WIFI LEACH SERVER

This is continuing on from a rant at the start of my phlog post 
"2020-02-29An_Anti-Logging_Protest", but you might be just as well 
served by reading it independently.

Years ago when I was paying more for less internet data (things 
haven't changed much in terms of the advertised plans, but I've 
since found ways to sort-of cheat the system to get more than 
enough for my modest requirements (for mosts months at least)), I 
hit upon an idea for a way to download videos and linux distro 
images for free.

The basic plan was nothing remarkable: go to free wifi hotspots and 
download things from them. Generally I'd try to park near a 
building with free wifi and leave a laptop in the car running wget 
to grab as many things of interest as it could before I got back 
from shopping. Usually I'd get back to find that the wifi dropped 
out five minutes after I left, and all I got was the first few 
megabytes (which I eventually learnt not to use when resuming the 
download, because often the last few bytes turned out to have been 
corrupted).

Besides that problem, I generally don't like cities and do my best 
to avoid them. When I am there, I'm generally running all around 
trying to catch various stores before they shut for the day, so 
that I don't have to waste fuel and half a day making another trip 
there (they're a fair distance away as well). The stores in local 
small towns that I do visit regularly don't have free Wifi. 
Overall, it didn't work very well.

The solution: The Eye-Fi is/was (hmm, was, the company shut down in 
2016 according to Wikipedia) a WiFi SD card to allow photos on 
digital cameras to be accessed wirelessly. This seemed a bit silly 
to me, "just pull the card out and stick it in a reader you lazy 
bugger!", but it turned out that they were running Linux and people 
were able to hack into the cards and get them to run commands, 
including wget. Some of the other WiFi SD cards from other brands 
were similarly hackable. The only problem was that people generally 
didn't have much practical use for them because they weren't 
powerful and had little I/O. All they really had was Wifi, lots of 
flash storage, and low power usage.

Well had I got an application for that! Strap on a rechargable 
battery with a voltage regulator, and you've got a tiny package 
which might be hidden somewhere around a shopping centre or store 
with free wifi. There it sits, gradually downloading a list of 
items (maybe even updating that list from one that I put online for 
it). Then later on I come back and pick it up, charge up the 
battery and copy off the downloaded files. Perfect!

Except for two things. One, they weren't cheap (in Australia at 
least, I remember being frustrated by how cheap they were 
apparantly in American stores), it was dubious that I couldn't just 
spend an equivalent amount more on my internet for the year and 
download all that I wanted without the fuss (I didn't, just did 
without instead). Two, I _really_ don't go to cities much, so the 
gap between depositing the thing and picking it up could be months. 
If I have to make a dedicated trip then that could be a 200Km round 
trip and the cost of fuel for that one trip would blow the costs 
completely out of proportion.

So it wouldn't work for me, but I expect for someone living in a 
city who might have been able to find some used Eye-Fi cards, it 
could have been much more practical. Though most such people 
interested in computers and electronics aren't nearly as cheap 
about their internet as I am.

------- The new Idea:

So in the phlog post I'm whining about the server that I use for 
Gopher needing the latest encryption protocols with SFTP when I'm 
trying to upload content, and it's causing me headaches. The gist 
is that I really want to be running my own Gopher server, but as 
noted in "2019-12-15Whats_In_This_For_Me" (I think) my cheap 
regional internet prevents that from working, and it would 
compromise my anonymity.

But what if I had lots of these WiFi leaches (very random fact that 
I just dicovered: there's a place called Leach in Oklahoma USA, 
which had a population of 220 in the year 2000), I could serve the 
site from them! It wouldn't work of course, the routers for the 
network that the Wifi is on would need to be configured to have 
inbound requests served by the leach device. Maybe you could hack 
them, but practically it's not going to work.

So still no good for me, but it leads me to another idea. What if 
the idea wasn't to be on the internet, but just the local network 
for that WiFi hotspot. So the WiFi Leach submits its local IP 
address to some public list/database on the internet where other 
people can find it. They go to the location, connect to the same 
WiFi network, and request web,gopher,etc. content from the WiFi 
Leach using its local IP address. What you've got then is basically 
digital geo-caching, where people could tour WiFi hotspots viewing 
and adding to content on these WiFi Leaches. Little pages only to 
be viewed by those who visit the place in person. I think that 
would really appeal to some people. Who knows, maybe people are 
already doing similar things.

Power would be an issue, even with the relatively low consumption 
of an Eye-Fi card, I'm guessing that someone would still have to 
keep charging/changing the battery fairly regularly. Maybe solar 
powered and hidden on the roof of places, or in the guttering? Does 
anyone who works in these places ever disconnect an 
important-looking box connected to a plug-pack in a power point? 
I'm sure there are ways and means.

Expanding on the idea a bit: What if users moving between WiFi 
hotspots that have WiFi Leaches could sync changes between them, so 
that you could actually propogate a network through all of these 
independent local WiFi hotspots? Its been a long time since I did 
any wardriving, but I'm guessing that in big cities there are 
probably lots of WiFi hotspots with overlapping coverage. Leaches 
on overlapping hotspots could sync between each other directly. Now 
I guess we're getting into the idea of distributed networks, which 
I've never really looked into myself (I'm not even sure if that's 
the correct term for them), so there might be a lot of software 
already developed.

- The Free Thinker, 2020-02-29