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Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More
A slightly cryptic announcement by the Pirate Bay yesterday has the Internet speculating whether the site might have accidentally posted their April Fools joke early. “We’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air.”
You can be skeptical, it’s all right. One does not simply launch a fleet of autonomous server drones. But the fundamental idea of physically inaccessible data is compelling even if this first, perhaps jesting, plan disappears into thin air.
The immediate concerns are obviously energy and weight. But a simple system (they mention the Raspberry Pi) coupled to an efficient radio unit and GPS wouldn’t draw much more power than a smartphone, nor would it weigh much. As for getting it aloft (which isn’t just for fun; it increases radio range and of course makes the device troublesome to shut down), some people are thinking quadrocopters or the like, but it’s more likely that a semi-permanent lift method would be used – balloons, for instance, with some propellers to keep it in position. A few square feet of solar panels should suffice for the device, and the passive lift would keep it in the air even on cloudy days. But with today’s prices and materials, it would probably be expensive and fairly unreliable.
At any rate, the engineering isn’t so much the interesting part as the idea of bypassing the existing infrastructure and providing a true “cloud” solution to the distribution of data. Naturally you couldn’t have whole datacenters floating around, so the actual data will in fact be on the ground, whether it’s on a user’s device or out there somewhere and owned only via permissions. So this idea would be more like an indestructible meta-net where people can exchange critical meta-information like magnet links and hashes.
But at the same time, the whole air-server thing does seem a bit grandiose. Why not a mesh of cheap routers with USB sticks for storage, sitting on top of buildings or stuck to the tops of telephone poles? Perhaps this too will emerge, but it may be that a centralized effort by a motivated party (i.e. the Pirate Bay) needs to lead the way. International waters too have been used in the past for this kind of thing.
And on the off chance (not that unlikely) that this was just a bit of a joke, it was the best kind of joke: the kind that makes you think.
View the original article here
A slightly cryptic announcement by the Pirate Bay yesterday has the Internet speculating whether the site might have accidentally posted their April Fools joke early. “We’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air.”
You can be skeptical, it’s all right. One does not simply launch a fleet of autonomous server drones. But the fundamental idea of physically inaccessible data is compelling even if this first, perhaps jesting, plan disappears into thin air.
We’re just starting so we haven’t figured everything out yet. But we can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.Crazy, sure. But how crazy?
The immediate concerns are obviously energy and weight. But a simple system (they mention the Raspberry Pi) coupled to an efficient radio unit and GPS wouldn’t draw much more power than a smartphone, nor would it weigh much. As for getting it aloft (which isn’t just for fun; it increases radio range and of course makes the device troublesome to shut down), some people are thinking quadrocopters or the like, but it’s more likely that a semi-permanent lift method would be used – balloons, for instance, with some propellers to keep it in position. A few square feet of solar panels should suffice for the device, and the passive lift would keep it in the air even on cloudy days. But with today’s prices and materials, it would probably be expensive and fairly unreliable.
At any rate, the engineering isn’t so much the interesting part as the idea of bypassing the existing infrastructure and providing a true “cloud” solution to the distribution of data. Naturally you couldn’t have whole datacenters floating around, so the actual data will in fact be on the ground, whether it’s on a user’s device or out there somewhere and owned only via permissions. So this idea would be more like an indestructible meta-net where people can exchange critical meta-information like magnet links and hashes.
But at the same time, the whole air-server thing does seem a bit grandiose. Why not a mesh of cheap routers with USB sticks for storage, sitting on top of buildings or stuck to the tops of telephone poles? Perhaps this too will emerge, but it may be that a centralized effort by a motivated party (i.e. the Pirate Bay) needs to lead the way. International waters too have been used in the past for this kind of thing.
And on the off chance (not that unlikely) that this was just a bit of a joke, it was the best kind of joke: the kind that makes you think.
View the original article here
