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Media › [VIDEO] How Occupy Wall Street Is Building Its Own Internethttp://prn.fm/2012/04/27/video-how-occupy-wall-street-is-building-its-own-internet/
Protesters at Zuccotti Park have enough resources to satisfy a small village: hot food, live entertainment, even a library.
But perhaps their most effective resource comes from a nine-foot-high pole known as the “Freedom Tower”, usually stationed at the southwest corner of the park and currently being redesigned to run on batteries charged by a biodiesel generator.
It’s free WiFi, but not as you know it.
“The movement is very much catalyzed and made possible by our newfound ability to communicate with each other directly,” says Isaac Wilder, who has camped at various Occupy Wall Street sites since September. “Rather than saying when you get home, ‘I was at the park today,’ they can say ‘hey, I am at Zuccotti park. Come join me.’”
Wilder and his friend Charles Wyble are the founders of The Free Network Foundation. In mid-October, they assembled two modems and six radio antennas to create the Freedom Tower, Occupy Wall Street’s public WiFi source. Their foundation has been paying about $80 each month to keep New York City’s resident protesters online.
Their larger goal, however, is an ambitious one: creating a new kind of Internet, with an off-the-grid component just for OWS.
When their work is done, the pair hope to have created a decentralized peer-to-peer network that provides discounted Internet access across the country, via what is known as a mesh network.
Mesh networks connect multiple nodes to one Internet access point. Think peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as Bittorrent, but physical connections. Many individual computers in the network can connect to the source — in this case the Internet access point — through connections with each other. In this way, many computers can share one access point.
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