Byzantium

This project was launched with a sprint on Feb 25-27, 2011. Sprints will be held the last weekend of every month.

The development wiki page is here.

The official mailing list is here. The Yahoogroup will be deleted on 14 July 2011.

Project Goals

The goal of Project Byzantium is to develop a communication system by which users can connect to each other and share information in the absence of convenient access to the Internet.

The use cases for such a system would be:

The infrastructure for accessing the internet has become damaged or inaccessible. (Eg, a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina.)
A central authority has decided to explicitly block or shutdown key infrastructure. (Eg, Egypt's recent internet blackout.)
A zombie apocalypse in which the personnel responsible for maintaining key infrastructure have all been turned.

The project aims to develop and publish the necessary documentation, best practices, and software to construct and support such a system. Our current approach is to start by investigating and documenting the existing technologies which would support such a system. In particular, mesh networking protocols, wireless networking technologies, and decentralized (or less-centralized) alternatives to internet addressing/naming systems such as DNS. In designing the system, we aim to reduce the dependency on exotic hardware or skill sets so that the system can be deployed quickly and easily by average internet users.

An additional goal is that users not actively participating in the mesh network (i.e., not running mesh routing software on their devices) can make loan modification use of the network without having to install anything new, jailbreak their phone, or pry the information out of a hacker infected with the Exsurgent virus.