Via, well, literally dozens of people (in one fast condensed rush on Twitter last night, in fact, suggesting a very successful viral campaign, be it deliberate or purely serendipitous), here’s a great way to get something good out of the economic collapse: why don’t we all pitch in and buy a bankruptcy fire-sale satellite, which we can then redeploy to provide wireless internet to a developing nation that could really benefit from it?
Not only a brilliant and ambitious bit of humanitarianism for the not-quite-fully-networked world, but confirmation of the practicality of a chunk of sf worldbuilding I’ve been kicking around for years… 🙂
The stranded satellite and the P2P DNS articles may be related. With Homeland Security and the corporate ISPs starting to limit both access to and content of the internet it may be a good idea to identify cheap alternative ways to access the internet.
I’m not near enough a techie to figure this out but, somebody better. Or, within a decade the internet will not bear any resemblance to its free wheeling origins.