The Hacker Mentality
When you hear the word “hacker” what’s the image that comes to your mind? It’s probably someone getting access to your social media accounts without your consent, maybe it’s a group of people launching a DDoS attack to bring down a website, or maybe it’s some mysterious figure getting unauthorized access to a website’s database. Sure, all of these are examples of scenarios where something gets “hacked”. But there’s a different, more inspiring side to the hacker mentality.
There’s a group of people, who, when put under restrictions, will find a way to do what they want to do. They will use technology in ways it was not intended to be used, find weird loopholes, and figure out a way to stand for what they believe. And this rebellious spirit is something I absolutely love.
The Redis Incident
Few months ago, the team that maintains redis (a database software), changed their license making it more restrictive. If you’re not sure what this means, here’s a less tech-ified explanation: A group of people volunteered to build a thing so that they can all enjoy using it. And then the one who officially “owned” the thing wanted to increase his profits. So he said people would have to now pay to use this thing they all built together (this is of course a simplication of what happened but you get the point). Guess what the people did when that happened? They basically boycotted redis and overnight built a replacement that was free for everyone.
Legacy of Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz, one of the co-founders of reddit, one day realized that his university has unlimited access to jstor but people in general had to pay to access it. He believed something was deeply wrong about that because knowledge should be open for all. So he did the most natural thing someone with the ability to code would, he wrote a python script that downloads a shit ton of jstor articles and left his laptop in the basement connected to MIT’s network to download as many of jstor article as he could so that he could later make them available for free (he was later jailed but there’s a lot more to this story).
What do these two stories have in common? Both of these represent the rebellous nature of people in tech. This is something I’ve noticed in people who live and breathe tech. They hate being told what not to do. If they believe in something, they will look for obscure loopholes and reach their goal. And here’s how all of this ties back to the recent internet shut down by the government, starting with a personal anectode.
The recent internet outage
When the internet was unavailable, I noticed that we were cut off from the global internet but not from the network among the ISPs. Essentially every home had a router connected to their ISP and every ISP was connected to other ISPs, thus forming a network (you might’ve heard about BDIX, this is essentially that). This meant communication wasn’t entirely cut off. You just needed to figure out a way to grab the internet and bring it into this network. And that’s what one of my brother’s friend did. On the second night of blackout, he built a chatroom that had a single global chat which was hosted entirely within this network and it worked. People could access it despite not having internet. After witnessing his proof of concept, I started building channels.
The first iteration was terrible and full of bugs but it worked. It allowed my friends to communicate among themselves in private channels. I wasn’t tracking how many people were using the chatrooms in realtime, however I found out that 40 channels were created in total in the 3 days it was alive. So I’m assuming (pessimistically) anywhere from 30-50 people have used this platform.
I wasn’t the only one who built something like this. Multiple other chatroom apps started appearing, some good, some not as good. Warp Chat and Jogajog were probably the most popular ones that were circulating around. At one point I noticed, Jogajog’s website mentioning they had over 20,000 users. These are insane numbers for non-professional hosting setups. But these madlads with their hacker mentality figured out a way to handle that.
Doing all this… without internet
The crazy part of all of this is THERE WAS NO INTERNET. If you aren’t familiar with how building software works, a lot of the times you have to download 3rd party packages to do something. When using nodejs you would write
npm install <package-name>and then it would download the package from the internet. With no access to internet I had to write a python script that would go through my existing projects and find the necessary files to install the required package into my project. This way I could at least reuse some of the packages I had downloaded in the past for other projects. And if I couldn’t find the package in my older projects, I’d just provide the script to my engineer friends and ask them to check if they had ever installed the package in some of their past projects. It was not how node packages are supposed to be installed but it was a hack-ey solution that worked. I’m sure the other people who built the other chatrooms have faced many such roadblocks, but then figured out similar hack-ey solutions to their problems and moved forward.
I saw chatrooms, ftp servers, media servers and even a jitsi server (I VIDEOCALLED FRIENDS WITHOUT INTERNET). All of these happened despite none of us being prepared for this. And this is what I love about this community. I may not know everyone behind these services individually, but I get the spirit. They’re just never willing to accept defeat. If the government decides we won’t have internet, we will just build our own internet.
What’s ahead?
A revolution is fought on many fronts. And maintaining the communication among the people is a very important one. With more preparation, the lack of internet can be entirely offset. However, to reach that stage, we have to work on a solution together. A solution that truly brings all the components of the internet starting from DNS servers, TLS servers to decentralized chatrooms and social medias. So that the next time the government decides to shut down the internet, we remain unaffected. I truly believe that even if the government decides to shut down this inter-ISP network along with the internet next time, we will still figure out a way to get something up. Because we always do.