Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular. The most
+know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
+people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
+trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
+forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue. I am sure it
+is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
+private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
+too. The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous. To have
+some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
+TED talk
+"The
+kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot", where he suggested this
+little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:
+
+
+
+
Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
+I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
+through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
+aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
+download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
+vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
+historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
+to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
+own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
+presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
+drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.
+
+
But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
+would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
+and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.
+
+
+
+
The key is that every citizen should be able to read the
+radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
+both the government and others use of drones. For such control to be
+effective, everyone must be able to do it. What should such beacon
+contain? At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
+location. Probably also the origin and target position of the current
+flight. And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
+the drone in a central database tracking their movement. Robots
+should not have privacy. It is people who need privacy.
Wireless mesh networks are self organising and self healing
-networks that can be used to connect computers across small and large
-areas, depending on the radio technology used. Normal wifi equipment
-can be used to create home made radio networks, and there are several
-successful examples like
-Freifunk and
-Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network
-(see
-wikipedia
-for a large list) around the globe. To give you an idea how it
-work, check out the nice overview of the Kiel Freifunk community which
-can be seen from their
-dynamically
-updated node graph and map, where one can see how the mesh nodes
-automatically handle routing and recover from nodes disappearing.
-There is also a small community mesh network group in Oslo, Norway,
-and that is the main topic of this blog post.
-
-
I've wanted to check out mesh networks for a while now, and hoped
-to do it as part of my involvement with the NUUG member organisation community, and
-my recent involvement in
-the Freedombox project
-finally lead me to give mesh networks some priority, as I suspect a
-Freedombox should use mesh networks to connect neighbours and family
-when possible, given that most communication between people are
-between those nearby (as shown for example by research on Facebook
-communication patterns). It also allow people to communicate without
-any central hub to tap into for those that want to listen in on the
-private communication of citizens, which have become more and more
-important over the years.
-
-
So far I have only been able to find one group of people in Oslo
-working on community mesh networks, over at the hack space
-Hackeriet at Husmania. They seem to
-have started with some Freifunk based effort using OLSR, called
-the Oslo
-Freifunk project, but that effort is now dead and the people
-behind it have moved on to a batman-adv based system called
-meshfx. Unfortunately the wiki
-site for the Oslo Freifunk project is no longer possible to update to
-reflect this fact, so the old project page can't be updated to point to
-the new project. A while back, the people at Hackeriet invited people
-from the Freifunk community to Oslo to talk about mesh networks. I
-came across this video where Hans Jørgen Lysglimt interview the
-speakers about this talk (from
-youtube):
-
-
-
-
I mentioned OLSR and batman-adv, which are mesh routing protocols.
-There are heaps of different protocols, and I am still struggling to
-figure out which one would be "best" for some definitions of best, but
-given that the community mesh group in Oslo is so small, I believe it
-is best to hook up with the existing one instead of trying to create a
-completely different setup, and thus I have decided to focus on
-batman-adv for now. It sure help me to know that the very cool
-Serval project in Australia
-is using batman-adv as their meshing technology when it create a self
-organizing and self healing telephony system for disaster areas and
-less industrialized communities. Check out this cool video presenting
-that project (from
-youtube):
-
-
-
-
According to the wikipedia page on
-Wireless
-mesh network there are around 70 competing schemes for routing
-packets across mesh networks, and OLSR, B.A.T.M.A.N. and
-B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced are protocols used by several free software
-based community mesh networks.
-
-
The batman-adv protocol is a bit special, as it provide layer 2
-(as in ethernet ) routing, allowing ipv4 and ipv6 to work on the same
-network. One way to think about it is that it provide a mesh based
-vlan you can bridge to or handle like any other vlan connected to your
-computer. The required drivers are already in the Linux kernel at
-least since Debian Wheezy, and it is fairly easy to set up. A
-good
-introduction is available from the Open Mesh project. These are
-the key settings needed to join the Oslo meshfx network:
-
-
-
Setting
Value
-
Protocol / kernel module
batman-adv
-
ESSID
meshfx@hackeriet
-
Channel / Frequency
11 / 2462
-
Cell ID
02:BA:00:00:00:01
-
-
-
The reason for setting ad-hoc wifi Cell ID is to work around bugs
-in firmware used in wifi card and wifi drivers. (See a nice post from
-VillageTelco about
-"Information
-about cell-id splitting, stuck beacons, and failed IBSS merges!
-for details.) When these settings are activated and you have some
-other mesh node nearby, your computer will be connected to the mesh
-network and can communicate with any mesh node that is connected to
-any of the nodes in your network of nodes. :)
-
-
My initial plan was to reuse my old Linksys WRT54GL as a mesh node,
-but that seem to be very hard, as I have not been able to locate a
-firmware supporting batman-adv. If anyone know how to use that old
-wifi access point with batman-adv these days, please let me know.
-
-
If you find this project interesting and want to join, please join
-us on IRC, either channel
-#oslohackerspace
-or #nuug on
-irc.freenode.net.
-
-
While investigating mesh networks in Oslo, I came across an old
-research paper from the university of Stavanger and Telenor Research
-and Innovation called
-The
-reliability of wireless backhaul mesh networks and elsewhere
-learned that Telenor have been experimenting with mesh networks at
-Grünerløkka in Oslo. So mesh networks are also interesting for
-commercial companies, even though Telenor discovered that it was hard
-to figure out a good business plan for mesh networking and as far as I
-know have closed down the experiment. Perhaps Telenor or others would
-be interested in a cooperation?
-
-
Update 2013-10-12: I was just
-told
-by the Serval project developers that they no longer use
-batman-adv (but are compatible with it), but their own crypto based
-mesh system.
