Happy Iranian elections
What with all the news of web and media restrictions currently in Iran I have temporarily unblocked my Web Proxies in solidarity. (Usually I block Iranian IP addresses as they eat up resources and there is no ad revenue to be had). It’s always possible my proxies are now blocked by their government, but we’ll see.
In other thoughts, some kind of peer to peer wireless network is needed to prevent Iran and other countries (who knows what idiocy will be thought up by the British government and other so called “free” countries in the name of counter-terrorism) from censoring information. Complete decentralisation is required. Terranet were in the news at one point, but they haven’t really taken off, and I’m not sure what their goals really are.
Such a network would undoubtedly be slow as treacle (have you ever used Freenet?), but provided the main content is pure text, and nodes do plenty of caching, something should be possible. And anything is better than nothing! Heck, even if messages and text pages took a few hours to trickle through and download, it’s still uncensored information.
Maybe currently existing tech can be subverted. A new mobile phone firmware, perhaps, if they are capable of phone-to-phone communications. Maybe some kind of long range wifi.
Having said that, for widespread adoption, you really want something incredibly simply to use, a dedicated gadget, not a hacked mobile that only a geek can set up. Mass production of self contained hardware nodes is required.
I guess too, if these devices had a use in the western world, and become indispensable here, they would eventually trickle through to other countries too. The obvious selling point would be the absence of a subscription fee – no cabling, no satellite, no nothing required. Free information, information for free.