EFF Aims To Launch An Open Wireless Router

[stiiixy]

blacklist porn sites and other criminal sites.

Poor choice of words. 'blacklist porn sites, criminal sites,' if you will.

Back on context, it's your/my connection to do with as you please, and seeing as I am with a very open and fair-use orientated ISP (Internode) in Australia, I feel I can pass that freedom on to the general public. Throttling was just one method to limit the random public accessing and abusing an open network. You also have to consider pBandwidth sharing in increments obviously is another. I wasn't going to list them all, but I chose simple limiting for my personal use case as I dont particularly feel letting hte public pound the living shit out of my 50MB/s connection. You also have to consider permanent residents.

Now, why would I limit the connections? In Australia there is no such thing as 'unlimited' and there's a real reason for it. We're bound by our remoteness effectively. Add a simple number's game to that (2 people per square kilometre, or 23mill over a landmass the size of the mainland US, somewhat mitigated by the high concentration of people living in city-centre's, and increasing due to modernised farming practices) and the costs of providing such massive data allowances is prohibitive. ISP's (or RSP's now) have to buy the quota from the companies supplying the backhaul across the Pacific and Timor sea. Internode does provide free services such as unlimited transfers between other Internoders, their hosting servers (linux distro's, updates etc) and various other local services but unlimited is effectively non-existant. It pops its head up occassionally, but usually disappears.

[stiiixy]

First choose a vendor that you can install open source software. Then do not block rates above 100kbps, just buy something that you can program it to give you an 70-80% when you are in (20-30% to others) and a 90% to others when you are not. 100kbps its the down limit for all connection you give. Then have a username like "Pass: free", so they understand the password.


In my previous comment I use a wrong word: backbone. I mean that a simple laser can fire from the village in the boarders of one country to the village in the borders of another, like 200km.

No worries, I think I misread what you said anyway. Late night's and cob-webbed brain again =D I get excited thinking about the stuff as well. Lasers are pretty pretty still though?

[Ansla]

1. Someone mentioned DDWRT as an alternative, that is not true. DDWRT is a restrictive binary blob on top of the Linux kernel. It might feel liberating if you switch from the crappy standard interface most routers come with to it, but its far from a true open router experience like that offered by OpenWRT, Gargoyle, CeroWRT or the just announced EFF firmware.
2. CeroWRT and the EFF firmware are not forks of OpenWRT but more like branches where experimental features are developed before they are ready to be merged into trunk.
3. As an owner of a WNDR3800 router I think its great to have a firmware that finaly seeks to take full advantage of the hardware capabilities of this router. Every other firmware out there just treats it like a more expensive clone of the 3700v2.

[droidhacker]

Why will I want to share MY internet connection, which I am paying out of my own pocket, with strangers and passersby? Are they paying me for it? No? Then they can bugger off. My subscription, my exclusive use. Period.

Because you are running a HOTEL and this router is running in your front lobby.

[droidhacker]

I think that's what they're aiming for. They'll market hardware with the aforementioned firmware. The flamefest in this thread is misguided. The network/internet sharing is aimed for businesses such as hotels, convention centres, etc. If you do not desire to share your bandwidth, you don't have to. I do not understand how much different would this be from OpenWRT? Can't they just use OpenWRT or modify it to suit their needs? "I think it's wasted effort."

CeroWRT **is** OpenWRT.
Or more specifically, its a specialized development fork that tracks and pushes back to upstream OpenWRT.

[droidhacker]

1. Someone mentioned DDWRT as an alternative, that is not true. DDWRT is a restrictive binary blob on top of the Linux kernel. It might feel liberating if you switch from the crappy standard interface most routers come with to it, but its far from a true open router experience like that offered by OpenWRT, Gargoyle, CeroWRT or the just announced EFF firmware.

This is simply not true. ddwrt certainly *is* open source, but not as much a purist as openwrt -- i.e., for certain devices, you may find binary drivers, whereas with openwrt, if there is no source available, that device won't be supported.
There are some open source parts of ddwrt that are simply not compatible with GPL. Still open source, but a bit more restrictive.

2. CeroWRT and the EFF firmware are not forks of OpenWRT but more like branches where experimental features are developed before they are ready to be merged into trunk.

Except that this branch is managed by a different group, hence it is technically described as a fork. At least they push back to upstream.

3. As an owner of a WNDR3800 router I think its great to have a firmware that finaly seeks to take full advantage of the hardware capabilities of this router. Every other firmware out there just treats it like a more expensive clone of the 3700v2.

Do you even realize that the only difference between WNDR3700v2 and WNDR3800 is the size of the RAM? 64 MB vs 128 MB. Everything else is the same.
The 3700v2 will even run on FACTORY 3800 firmware with all 3800 "features".

[liam]

I am a far left (anticapitalist) activist in the US, and have been since the El Salvador War in the 1980's when we stopped Reagan's 1988 ground invasion of Honduras and deterred the 1980-1984 attempts to bring back the draft. This is who I am, so as you can see my security needs are a lot higher than those of someone only doing filesharing.

The 2008 raid on my house wasn't after porn or liberated music/movies. They were after raw media files from a protest they didn't like. They got nothing because I did not commit to camera anything they could use, and encrypted everything else. Under these circumstances, open wifi is good for plausable deniablity, so long as multiple potential users exist within wifi range. With copythug stuff, it's good for at least one free bite at the apple, with heavy stuff it could prevent a conviction if the cops can't crack your encrypted drives.

To us, the most likely hazard is when cops don't like reporting on militant protests(my work!) or especially when they dislike the communications hub. When I was in Pittsburgh during the 2009 G20 summit, we had a crew putting all police comms out on a Twitter feed. Evidently they did not create and service the account exclusively through Tor, as their room was raided before they could clear out after the battle. Ideally they would have run open wifi as a Tor exit node, while doing everything through Tor on accounts serviced only through Tor. This would have killed the evidence against them if they claimed to only be running a Tor node. Even kiddie porn would have been a lower priority target. OK, here's the back story:

Our target was the 2009 G20 Convention in Pittsburgh. Military police closed off downtown to the cost of about $50M in lost shopping business, trying to keep our 1,000+ fighters off the convention itself. We had the entire Pittsburgh PD outnumbered 1,000-750 or so, they brought in outside help but all they were able to do was statically defend the Convention, with little ability to project power against us in the streets. We held out against 4+ hours of rubber bullets and an LRAD sound cannon, as repeated assaults failed to disperse us. Through all of that a special action team managed to bypass all the security and get downtown. We gave as good as we got. The next day 10,000 mainstream protesters marched. Generally in one of these "Summit protests" we can control the streets for one day before the cops recover and catch their breath. A rare exception is when the cops either don't care or royally screw up: then the convention itself ends up under siege, like that Koch funded "Defending the American Dream" convention that was beseiged and nearly raided by Occupy DC in Nov 2011, or the WTO in Seattle in 1999.

Under conditions like this, you are far less worried about kiddie porn, etc over your Tor node than about being directly targeted. The kiddie porn will go out anyway over another Tor node, so you can't stop it by shutting down. The guys who investigate that sort of thing move a lot slower than a police chief with angry ideas about "later" after his troops got their badges handed to them in the streets. A delay of two days past the end of the event is all you need for this when working from a temporary location. Tor delays or prevents the cops from finding you, open wifi plus encrypted disks keeps them from convicting you if that first line of defense (Tor) is breached. In my community our pro bono lawyers also give as good as they get, deterring casual harassment and winning millions in judgements for things like illegal mass arrests. What do you think paid for my 8-core video editor's parts and my 1080P camera?

Even in your case, the prosecution would love to be able to say that you folks are enabling, or even directly acquiring, CP. It's just the sort of thing cops/prosecutors do by piling on charges.
Having the WiFi open you can certainly make the plausible deniability case (I think the eff even says this exact thing on their site), but PERSONALLY I'd be concerned about the effectiveness of such a defense until its been well tested.
Good luck with your work!

[stiiixy]

Even in your case, the prosecution would love to be able to say that you folks are enabling, or even directly acquiring, CP. It's just the sort of thing cops/prosecutors do by piling on charges.
Having the WiFi open you can certainly make the plausible deniability case (I think the eff even says this exact thing on their site), but PERSONALLY I'd be concerned about the effectiveness of such a defense until its been well tested.
Good luck with your work!

Interesting reads by the way. Seeing the side of someone proactive out there in the field.

[Luke]

Hardball's a game two can play

Even in your case, the prosecution would love to be able to say that you folks are enabling, or even directly acquiring, CP. It's just the sort of thing cops/prosecutors do by piling on charges.
Having the WiFi open you can certainly make the plausible deniability case (I think the eff even says this exact thing on their site), but PERSONALLY I'd be concerned about the effectiveness of such a defense until its been well tested.
Good luck with your work!

If you've got opponents thinking in terms of piling on charges you've got bigger problems anyway and need to decide how you want to fight back. If they understand that cooperation and plea bargains are totally off the table they sometimes lose interest in my experience. I still remember an ad by some war contractor promising their latest war toy would "kill the enemy's appetite for war." That's the kind of thinking that can allow you to buy the pot by escalation and force your enemy to put up or shut up. When threatened, sometimes the only thing that works is to tell them to "bring it on." If it is known you use deeply layered defenses they may well lose interest. No more search warrants against me after the one that got a useless encrypted computer, and that one was after I responded to a subpeona (in a previous case) by the cops' defense lawyers in one of those mass arrest cases by going straight to the opposing counsel (MY side anyway!) to have it quashed. No more of either mode of harassment ever since!

[DrYak]

I am a far left (anticapitalist) activist in the US

While I don't necessarily share all of your idea, I admire your activism.

Porn is a crime now?

Lucky the ones living in countries where sex workers are "yet just another job" with their own union, retirement plans, and paying their tax just like everybody else.
:-D

Mine won't do static IP assignment within the local network, making a home server impossible (dynamic DNS only solves the external IP being dynamic).

Some boxes make it even easier by allowing you to use *machines name* in the rules instead of static IPs. (i.e.: not only can fix myserver to always be 192.168.10.1, you can also ask the routeur to forward port 443 to "myserver" by name instead of static "192.168.10.1").

As suggested by many, you can try OpenWRT derivative. Available either as a 3rd party re-flash, or directly available on some retail models.

Or even some comercial alternates. Fritz!Box by AVM tend to have very good characteristics (rules with names, for example, as mentioned above), and are the official boxes of a handful european providers (in AVM's own native Germany and in Switzerland, for as far as I know).