Ignacio Nieto's blog

Free Mesh Networks. Two Cases from Chile

Ignacio Nieto — Sun, 31 May 2015 09:15:23 +0000

English

This article starts with a short introduction to free networks, followed by a summary about free networks in Latin America. The article then tells in more detail the story of two attempts at making free networks in Chile, in both cases linking the idea of free networks with specific artistic and socially engaged goals, reports Ignacio Nieto, who has been involved in both projects.

Free networks have made possible new alternatives that allow it to think about autonomy from the commercial ISP system and be able to share information between peers and on an equal basis. Free servers have allowed creating services on the Net which aren’t determined by the commercial interest, and which are not governed by the desire to control information. However, they have also led to the overcrowding of the spectrum for IEEE 802.11 technology.

In 2001, “NYCwireless” has been created, as a nonprofit organization that promoted and enabled the growth of free, wireless, public access to the Internet in the city of New York and surroundings. Several free networks have emerged with similar objectives, both in Latin America and in the world. Standing out is Guifi.net, for its rapid growth, a project which began to take shape in 2004 near Barcelona. On November 17, 2006, the National Youth Council of Catalonia gave to guifi.net the award for most innovative partnership project, as a pioneering project which enabled new forms of participation, beyond offering free Internet. Guifi.net provides resources to the community and interconnects the rural world, while bringing closer young people to new information and communication technologies. In the year 2008 was legally established a Private Foundation for Open Network Free and Neutral, Guifi.net as a platform for collaborative R & D, and as a forum for institutions, organizations and companies interested in participating in a global project for the development of infrastructure and network services.

The development and growth of these communities resulted in the development of free software, focused on replacing the factory firmware routers to allow greater control and the ability to incorporate new features. In early 2004, based on a Linux kernel, appears the first release of OpenWRT. Currently it has a repository system that installs around two thousand applications and there are versions for a lot of different architectures, compatible with various routers and inexpensive computers. This facilitated the emergence of several derivatives projects which have contributed to the development of the state of art.

One case was Netsukuku, a firmware developed by the Italian hacklab Freaknet, makers in 1998 of the first hackmeeting. Its proposal arises with the idea of creating a pure network that would use chaos theory in the sense that it is created and maintained autonomously, adapting to mutations in the Network Connections. Binding of management algorithms of a pure network with fractal algorithms and mathematical theories of chaos is one of the features that give Netsukuku the power to create a diffused and distributed, non-centralized, anonymous, anarchic, uncontrollable and finally, autonomous network. The goal is that anyone, anywhere, anytime can immediately connect to the network without having to go through bureaucratic controls or having to sign contracts. The IP address which identifies a computer will be chosen randomly and unambiguously (the eventual IP “collisions” will be resolved as a Hash Table), so the IP number will not be associable to a precise physical location (its server), and those routes, formed by a huge number of nodes tend to have a high complexity and density as they do not allow the "tracing" of a particular node, due to the complexity and randomness allocator IP. In December of 2011, Andrea Lo Pumo, part of the Netsukuku project, published “Scalable Mesh Networks and the Address Space Balancing problem”, available for free download. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ey204/pubs/ACS/andrea_master_thesis.pdf

There are several algorithms of Mesh routing, among others: OLSR, BATMAN, PA-SHWMP. Currently open source developers have a struggle to find the best routing protocol, that’s why they meet once a year in http://battlemesh.org.

In Latin America, the creation of collective oriented implementation of free networks began to settle early in far more precarious circumstances than in the so-called first world countries. One of the first cases of which it is known is Buenos Aires Libre, also known as "BAL", originally the group was called WirelessZonaSur and was then known as FreeBaires. Although there is little clarity about its foundation, it was apparently circa 2001 that it started developing as "Buenos Aires Libres" (BAL), with the objective of implementing a data network, free and community-based, for the City of Buenos Aires and its surroundings, connected with services like Wikipedia in Spanish, including community-based services. Jointly with the installation of nodes, BAL conducts outreach and training, where gets taught the building of antennas with household items. They have participated in events like "Wikimania" (2009) and Free Culture Festival "Fabrica de Fallas” (Failures Factory), organized by Radio La Tribu since 2008, and have contributed to the emergence of other free networks as: FerNet, Rosario, MontevideoLibre or LugroMes, who have excelled in the developing of firmware Nightwing , and have recently collaborated to develop a version that can meet the specific needs of BogotaMesh, a free network that have his reference before with Andres Burbano, the first free network project in Bogota in 2007.

In 2010, BAL organized the first Jornadas Regionales de Redes Libres (JRRL, Regional Conference of Free Networks) in which free networks from Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Paraguay meet. During the II JRRL, made in Tacuarembo, Uruguay, it began work on the preparation of the manifesto of Latin American free networks, which was finished and presented publicly in the III JRRL, conducted within the framework of the 12th International Free Software Forum (FISL) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This event also included the participation of Elektra, B.A.T.M.A.N. (Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) developer, among with Rodrigo Troian from RedeMesh (Brasil) and Hollman Enciso from Bogotá-Mesh. Together, they traveled to Santiago, Chile, to deploy an open network using mesh routing protocol BATMAN-adv, in a community called La Victoria, “The Victory” the first occupied area in Latin America. We established our base station in Channel 3, a pirate television UHF frequency station that began their transmissions during the late nineties. The station`s editorial line is left-leaning, connecting with the 70`s in Latin America. This particularity mixed up with the idea of centralized signal transmission was why we choose it. We proposed a project for FONDART, the National Funds for the Arts of Chile, and we won it. We installed 5 nodes in different houses in La Victoria area.

The project, that was funded focused on the transmission on digital video within an Internet portal. Any person in reach of the radio signal of these free network nodes could access to the web portal and see and hear the videos transmitted from Channel 3. Elektra, from B.A.T.M.A.N. protocol funded by FONDART, was invited to work technically to install the network.

A mesh network was working in the winter of 2010 in La Victoria. We could “see” all nodes and also the web portal, but we couldn’t transmit video from Channel 3. Elektra left it in that state of the art, and afterwards the person in charge conducted bad management, taking the money of the project for his own purpose. So the group that was working on the mesh network broke up and the mesh network was abandoned.

A second free network project was run when the curator of Encuentro de Cultura Digital (digital culture gathering) met Elektra in Berlin. The curator spoke with me and we decided to invite Elektra again, funded by the Chilean government state department of New Media.

We established our base in Espacio G, an alternative gallery hacker space in the city of Valparaiso. One of the curatorial ideas was to work with the people who had lost everything with the fires during the summer of 2014 in Valparaiso. So a prototype was done and installed in two community centers and two houses in ButterFly Hill. Technically speaking, the network was based on an infrastructure which combines antennas, softwares, and a social network that can be freely used. In the sense of the context the installation of these network up on a hill broke typical communication flows. Topologically people, who live in the hills, usually have to go down to communicate in a verbal or non verbal way. All the services of the city (school, stores, baths, etc) are down the hill, far away from the places we installed the network. This produced a new form of communication that impacted directly oin the way how the city was organized, generating new forms of activity that having nothing to be with other urbanized public or private spaces.

Conclusion

Technically speaking, these technologies are difficult to install, manage, support and train. Chile isn't a rich country, and especially the community who works in these projects, have no free time to work in this network, in a contextual issue.

In the first case, technically speaking it was impossible to transmit digital video to the community, the mesh network was too weak, besides we got economic problems that broke the group and we never saw and prepared a final document to give back to the FONDART evaluators.

In the second case, Mariposa Hills are far away from Espacio G and we haven’t had any money support to go on with the project. Also, people at Valparaiso weren't motivated enough to go on with the project; the distance is too great and the community of hackers in Valparaiso is a very close-knit community. As for myself, I live in Santiago, so it was quite expensive for me go there and work for free.

Article that appear in an Electronic Newspaper about Elektra a Valpo Mesh. Spanish Only

Ignacio Nieto — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 15:23:39 +0000

multilingual

Filósofa y activista alemana Elektra Wagenrad realiza laboratorio de redes libres en Valparaíso
La filósofa del “no-pensamiento” está de visita en Valparaíso participando en el 2º Encuentro de Cultura Digital a través de la realización del Laboratorio de Redes Libres con el apoyo del Área de Nuevos Medios del Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes. El taller se realizará este lunes 24 de noviembre a las 12:00 horas en la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Valparaíso.

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Interview with Elektra 1. By Valeria Viancos

Ignacio Nieto — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 22:32:28 +0000

English

This is an Interview made by Viviana Viancos with Corinna "Elektra" Aichele, before she made a presentation in Espacio G. The photo is moment of her presentation on November 15th in Espacio G, Valparaíso, Chile.

Viviana Viancos: 1. How will be your participation in the 2nd Digital Culture Meeting? Can you describe it?

Elektra: I will help to build a free and open wireless communications community here in Valpo, by explaining the technological principles and physical and software basics of a wireless mesh network. We will do practical network building, lectures, workshops. I am training people to use the Linux distribution OpenWRT, which is used to flash commodity (cheap of-the shelf) routers and transform this hardware to something even more useful that can be used to form a relatively large and cheap communication network. It can cover a large section of a city or even an entire city. I am introducing people also to the routing algorithms, principles of radio physics and the philosophical background of such a mesh network – which is basically based on mutual aid.

Viviana Viancos: 2. How does the idea of making this kind of intervention comes up?

Elektra: I have been involved in the development of Freifunk, which is a free and open communications community in German speaking countries and I have met Enrique at the ResPublica 2014 in Berlin, who suggested me to come. Besides: Freifunk has a nice film on youtube, with subtitles in Spanish, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z12OjnPADA

Viviana Viancos: 3. I've been told you were an hacker philosopher, can you explain me what is it about?

Elektra: I am the "philosopher of non-thinking"
I don't make my brain think: My brain thinks me.
To explain it a bit:
The fact, that you talk in your head, doesn't mean that you think, but only that you speak – and since nobody else can listen to your talk, you are most likely talking to yourself. But how useful is self-talk?
According to communication theory, if two instances involved in communication have reached the exact same level of information, they can stop the communication process: I don't have to tell anything to myself, because everything I know and think – I know and think, too!
Autocommunication is merely manipulation by autosuggestion. Autosuggestion doesn't always mean self-programming, as the content of the autosuggestion is not neccessarily originated from the individual itself. Others might be able to exploit the habit of an individuals autosuggestion in order to harm the individual. I think of it as a brain-malware. And by the way: What good is it to manipulate ourselves?! Are we not good enough as what we actually are, why do we need to optimize ourself in the way of fools?
One can not explain the meaning of ones life, the life of others or the secrets of the universe to oneself, by talking to oneself. Truth and reality are outside outside head. So I go out to the world, explore and follow my intuition, as intuition is the natural cognition of the brain.
If people ask me who I am, in reply to these thoughts, I tell them:
I am the voice of Elektra Wagenrad. My mistress is currently not at home. So please, leave a message. Someone might call you back later...
There are two fundamental concepts of cognition:

1/ The first concept of cognition has been developed and implemented by nature. Nature has developed the nervous system of animals, including us human animals. The cognition of our nervous system, which happens automatically and independently of our "free will" is often disrespected and disregarded by the ruling morale and education, because it can not be controlled by "our free will". If humans make mistakes, they always blame it on their animal-human nature. Hence, humans consider their own physical existence "imperfect" or even "bad" or "evil". I call these people that disrespect and disregard their animal-human existence "body-haters".
Biologists call the natural, independent cognition of the human body "irritability": The nervous system responds to external or internal stimulus in order to keep us alive and make us happy. A internal stimulus is hunger or thirst, for example. An external stimulus is that we see birds fly, want to fly too, and build planes. That is the sole purpose of our nervous system.
The brain has a stimulus-reaction scheme. We touch the hot plate as a child and burn our fingers. We draw back the hand in response to the pain. However, we consider this act a "lower function" of consciousness and are ignorant to the many, many immensely complex cognitions of our brain, that it performs with ease every day.

2/ The concept of thinking of the "mind" or "free will" – that almost everyone in society believes in today – I consider an illusion. One doesn't become smarter by imagining a smart little man in ones head, that takes our matters in his hands. We do this all the time when we ask ourselves – because if we don't know the answers, why are we actually asking ourselves – a.k.a. the little man in our heads?
This is a childish philosophy that originates from our phase of magical thinking, a phase that we all are likely to go through in our childhood. Sadly, ~96% of the human population, young or old, follow this basic philosophy today. I consider that the fools way to wisdom. Basically all schools of thought, world view, philosophy are merely modifications and modulations of this childish philosophy.
Talking to the average dude about this, triggers a strong experience of cognitive dissonance and subsequently strong emotional acts of cognitive realization by the little man in their head, who feels endangered and calls for arms and injustice and lack of logic in a fight for self-little-man-defense.
The self-talk in our heads also is a stimulus, that our nervous system will respond to, according to the natural stimulus-response scheme. Schizophrenic people believe, since they can influence their nervous system with their self-talk in their heads, that they are able to control and optimize how their brain works. This is the same logic like believing you will become smarter if you hit your forehead hard enough with a hammer, as one can indeed influence brain activity with a baton.
The philosophy of non-thinking goes beyond thinking, so it can not be understood by thinking Talking to yourself about it, i.e. hammering on your forhead with your mother-language will not help you to understand anything better.
I am trying to cast a spell: To create a virus in human language, a meme, that goes from head to head and destroys the logical fallacy of "mind", to set us all free from the magical ban of mental slavery by autosuggestions

Viviana Viancos: 4. Did you knew about this Digital Culture Meeting? What do you think about this?

Elektra:I learned about it from Enrique. It is providing a framework and brings us together to learn from each other: The power of networks and their effects can be beautiful.

Viviana Viancos: 5. The first edition of this Meeting was developed in Santiago, now it will be in Valparaíso. What does it mean for you to work in this city, considering its history and cultural heritage?

Elektra: I'm sorry for my lack of knowledge about Valparaiso, so I don't think I can come up with an elaborated answer.
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Valparaiso Mesh

Ignacio Nieto — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 01:14:31 +0000

English

Thanks Armin to give me an space here. My name is Ignacio Nieto and with some friends Mauricio Roman, Elektra and Daniel TIrado start to build a second version of the Valpo Mesh, a network re-build on the city of Valparaiso, up on the hills where were a fire burn part of the city on April 2014. Im curiuos with the idea of the network used on a neighborhood full of needs, starting from water. The rebuild of the network will be detail documented by texts and images and probably with a qualitive research will be done. The rebuild of the network start with the support of Espacio G, Segundo Encuentro de Cultural Digital done this time in the city of Valparaíso and the Goverment of Chile the Area of New Media of the Ministry of Culture of Chile.
As a first post I send you a Map that we are starting to build with the nodes.