WAN B

admin | Feb. 6, 2025, 2:24 a.m.

Defining The Problem

It is often said that data is secure insofar as all three of these criteria are met:

• Confidentiality - only authorized people access it
• Integrity - it comes from where it says it does and has not been tampered with
• Availability - it can actually be accessed when needed

A lot of people use the word "security" when they really mean just the confidentiality part, and a lot of the same technologies that address confidentiality (encryption, multi-factor authentication, etc.) also incidentally solve for integrity. Availability is the odd one out because it's usually considered a property of the infrastructure itself. Sure, you can have a cloud backup, or if you're fancy maybe your own Network Attached Storage (NAS) system. But at the end of the day if the juice isn't flowing through the internet tubes, then you're out of luck.

Under normal conditions, you mostly don't have to worry about availability, but as you might have already noticed, we don't live in those sweet, precedented times anymore. Between winter grid failures, summer grid failures, and severe weather grid failures, our availability leaves a lot to be desired. Add to that social media repression of activist content and the habit of dictators to disrupt internet access for entire regions, and it might behoove us to have a backup. So what does that look like? Here are some things you can do today (ideally with friends!) that can help improve emergency connectivity in your community.

Level 1: Join The Federation!

It seems like every time a technofeudal lord starts acting extra divorced, there are mumbles about something called Mastodon. Perhaps you've even created an account on one of its many instances. But what exactly is Mastodon?

Mastodon is an implementation of something called ActivityPub. ActivityPub is a protocol, which is about where most people tune out of the explanation. If you haven't, you might be fascinated by the fact that every piece of reliable IT infrastructure is built on top of one or many protocols. What we get from these protocols is called interoperability. You can make a new web page or email server however you'd like, but if it doesn't implement the necessary protocols, you're not going to be talking to a whole lot of people. By agreeing on a protocol and sticking to it, all the computers can know how to handle all the data that is coming through. It's the protocols that make things work together. It's what makes the inter-operable.

While Mastodon has the most users, it is just one of dozens of platforms that implement the ActivityPub protocol. That means that if you don't like the instance, or you don't even like the platform itself, you can leave for another instance or platform and still talk to the people who are on it. It also means that absolutely zero nazi billionaires have the power to remove you from the network...UNLESS they turn off the lower level infrastructure, in which case we'll have a way bigger problems than finding out what John and Hank Green are up to these days.

Level 2: LAN-maxxing

Have you ever been watching TV and had the power go out? Did you know that your TV likely runs off less than 100W of power - the equivalent of an old incandescent bulb? Did you also know that many smart TVs have a USB port that accepts removable media? That means that a 1kWh backup battery and a thumb drive full of legally acquired intellectual property can turn a black out into movie night. And it's harder to censor something when it's on a million thumb drives than it is to simply demand that Netflix stop streaming it.

What if you don't want to fumble with removable media, or you want to stream to multiple devices simultaneously? Good news! Your Wi-Fi router doesn't need the internet to serve files from your computer to your television. With a basic mini-UPS to keep your router running, you can serve up those delicious video files using JellyFin.

Streaming content to your TV might not seem like the most important thing, but during 2021 Winter Storm Uri, it was a couple screens and some locally accessible media that kept my little ones occupied and allowed me to focus on helping with Cooperation Denton's crisis response. As far as my kids knew, it was all snow, movies, and hot chocolate that week. We need to protect our peace of mind as much as anything. And you can serve more than movies over your local network, including all of Wikipedia and even locally run AI models. That said, let's move onto something a little more critical.

Level 3: Not Meshing Around

"We didn't know that none of us were going to be able to use Signal for the next week."

"Really it was just like 24-48 hours of people not knowing what was going on...because we could only know what was before our own eyes."

"They couldn't even keep the radio on the air."

"The huge thing is having multiple alternate forms of communication."

These were the words spoken by members of ROAR and Firestorm Books in North Carolina in their interview on It's Going Down about the incredible self-organized community response to hurricane Helene. About forty minutes into the episode, the conversation came to focus on the communications challenges that organizers faced, especially in the first few days after the storm. At 46:50, Firestorm members even mentioned someone bringing in a mesh networking device to their store. Unfortunately, none of them had the app that would have allowed their phones to connect to it! One interviewee emphasized, "It's better to be over-prepared than under-prepared."

If we imagine a scenario where they were better prepared, those mesh devices would perhaps have been distributed beforehand, and the people expected to use them would have already had some practice with them. This is precisely what we're working on with Denton Mesh. Denton Mesh uses the most widely implemented meshing network for long-range devices. It's called Meshtastic, and it can run on little $15 devices like these. You might be wondering, why not just get some walkie-talkies? What makes Meshtastic so special?

What makes Meshtastic and other LoRa (long-range) setups so well-suited for mesh communications is the ability to send encrypted data packets, allowing any device that can read and understand the frequency and protocol to forward them. Every device functions basically like its own little cell tower, meaning that in those darkest hours right after the storm, our good friends at Firestorm Books could have already been linking up with other critical infrastructure points in the area. Imagine how much more smoothly disaster response operations can go when you have that kind of communications setup in place!

Level 4: Mycelial Connectivity

Sending messages is nice, but what about media? What about files and websites? Is it all gone the second The Man hits the switch? A lot of the internet is vulnerable to this type of thing, but emerging technologies are coming together to overcome it.

Reticulum is perhaps the ultimate example of resilient connectivity. As long as any two devices can send and receive information, reticulum can work between them. Connected to the same Wi-Fi router? Your devices can talk to each other. A mile away with a LoRa antenna? Send those packets on over. Morse code? Heck yeah. Two hijacked digital billboards with telescopes pointed at each other sending QR codes? It's going to take some processing power, but sure! And once you are connected to one part of the network, you're connected to the rest. That's because Reticulum is not just a meshing protocol. It's a networking base layer, similar to the TCP/IP protocol that underpins the internet that we use every day. Reticulum is the closest thing to a "second internet" that we have that doesn't rely on a technofuedal lord. Here is a lot more information on it if you are so inclined. If you're not so inclined, just download the Sideband app or Meshchat app and start playing around!

Level 5+ (And Some Side Quests)

Hopefully these suggestions have ignited a little spark of desire to help build a more resilient communications infrastructure from the bottom up. In lieu of making this post any longer, here are a few more suggestions for you to check out:

• Kiwix (locally serve Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and more)
• Internet-in-a-Box (create offline learning hotspots that can be accessed over Wi-Fi)
• FreedomBox (a suite of services that you can host at home)
• Briar Project (mesh networking over internet, local Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth)
• I2P (a fully encrypted private network layer)
• Awesome Self-Hosted (services that you can host yourself, i.e. Nextcloud instead of Google Workspace)
• Surveillance Self-Defense (best practices for protecting your privacy online)
• Disenshittify Or Die (talk from Corey Doctorow on why the internet sucks now)

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