Building an Independent Internet: Mesh Network Experiments and the UDP 53 Hack

Recently, a friend shared an interesting point: the internet is essentially free and can be bypassed by leveraging UDP 53 access. I began to realize how fragile the commercial internet network topologies we use today truly are. Almost all of us depend absolutely on a handful of giant internet service providers. This architectural model takes the form of a rigidly centralized star topology, where all our hardware—from phones to laptops—must connect to a single central point, such as a cellular to