It turns out that what was one of the most promising open source mesh wifi projects of its day has been overrun by profiteering bastards who have closed up the source, possibly illegally, and have instated a governing policy for the hardware they sell that is reminiscent of Microsoft’s XBox 360 tactics and, well, most commercial out-of-the-box hardware being developed these days.
In this great article the story is told of a Vancouver based free wifi activist group who got repeatedly ass-fucked by Meraki and their fluctuating policy. This story underlines but one thing: the demand for open source hardware is increasing, in part due to the fact that the OEM producers are becoming increasingly totalitarian with their hardware.
Through a month’s worth of discussion about Open Hardware licenses on a small backwater mailing list (consisting of many of the smarter people in the field of open licensing) I’ve come to realize that the need is augmented by the thresholds created by hardware manufacturers - with electronics fabrication techniques becoming increasingly complex, the ability of Joe Public to fabricate such revolutionary open hardware such as Sun Microsystems’ OpenSPARC II is severely limited, even to the degree that I’ve given some thought to how hard it would be to get a small chip fab into the Fab Labs.
As I said previously in an article that appeared on the Peer-2-Peer Foundation’s blog: The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.
Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.
This holds. With the sheer number of projects attempting to create blanket mesh wifi for urban areas, such as Vancouver’s FreeTheNet and related software/hardware projects such as Peernet and B.A.T.M.A.N, it’s only a matter of time before the Genie gets let out of the bottle.
The community must prepare for this.
As Cory Doctorow showed in his fantastic novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, besides the huge technological barriers to achieving free mesh Wifi are the “capitalistic” barriers of the phone companies not really wanting people to do that kind of thing and being very bent on stopping them.
Point in case: My ISP, Hive, leases out wireless routers to their customers and does not allow their customers to use other endpoint equipment than their own. The equipment is locked and password protected, so they can access it from their headquarters over some telnet route but I cannot log in to it myself. As a result, the ESSID and the wep key cannot be changed by me. I could not blank out the wep key and open up my network even if I wanted to. Or, let’s say I could: then I would be in violation of my service agreement with them. Actually, even telling my friends the wep key when they visit so we can play a game of OpenTTD over the wireless is in violation of the service agreement. Not that that’s going to stop me.
As much as I understand Hive’s policy in not letting the lemmings tamper with the settings on the router, which would cost them endless hassle in incompatibility, repair service and lengthy telephone arguments with know-it-all PFY’s who’ve just botched their GPIO settings and can’t connect, I’m afraid their policy is more suited towards blocking uses that would be legitimate if the ISP’s were selling uplink access as opposed to personalized tyranny.
Because that’s what ISP’s are: They’re service providers, and their service is uplink. As soon as they step outside that box they’re well on their way towards blocking legitimate uses. It would be as if a grocery store were to ban customers from opening tin cans bought at their store, lest they cut themselves on the lid; or worse, would forbid customers to share bananas bought at the store with their friends, lest the friends figure out a way to stage a bank robbery using the bananas.
A friend of mine is renting an apartment in down town Reykjavík, and the landlady has provided wireless Internet to her tenants. Allegedly. The truth is the signal is extremely flaky and only perceivable in one room in the apartment. However, due to the virtue of the immensely thick carpet of wifi in the city center, there’s more wireless access points in her vicinity than is strictly possible to shake a stick at. During our frustrating moment the other day when the granted wireless connection was failing to impress, we stopped for a moment to consider breaking into some of the AP’s and using them.
Ethically, I’m not opposed: Anybody who locks their wifi is blocking a resource that others could use on egalitarian grounds, given just a hint of altruism. To wit, I think anybody who willingly blocks their wifi is behaving criminally towards their fellow humans. Legally, I can’t see any objection: There are no laws, to my knowledge, banning people from connecting to uplinks when available, and WEP keys are not really locks so much as just a simple obfuscation technique to prevent discourage eavesdropping.
In the end the only reason we didn’t do it is I didn’t have any software to crack the WEP keys. Since then I’ve been thinking, perhaps I should have just gone door to door in the neighborhood asking people to submit their ESS ID’s, WEP keys, addresses and WGS84 coordinates to a public pool.
But even if we did do that, the telco’s are not altruistic. They are not fond of egalitarianism. Their interest in liberty, and equality is none. We need open hardware, and we need a battle plan.
