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by ChuckMcM 4397 days ago
Which would be an excellent way to pitch it. I get the whole anarchist thing but calling it "PirateBox" is going to incite antibodies in nearly any IT dept. Its like naming the Wifi at your house "FBI Surveillance Van 2".

That said, with a unique 'box' identifier and a simple store and forward protocol you could have them link together into a simple network, where you could pass messages or files with addresses like box1!box2!box3!userhandle :-)

2 comments

> FBI Surveillance Van 2

I've heard of people doing this to scare the crap out of their low-key criminal neighbours.

> box1!box2!box3!userhandle

That's called Source Routing, and is what cjdns [1] does, although in a more federated and private manner. There's an OpenWRT firmware called meshbox [2] that works on the same devices as PirateBox (and more).

There's no apps shipped with it, but instead you get a secure, adhoc, near-zeroconf mesh network.

[1] https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns [2] https://github.com/SeattleMeshnet/meshbox

The bang path and "store and forward protocol" bit probably refers to mail routing in the UUCP days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing