialVPN and the P2P social network concepts. Imagine: 1) You buy this USB device from WalMart, and plug it in for the first time. 2) An app launches, whether you're on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPad, whatever. 3) It asks "Welcome to the Mesh! Do you have an account, or do you want to create a new one?" You choose "Create a new one, named Quinthar"; it generates a huge public key. 4) It asks "There are 23 nodes in range named Alice, Bob, Cathy, etc. Which are your friends?" You choose "Alice". 5) It shows you Alice's public profile, which is available to anyone. It's up to Alice to decide how much to show. It asks "What password would you like to use to friend Alice?" You say "Wonderland" 6) On Alice's computer it says "Quinthar would like to be friends, what is the password?" She asks you, then types it in "Wonderland". It says "Great, now you and Alice are friends, and will stay connected so long as you are directly in range, share an intermediate mesh node, or are both connected to the internet." [Eg, it works just like SocialVPN and if it can't directly connect, establishes a NAT-penetrated connection over the internet. After the initial setup, you never need to think about it again.] 6) Once connected, you can see Alice's "Friend" profile, which is shown to anybody who is friends Alice. It might have additional information, such as online status, more photos and such, as she chooses. She sees the same for you. 7) It says "Now that you're friends with Alice, what do you want to do?" You say "Share these songs, photos, and videos, but not these other ones." [Perhaps by folder.] When she looks at your profile, she sees all these items. She can set offline preferences to optionally sync your data to her computer for access if you get separated. You might have a variety of access levels that you choose to share or not with different people. 8) It says "Great, it's shared with Alice. Do you want to share with any of Alice's friends -- including those you don't know?" You directly set how many levels of indirection you'll allow, perhaps just defaulting to 3 (Alice, Alice's friends, Alice's friends friends.) ... fast forward until you have many connections, some of which are physically in range, others are connected via a VPN over the internet, others are offline ... 9) You have a vast interface to browse the photos, videos, songs, updates, profile information, and basically a lot of stuff about everybody around you. The USB dongle is used to install on a new computer, and connect directly without the internet, but even without the dongle an installed computer can continue to participate in the mesh via the internet. 10) If any particular computer gets lost or compromised, you can unfriend them (or remove just that device) immediately. Furthermore, your node is configured to monitor unfriending to automatically "quarantine" any node that has become suspect. (For example, one of my friends lost his iPhone; he'd remove that device from his profile and my devices would stop talking with it, without any involvement from me.) 11) And because your USB dongle is owned by you, it can store data such as your private key so you can easily move it between computers -- or even quickly access your mesh using someone else's computer, without leaving any trace on the computer itself. Anyway, ultimately I think mesh technology will be far less important than mesh *usability*. It needs to be packaged up with really simple, excellent software that enables the most basic peer activities -- especially file transfer -- to be done in a totally seamless way -david _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
