Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit. The scheme was outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
The project’s organisers said the Hackerspace Global Grid will also involve developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites. Longer term they hope to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon.
[…]
“The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let’s take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities,” Mr Farr said.
Is Sigfried still in charge at Kaos?
You know, of course, its all really run by Control.
Financing? Who’s gonna pay for this uncensored web?
Satellite downloads are not bad but uploads can be a real problem for small dishes.
You’d be surprised how many legitimate companies and organizations would be interested in securing untraceable, unmonitored communications.
Right now the carriers are like hand puppets with everybody and their uncle shoving their fists up to the wrists up their skirts.
Everything on AT&T coming into and out of the US towards the west is funneled through a single NSA communication room in LA. where every bit is duplicated and stored. The room setup is repeated in the East in New York City.
Some companies like to keep their private information private. (Plans, marketing campaigns, R&D info, engineering specs, M&A discussions [This would enable them to keep those private from the greedy 1%ers in government.])
Who will be defending these rogue satellites from govt. missiles/lasers?
There are thousands of satellites up there already, its no real problem to park yourself next to something to valuable to shoot down.
Now that the electronics are available, the satellites can be made small and consist mostly of a signal receiver antenna and a much smaller directional transmitter antenna.
Unlike Nasa’s efforts, the satellites don’t have to be sterile, be developed in clean rooms, be extremely resistant to the space environment, be long lasting (its far simpler to shove a lot of small, cheap, unsophisticated satellites up often than it is to put up some general purpose satellite once in geosynchronous orbit.)
It might not be clear which satellite you need to hit if part or all of what it is doing is approved.
If the governments know I have not doubt they could hit anything they can track from the Earth with a laser. I think that gets you down to something about baseball size though in fact it might be as small as marble sized.
The problem is governments are most likely being disingenuous about what they can and can’t track and can and can’t hit. Some are making claims they can’t back up while others are stating rather less than the truth.
We first need to send up a test dummy. Thinking of Alfred or Pedro.
They can put up satellites using commercial rockets and have ground stations anywhere on the planet.
They can encrypt the hell out of the traffic so that the content can’t be detected.
They also broadcast the signal over a third of the planet so the receiver also can’t easily be detected. (Anything can be used as a dish)
The IPv6 address of the transmitter can be anywhere on the planet and the transmitter can also carry a list of trusted addresses so it can reject any signal except those from trusted IPv6 adresses.
Latency and bandwidth are already not a problem because the streams of data are not “interactive…” (They can use the regular internet for “discovery” and use the Pirate Backbone for the actual transmission.)
By encrypting a low powered message that is broadcast over large regions coming and going they can make the satellite used and the Earth based relay much more obscure but the fact that someone is broadcasting encrypted messages should be easy to detect.
One of the things I don’t actually understand is why they don’t simply put up large metal spheres in orbit and bounce their communications off them rather than creating the much more complex relay stations that wear out. The only thing I can think of is that you have no way to control who is or is not using them.
Just don’t send any liberals up there. They’re so dense they’d survive reentry and smash the hell out of the place when they come back down.
The FCC regulates satellite transmissions too. China has already proven it’s not difficult to blind a satellite with a high power beam. This reminds me of the gun clubs who think they’re protecting themselves from a government gone wild – ignoring the massively overpowering weapons that government has and uses (and the ones kept quiet in case a Really Big Problem erupts). If Uncle wants in to whatever comm network, it can get in, given enough time. High quality encryption is the best way to slow him down, which is why [re]regulation of encryption is inevitable, to prevent (choose one) piracy / child porn / terrorism / drug trafficking / voter fraud / Sharia law / atheism / boogeyman du jour.
And once upon a time there was a system named Teledesic
Google it
There was lots of $$$ and power backing it – makes you wonder what the back story was behind it being dropped.
Maybe a visit from some government officials?
LF (3oKhz to 30Khz) at very high power has been used to communicate around the globe with submarines. However it is very bandwidth limited and very slow. MF and HF could be used, but it has the habit of flying off into space instead of reflecting off the ionosphere and requires constant frequency changing or frequency hopping techniques. Again very band limited. Not quite up to todays communication speeds. That is dark ages communications. If you want privacy and speed cable is the ticket if you can own the terminals.
ELF frequencies for submarine communications are 76 Hz for the US System and 82 Hz in the Russian system and it’s slow as hell.
Internet censorship is coming and in a very big way if we don’t fight it. “Internet censorship” is all about Internet ACCESS! And access to/from various web sites/servers is pretty much what the evil SOPA bill is all about. So as far as censorship goes, adding more satellites or even privatizing them is rather pointless. However, it is concerning where privacy is concerned. Let’s just not confuse privacy and censorship.
FYI: SOPA is not yet law. But it is designed to give control over to someone like the RIAA/MPAA and allow them to decide under the guise of anti-piracy – and without process of law – just who/what has access to/from the Internet. And they’ll do it by controlling the DNS database’s as well as controlling the ISP’s. They won’t need to “control” backbone infrastructure which is where the majority of satellite communications come in but they may want to “monitor” it.
Quite simply, adding more satellites is not going to thwart censorship and really not even solve privacy concerns either. Unless cheap direct access to these satellites can be provided to every end-user it’s not going to do a thing. Internet traffic is still going to be “monitored” and monitored by someone with at least the legal power to do it. You may even think someone like the NSA doesn’t have that legal power. But do you really think that’s going to stop them? — Think again!!!
About the most a private satellite is going to do is provide secure communications between it and whoever/whatever is accessing it – nothing more! Once communications paths exit a private satellite system it’s open game to whoever or whatever system it passes on to or through.
You’re only hope for privacy is to encrypt your traffic. And your only hope against “censorship” is to fight the power that wants it!
The “Pirate Net” would make the control of the internet moot.
That would be a case of shooting the horse after barn has burnt down.
Just saying…
I may be thinking outside the box but if you have reflective metal spheres in orbit you can use a laser to bounce encrypted communications off the thing to another receiver located elsewhere though the location of the sender would to some degree determine the location of the receiving station but a very small commercial laser could do the job.
Under the right circumstance you might even be able to get away with bouncing it off a regular satellite or the space station or even the blinking moon. While you will run into issues with less than clear skies jamming it would be problematic. While the bandwidth of individual beams and receivers is finite the cost would be vastly less than a normal telecommunications satellite so creating a network should be possible if some government doesn’t stop you.
The problem with reflective metal spheres is their low density — they are too easily pushed around by radiation pressure from sunlight, the solar wind and they are too easily slowed by drag when the Earth’s atmosphere expands due to solar activity. Their orbits are unpredictable and decay faster than those of conventional satellites. Plus they present a much bigger target to random space junk and are more likely to get holed, possibly by something as small as a paint chip, and add to that problem.
As for low cost ground stations, there are lots and lots of unused satellite TV receivers, which could easily be rigged up with low cost off-the-shelf hardware and open source software for just this purpose. The most expensive part of such an installation would probably be the aiming mechanism.
The real question is: what are we doing to protect against the rise of senient machines?
Computers are the only thing that know all our truths and lies. As individuals and as societies.
If they wake up, and decide we are no longer useful to them…
Without us, the computers would not get their updates.
They need us more than we need them.
Click HERE to install update and accept EULA.
Assuming that the computer is rational, and would be more bored without us than with us.
However, if computers, or “the network”, became self aware tonight, the global impacts would be beyond our imagination.
We are unprepared for this kind of alien intelligence.
They don’t need to send anything up or start they own internet.
They can just ride the backbone already there and put up normal, vanilla sites that have encrypted attachments that you can download, unencrypt and view whole websites on a local machine.
Easy as all hell and unless they determine the site and break the encryption they could have it start today.
People are forgetting to keep it simple.
Cursor_
The Haxors want their own internet and they’re going to get it, damn it, and screw this broad (band. 🙂 )
Condi be intromissiously mysterious
encryptiously secretious
& intraslitulatiously lubricatious
oh that Jamie Farr. What will he come up with next?
Every problem in the universe has its “All You Have To Do Is…” solution.
All you have to do is… snap a photo of the Earth from halfway to the Moon.
All you have to do is… die and be reincarnated so you can tell us what it’s like.
All you have to do is… send up your own satellites to ensure hackers their place in the sun.
Problems; solved.
On twit.tv am watching a show. One rather intelligent man was discussing at a ham convention how to bounce messages off the moon and pick them up using something you could put in your back yard. In other words using reasonable power levels.
They aren’t going to shoot down the moon, it doesn’t suffer from atmospheric drag, and I don’t think they could completely jam this or not easily. Detecting an aimed broadcast from a directional antenna unless you are more or less directly above it doesn’t seem all that likely. The reflected message would be very low powered and not bother others. Anyone with the right equipment could detect it but doing something about it could be an issue.
Yall have fun now.
Don’t bother. Just hijack existing satellites.
Big Brother’s solution to uncensorable satellites would be this.
One, jam whatever frequencies these satellites choose to use.
And two, declare it illegal to obtain communications thru any non-government approved channels or services. Like an act of terrorism. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me if the second one doesn’t already exist.
All the public carriers (phone, internet, anything) in the US, have to have an FCC license to do business. And they don’t get one, if they don’t cooperate with the government in providing a means of monitoring communications. And now, that’s possibly been extended to censorship. So some entity can send up all the satellites it wants to. They won’t be able to operate a legal subscription service in the US, to fund it. And probably not in any other country.