Satellite Internet used in Haiti disaster. Image by ChrisDag via Flickr
Hot news from the Internet activist community: Good guy hackers plan to launch satellites to fight the Stop Online Piracy Act and create a censorship-free Internet.
They also want to put a man on the moon.
Really.
What they will probably get — if anything — is a low-bandwidth, expensive to access Internet that will still be subject to censorship and easily shut down if some angry nation — or bad guy hacker — decides to.
Can a space-based Internet be done? Sure, it’s already been done. Will hackers be able do it? Questionable. Will it stop censorship? Hardly.
Commercial satellite Internet has been available for a number of years, but it is slow, capacity limited, and the trip to and from space adds a noticeable delay that can disrupt some applications. There are sound reasons why long-distance telephone, television and Internet long ago moved from satellites to terrestrial microwave and then fiber optic.
The BBC has an excellent story that explains the hackers’ idea, outlined in Berlin at the just-ended Chaos Communication Congress:
The project’s organisers said the Hackerspace Global Grid will also involve developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.
Longer term they hope to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon.
The hacker activist Nick Farr first put out calls for people to contribute to the project in August. He said that the increasing threat of internet censorship had motivated the project.
‘The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let’s take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities,’ Mr Farr said.
Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcoursey/2011/12/31/star-wars-meets-sopa-in-hacker-space-program/
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