Month: February 2017

I’m not exactly sure where the two assignments for this week begin and end but the two ideas I’d like to pursure include a project relevant to my thesis work and a contribution to a NYC mesh network.

My thesis project its related to “people counting” based on radio communications. Initially my plan was to use Wifi and Bluetooth but I’m curious if it’s feasible to use GSM as the core technology. What I’m able to do with Wifi is sniff packets and tally unique MAC addresses of the various wifi clients and devices sending probe requests. This number is ok in terms of counting people but theres a lot of problems with people having multiple Wifi devices in certain areas and people disabling wifi connections on their phones. GSM seems like a great solution to this problem since most people (in highly connected economies) carry only one GSM device and rarely disable its signal. I’m not sure if this is achievable by just listening to GSM and demodulating (my preferred approch) or if I would need to set up my own BTS and actually have devices connect to it. Ideally this set up can be small enough to “wear” and it would count/estimate the population surrounding it’s user. There are a lot of potential applications of this kind of people counting. It could be used by retailers to gauge for traffic in an area, by city planners to understand where people experience the most crowding, or by organizers to estimate the size of an event without relying on 3rd party data or labor intensive hand counting.

A separate project, that would probably utilize a lot of the same research, would be some kind of contribution to the NYC mesh network. It seems pretty easy to join their network at a low cost and they have a bunch of volunteer opportunities to help install and maintain infrastructure. I was thinking that it could be cool to set up a node and maybe build a short range GSM system on top of their internet connection. I don’t know how realistic this is but I like the idea of contributing to a network that may help subvert telecom monopolies and improve local communication during emergencies.

Setting up openVPN took a few hours of flipping back and forth between the documentation for openVPN, our Towers of power git hub and the virtual machine. Not to mention the obligatory google searches. I tried to do as much in the terminal as possible; using the nano editor to create the conf files and navigating the file paths. Ultimately I think I have a decent understanding of what I  did. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to generate my own CA and client keys which in retrospect may not have been necessary. One difference I had from the instructions was that I ended up having to use the sudo command a lot. I’m not sure if this means I was working in some sort of protected directory or if that was something we were intended to figure out. Either way I’m glad I seemingly got this up and running in the end. I understand how this is relevant for secure connections to to devices like a BSC but I’m still a little fuzzy on why this would be necessary exactly (I know it has to do with public vs private IPs but that concept hasn’t totally clicked yet.)

-Built to last reading-

These chapters of built to last really drove home the benefit of having guiding principles or core ideologies behind a company (or any institution). However my concern with this idea is that, as far as I understand it, it is in some conflict with the way the American corporate finance and legal system work. While a founder or CEO may appreciate the need and usefulness of core principles and favoring other ideal over profit most of our large companies are publicly traded and are majority owned by a series of atomized investors who rely on these profits exclusively. Ford may be a stable long term business but how much can that matter to a person who’s close to retirement and who holds an investment in the company through a byzantine structure of special retirement amounts, mutual funds and stock brokers. It seems like our system of investment is arranged to create un-visionary companies focused on short term profits. With this in mind It makes sense to me why many of the behemoths of Silicon Valley have adopted corporate structures that insulate founders & CEOs from their investors. This seems like a smart move to preserve the power of core principles (or at least core decision makers). But I wonder if this has its own, unaccounted costs. These chapters really made me think about what a financial system that incentivizes goal oriented organizations rather than profit hungry companies would look like.

(I have some screenshots of the terminal but I’m gonna hold of on posting them until I’m sure they don’t contain sensitive information about my computer) :/