Foojutsu

Recently, during the insurrectionary movements and pressures emerging in Egypt, Internetwork attention was given an opportunity to learn how to route around a new<->old form of Internet censorship: decoupling of networks. Egypt exercised an existing piece of legislation enacting state control over privately owned networks providing Internet service to citizens of the country. Packets could no longer find destinations within the country, and packets could no longer find their way out.

This was seen as a plight by a large number of people, a majority of whom perhaps have Internetwork privilege. The expectations of<->for packets to traverse this simulation<->extension of state privilege demanded remanding. Techniques were found, and development of flexible mesh networking renewed.

One technique that came to my attention was the notion of “dead drops.” In the present context, dead drops are USB sticks somehow embedded in public space. Devices must be physically connected to the USB stick to access its memory device for reading and<->or writing. Physical connection demands physical presence.

Connecting to a dead drop (Lyon, France: 2011)

Dead drops are locations for temporary offline storage and transfer. The memory device is a single node in a connectionless landscape, a graph without edges. After connecting, a new vector is introduced, and the USB stick is connected to a computing device with sufficient intelligence to access its memory contents and perform whatever ingeniousness lay dormant in waiting for the flux of power from beyond.

So this technique is not without its dangers, and that is good but not the best way to promote the exercise of the technique. Instead I want to suggest two modifications to this idea:

• Group Many USB Sticks Together
• Place Them In Cafés

Prototype from Carl Harris' project "Why Be Human?" (2010)

It’s a Digital Era Post Office

This fellow over here, Carl Michael Harris, whose thesis I have not read though I looked at the pictures, has constructed a canonical representation of this idea. There’s no reason to be constrained by the idea of this form – I would hope to see lavish artworks expressing the mood and mode of the places in which they are embedded (security and structural integrity will always be important to harmonimize cognitive expectations against tampering). But there is something to be said for form following function.

U.S. Air Force Sgt. Suzann K. Harry (Wildwood, N.J.) operates a switchboard in the underground command post at Strategic Air Command headquarters (Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska: 1967).

One of the user experience problems with dead drops is making and maintaining the physical connection to one’s computing device. The workaround is to carry a USB extension cable or to provide one in the dead drop zone. This could be a public service repaid by frequent theft of one’s cables, or more restricted to encourage forms of membership. However one connects, usage of a cable encourages exploration of a dead drop zone.

One can imagine new connecting devices—squids—with multiple extensions routing transfers through one high throughput port. LEDs on the connectors to indicate flow rate and signal shift assignment.

A Context for Social Complexification

I suggest cafés because it is an existing widely distributed and widely diverse milieu that will see immediate economic benefits from increased flow of probable patrons. It is a way to bring people into a place. Cafés are also physical locations which tend to accept the necessity of providing free Internetwork access to their patrons. Proximity to the Internetwork increases the probability of sneakernet exchange of information from anywhere on the Internet to the offline nodes hosted at the café.

We create a context for the emergence of microcultures around these dead drop zones.

In Conclusion

Someone should do this and see what starts happening. Let us know about it here.