Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] WiFi BBS

[Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

>That makes me think of an interesting application of wireless. What if
>you didn't connect your wireless to the Internet <GASP!>. :-) I guess
>that's kind of what you were suggesting,
>
Pretty much. I had been thinking of not connecting to the Internet at 
all.. but then the idea of creating an alternative content network with 
wireless access points spread around the globe seemed even more 
interesting and not much harder to configure. Pipe your data over the 
Internet but don't offer any connectivity to the Internet. That should 
be within the limitations most people agree to when signing up to 
broadband and it'd be a really interesting experiment. The applications 
could be very interesting as it'd be possible to configure things such 
as bit torrent such that the downloads would be pretty much invisible to 
those on the regular Internet. Also we could do more location-based apps 
which is something I think the Internet is ignoring.

>but with the local population
>density around Columbia, I can't see a single access point serving a lot
>of people unless they are accessing it on purpose and there is somewhere
>to hang out while they do it. It would probably work in Las Vegas, and
>other areas with a higher population density.
>  
>
I dunno. I think with a good antenea (a mile or so range) in a dense 
population zone (apartment complex, dorms, etc) that you'd get hits. 
It'd take a while to grow if you didn't advertise but if you provided 
good content on there it could be something of an underground hit. The 
idea wouldn't be to reach huge amounts of people so much as to 
experiment in a network made from numerous low-range access points. I've 
seen plenty of users that accidently (or on purpose) logged into their 
neighbors AP so if you named it something to indicate you were making it 
a public wifi point then I think you'd gradually pull in users if you 
had an antenea that could reach your neighborhood.

>I haven't seen the movie, but I heard about the minority report having
>some kind of strange proximity advertising system and someone else came
>up with a way to implement it in the real world.
>
I don't remember much about that in the movie. The closest I can think 
of is one of my college projects of a car computer that connected via 
cell network and using GPS coordinates would download appropiate content 
as you drove.

>How about this. You set
>your AP up connected to a server or two to create a local node with
>little or no extra connectivity. People in your local area, (i.e. on the
>wifi) can add and access content relevant to your node. More like a
>bulletin board and less like the traditional BBS type systems.
>
Adding localized content for each node would be interesting and not much 
harder to implement. I'd still want some shared area though if I was 
going to bother with the whole VPN thing for connecting local nodes. 
Otherwise I'd go with my original idea of just doing a neighborhood 
wireless BBS.

>You may
>even extend this to something like a war driving/Easter egg/geo caching
>type thing. It might be bigger in the cities, but it struck me as an
>interesting idea. Might even build some type of solar powered thing and
>drop it off in the woods. :-)
>  
>
Could turn into something of a fad if you could get places around town 
to do it. I could see businesses being interested in providing such 
wireless access to their own content and services. Bring your laptop to 
Starbucks and they connect you to Starbucks chat which lets you chat 
with people at your local or other Starbucks. Things like that which 
they aren't (to my knowledge) doing now which is really a missed 
oppurtunity for them.

>By the way, I have heard of BBS's in the Internet age, but I can't
>rightly figure out what differentiates them from a regular "group" based
>web site. Is that all there is to them?
>  
>
You can still get BBS software. It's mostly be converted to web-browser 
based though. May as well write your own or use off the shelf opensource 
stuff.

>Also, Michael, you may want to consider some sort of MTU limitation on
>your VPN. That's the biggest performance drag on something like that.
>Putting a 1500 byte MTU on a packet encapsulated on a VPN that runs on a
>network with a 1500 byte MTU really can drag down performance.
>  
>
Good idea. I'm not terribly familiar with setting up a VPN network so 
any suggestions are helpful. I don't really care much about the VPN 
security so any settings to lower the CPU/bandwidth strain by reducing 
the quality of protection would be useful too. Mostly I just wanted to 
use a VPN to route data over the Internet without granting Internet 
access. I suppose I could do the same with a firewall and customized 
nameserver but it seems it'd be more work in the long run and easier to 
hack out of.

--
Michael <EMAIL:PROTECTED>
http://kavlon.org

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