Private Internet?

booman

booman

Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming
Staff member
You know how people will use a Ham radio and chat with each other anonymously?
I've been wondering if there was a way to do this with Dial-Up...
Create a private internet and find other people out there who want to be anonymous and use text-only browsers/email.
I'm sure there are people who want to relive the retro internet and hangout 90's style.

Would this be possible with Linux?
Do you NEED a service provider?
Could this be done for free like Ham Radios?
 
I used to visit BBSes occasionally, back in the late 1980s.

The easiest way would be to just more or less replicate what was used back then.

You definitely don't need an ISP. It's just modem to modem over a phone line. But you would need at least one phone line and modem for the host, and that would only allow one connection at a time. It would get expensive if you want more than one person to be connected at any time.

With just one phone/modem it wouldn't be anything like a private internet.

If you had to have your own private internet, then using the latest tech would be the best way.

How about using laser beams?
http://www.fastlinks-wireless.com/laser-beam-communications/

:D
 
One connection huh?
What about using an old phone switch that allows multiple lines or extensions?
Could other people call in to different extensions and then connect to the server?

Lasers? Ok, that sounds expensive.

I was just thinking of a way to have an open, free internet where only people who are willing to "go retro" could use it.

I have seen there is free ISP for Dial-Up internet. Some libraries use it.
But its still too public.
 
As I remember the vast majority of switch boards were incompatible with modems and fax machines.

In any case, you would still have to have x number of phone lines to handle x number of external calls. So you might have 20 extensions, but only 5 external phone lines (on the same phone number). Meaning only 5 people can be making external calls at the same time.
 
Sounds like Dial up isn't a solution.
Too bad we can't send digital data over Ham Radio signals.... or can we?
 
There's a video here showing how to snoop on amateur radio data:

Anyone can do that, because there are audio feeds on the net.

If you want to transmit you need a licence and some expensive radio kit.

It's not private as such.
 
Wow that is pretty cool. Intercepting conversations over HAM Radio...
Too bads its slow and only translates audio into code/text.

Oh well, it was just and idea I'm sure people have thought about before.
 
It is slow to allow it to work at a low power over long distances (possibly 1000s of miles), in poor weather conditions, etc.
 
wow, I didn't realize that.
So all the internet was shutdown, we technically could use radio waves from our HAM radio to communicate over the computer.
Have they used this in a movie?
 
There's no doubt that it works, this is part of the birth of the internet.

In 1977, DARPA created a packet radio network called PRNET in the San Francisco Bay area and conducted a series of experiments with SRI to verify the use of ARPANET (a precursor to the Internet) communications protocols (later known as IP) over packet radio links between mobile and fixed network nodes. This system was quite advanced, as it made use of direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) modulation and forward error correction (FEC) techniques to provide 100 kbit/s and 400 kbit/s data channels. These experiments were generally considered to be successful, and also marked the first demonstration of Internetworking, as in these experiments data was routed between the ARPANET, PRNET, and SATNET (a satellite packet radio network) networks. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, DARPA operated a number of terrestrial and satellite packet radio networks connected to the ARPANET at various military and government installations.
Click to expand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
 
ARPANET was mostly radio-based, obviously the military wouldn't have been able to make much use of it if it was cable-based.
 
Good point!
Who wants to run cables across thousands of miles of water and land?
 
More to the point, cables require fixed installations and are thus an area of vulnerability. You can use the tor network to pretty well anonymize yourself, and that still runs on the regular Internet. The only problem is that accessing tor will pretty much guarantee you come to the attention of the spooks. It's an open question as to whether or not the NSA can snoop on tor traffic, but informed opinions suggest that, AT BEST, the NSA can only get and decrypt a small portion of the traffic.

Much easier to just compromise the user's computer.
 
Whoa, I've never heard of tor before. Apparently its still in use but how do we use it?
Or is it something that servers use?
 
I use tor frequently to circumvent the local government censorship. It's often slow, but it works.

Reading about the construction of the onion routing hidden network will answer some of your questions.

Believe it or not, there are times when somebody must be flicking a switch in the IT Ministry here, and even sites like AOA are blacked out to me (others, too, and I can only guess at the reasons). The tor proxy gets me around that kind of problem. There is most likely a package in Mint that includes both the tor browser plugin and something like privoxy or polipo, which are names of actual filtering proxy clients that communicate with the tor hidden network, and are used in conjunction, chained with tor.
 
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