if the internet died!!

[Mark]

Geeks get crazy and design an internet that is not relient on isp's and corprate money - it must be possible to do this.

Then i would die along with it.
http://shibumi.org/eoti.htm

[eurosceptic]

We wouldn't have this...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_Ogi...eature=related

[eurosceptic]

seriously though - print out info - if you have no printer go to a library. write things out.

Contact local peoople/groups with info and knowledge etc

[FractalCatalyst]

Build real community locally. Open your mind to the unlimited possibilities of the universe, specifically as it applies to your latent psychic abilities and learn and practice telepathy already.

In addition, you should strongly consider buying/building a bunch of outdoor WiFi mesh routers and deploying them around your community using solar power. The mesh networking protocol, developed by MIT for their "roofnet" mesh, ensures that connections can be made even if some nodes are down.

If you're this geeky, you could probably figure out how to host a server out of your house that can provide a community wiki as the default page users see (like at hotels) when connecting to your free wifi mesh network, and get the free Sahana disaster management platform installed and configured and get some trusted locals deputized ahead of time as Sahana users in case a disaster strikes your community that would benefit from centralized resource/response management. You should probably have at least FRS radios if not HAM and a few agreed-upon channels for routine and emergency communications traffic if you set up this kind of team.

The whole idea here is to take your communications off the grid, even the Internet itself. If a few of these solar wifi mesh nodes were hosted by people with diverse Internet connections, you'd have redundant pathways to the public Internet. If the Internet becomes unusable, you still have a community intranet based around an auto-loading Wiki page which you're hopefully backing up in nightly increments with free solutions such as Bacula in case unstable people mess up the contributions of helpful people as with Wikipedia.

The community wireless mesh could also host a secure voice and video communications server using the free Asterisk software on just about any old PC to provide secure community telephone and video broadcasting/conferencing service within your mesh coverage area. All your neighbors need is a PC with a modem and any regular telephone, and they can have an extension on the system just like in an office. Or use software phones and headsets to connect to the community Asterisk server from anywhere. When done over an OpenVPN-based encrypted VPN it becomes impractical for even the Ennesay to electronically wiretap these conversations.

You could even find some cheap WiFi webcams and power them off the same mesh node solar circuits to create your own counter-surveillance network so you know when and where it's safe to roam the streets amid police state actions. Hell, add a personal weather station... the possibilities are endless.

We're very fortunate to share like minds with thousands of brilliant and selfless software developers who volunteer their time to free open-source software projects such as the ones listed above to create in many cases the very best-of-breed software solutions for a wide range of human needs which are completely free, secure and infinitely extensible thanks to the availability of the source code. I think the global open-source movement is beginning to reach a critical mass of creative output which is going to help propel us into the next steps in human social or organizational evolution through decentralization, disintermediation and democratization of communications, security and resource management of every imagineable kind.

Basically, these geeks are the ultimate libertarians, intentionally yet humbly and quietly building people-owned systems to replace all corporate- or gov't-controlled or intel-infiltrated systems currently in place. It's efforts like these that give me hope that we will be able to comfortably transition the world's societies out of global capitalism and into whatever organizational superstructures our new reality is spawning with minimal suffering.

So get to work!

[RSF]

A controlled crash & burn of Internet communications by authority within North America is more than conceivable I feel, it may well become reality. It's already soothed as a lack of controlled media.

Which has and continues to drive powers to the point of considered interdiction. Elections are won/lost off the power of todays communications of People through the Internet.

Slicing a few optical lines can simply change a whole bunch of stuff that till this point was taken (rightfully so) by People communicating with other People about 'things & stuff''...
RSF

[Fredkc]

Originally Posted by Mark

Geeks get crazy and design an internet that is not relient on isp's and corprate money - it must be possible to do this.

A couple of thoughts to this end.

First:
T'was a time, not too long ago that the Internet was the exclusive domain of A) the military/Feddle Gummint, and B) The cogniscenti of the universities who took their dollar. It's just since the mid-90's that the great unwashed (me n'thee) had access. But....

Information such as you see here was available almost universally. The media was called BBS, or Bulletin Board Systems. These were generally slower (read L O T S !! ) as they were modem to modem connections. No Google existed so knowledge of their existence was largely word of mouth, etc. Most were run by just plain folk who did it on their own, with maybe only 1 to 5 connections allowed at a time.

I still have copies of some Lear, MJ-12 docs, and even transcripts of Lazar interviews which I first encountered on just such systems.

Secondly;
If you have any inkling/curiosity/desire/notion to build your own electronic archive, as I have done, then I suggest you invest in, and investigate what is possible on a machine using Windows 2000 Pro, or Xp Pro (Yes, this is also built into any Linux installation. I'll stick with what most people know).

Both Win2K Pro, and Xp Pro, and for that matter ALL server versions of Windows have on the original CD, tho in most cases is not installed, something called IIS. This stands for Internet Information Server. In short, a web server.

With it you can take and archive nearly anything you find on the web. I began doing this almost 13 years ago myself. In the process I have learned to keep most of my own documents and such in HTML form, as a habit. I also wrote a browsing/search system for all this (happens to be one of my specialties, I guess) but not it's necessary for the purpose.

My original intent was to leave for my children/grandchildren a body of knowledge which I felt was both important, informative and educational. I began with Classical literature, important "sacred" and political documents, and the like. This archive has now grown to (if you include both machines I use for this purpose) some 48,000 docs, roughly 4 Gigabytes of info. I have additionally burned off copies at various times to CD's which are now stored at my kid's and two friend's houses.

When/if the "internet" is shut off, if electricity still exists, this whole archive is still available to them, and could also be made available using the old B.B.System as well. Saved on CD, it could also live again, whenever electricity returns. :^)

My classical literature collection, for instance now stands at roughly 1,200 volumes. If you are curious as to what I mean, I keep a "revolving" subset (usually around 300 volumes) on my website and the start point for this monster is here:
http://fredsitelive.com/books/index.php

A couple of things I did along the way, since database programming for the web is one of my things, is take a few things and develop search pages for their contents. Examples:

• A "Wild card" searchable Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. The idea is you type what you know, and put an * where you don't, and let fly. For instance entering abduc* will return the definitions for: Abduce, Abduced, Abducing, Abduct, Abducted, Abducting, Abduction, and Abductor.
• Two excellent bible dictionaries, out of copyright are Vine's and Easton's Bible Dictionaries. I have assembled both into a similar search here.
• An odd one, perhaps, but useful. If you know the latitude and longitude of two zip codes, you can calculate the distance between the two. Yes, I happen to have both a 42,000 entry Database of such data, and a page which will calculate the answer here. This is "as the crow flies" distance, and is from center of one zipcode, to center of the other. Example: The distance from Riverside, Ca. 92509 to Boulder, Co. 80501 is 803 miles, 1,292 Km. And yes, for those who've seen the latest Bourne movie, the zip code 41571 really is for Varney, Ky. ;^)

Anyway... food for thought, and please feel free to browse the links. My site is completely non-commercial. I don't make a dime from all this. Nor do I record your comings and goings in any way. As I said above, it began as a "pay it forward" project for my kids, and such, and it's presence on the Internet is more of the same. Enjoy !!

Fred.

[sunflower]

Hi Fred K, this is the sort of stuff which is truly useful. I am not computer tech literate but am saving your info anyway. What a wonderful and thoughtful idea to record and save imp. works of info and lit.

Some of us can't contribute all that much but we can surely learn from what's available on this site! Diane

[Fredkc]

Thanx for the kind words, Diane.
It's something I've felt both had a good use now, and in the future. who knows, eh?

I just did a quick inventory of the online book section. There are roughly:
420 books,
and their 240 illustrations,
in that section. It is roughly 90 megabytes. which, if you take roughly 4,000 bytes as the size of the avg. type-written page, yields some, 22,500 pages of text.

For something fun, Mark Twain wrote something called Adam's Diary, and theres always Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary.

Examples:
ABDICATION, n. An act whereby a sovereign attests his sense of the high temperature of the throne.
KILT, n. A costume sometimes worn by Scotsmen in America and Americans in Scotland.
AIR, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor.

You can go here, for things of a political/historical nature like:

• Dec. Of Independence,
• U.S, Constitution,
• Federalist Papers, Anti-Fed Papers,
• Minutes of the Constitutional Convention,
• A small Collection of Thomas Jefferson's Writings,
• Democracy In America

Again, Enjoy!
Fred