The Antisocial Engineer's Guide to Community Building: Deploying a neighborhood Honeypot

Welcome everyone. Um, I am John Ford and uh, just so you know a little bit about me, I have 20 years in the tech industry, the majority of it here on this campus at Microsoft. Uh, and about four years ago, I decided that what I really wanted to do was be a mental health counselor. Uh, so I left the industry and now do that. But today I'm going to talk about uh basically the extreme introverts guide to community building. And I am delighted to see that there are so many of us in here. Um I would make you talk to your neighbor, but I'm not that mean this morning. So just kind of a quick overview of

where we're going today, kind of the map, uh what the problem was, why I cared, what I did, and then maybe what you can take to your own neighborhoods. So the problem is this is where I live. I mean not literally here. This is actually Houston, but very suburban, lots of culde-sacs, very little interaction between people. Um, precoid, nobody even walked around. We had sidewalks, but like nobody used them. Um, lockdown actually changed that and that's persisted since then. Um, and so that's been sort of a positive change since that period. But the problem is is this is what I want, right? I really want this like super arty neighborhood where people are talking to each other. Um some, you

know, neighbors around. Cool, weird little art like that dragon statue. Um this space is apparently so rare I could not find any photo that looked like this. I had to AI generate it. But I am a firm believer in the be the change mentality. And so I thought to myself, well, probably not going to get here in one step, but what's a little slice of something that moves towards this type of neighborhood? However, I am an incredibly awkward human. Um, I started thinking about going and knocking on my neighbors doors and I cannot even express the amount of terror that generated in me. What would I talk about? like what if they said something I didn't know how to respond to? Um, and

so I started thinking, okay, me going to the neighbors is not going to work. How do I get them to come to me and maybe have something to talk about? Um, and so I started thinking, what would a honeypot look like in this in this instance? Um, you know, a little bit about sort of why it matters, right? Um, we are in a moment where people are feeling a lot more disconnected, a lot more uncertain, and where systems that they're used to maybe aren't as dependable as they used to be. And so local connections, right, we know are very resilient. Um, we see that everywhere. And so the thing about infrastructure is it helps you create

community without this sort of non-stop socializing, right? Like good infrastructure just breeds community. If you think about neighborhood parks or even our little library here, um we don't have to have a meeting to say, "Hey everybody, we're going to have community in this spot." It just happens because it's built in a way that encourages community. Um so that's kind of what I'm starting to try to do with this project is create some community infrastructure. So I started thinking, well, what about a little library? uh my BFF and his husband started a little project like this at the local uh Burning Man that I go to, Critical Northwest, about an hour north of here. If you all are in the

area, it's amazing. And it was a fantastically successful project. Um people stopped by, they would pick up books, there would be all these conversations around what did you pick? Did you like what was there? What did you bring? Um so that was amazing. Um, and I started thinking, well, maybe this one could have some nerdy books, some games, uh, maybe some puzzles. And I started thinking like, what if I can make it a little bit quirkier? And so I thought, well, what if I have a little library that also has a hyper local Wi-Fi? Um, for those of you who are older, just think LAN. Um, so I live in a community with a lot of

tech workers. I live quite close to here. Um, and I thought, wouldn't it be neat if this also involved some sort of tech? So, in this model, the Wi-Fi is just this offline hotspot. It's super local, not connected to the outside world. Um, everybody is already connected to the outside world through the cell network. So, there's not really much value in replicating that. Um, the physical library, which you see here, can kind of point to the virtual library. So, you can see this little sign um in the lower right of the box that says, "This library has Wi-Fi." Um, and then when you click it, the Wi-Fi capture portal brings up what you see on

the right, which is the content that's in the digital library. So, why would you care about a hyperlocal Wi-Fi, right? Well, novelty. Humans like things that are odd and weird. Um, it's really customizable for local interests, right? So, I can do things like local phone books, a little digital fridge for kids in our area, sort of whatever that might look like. It's a low information exposure. Like, literally, this goes across the street for me and that's where it ends. Um, and that's because I extended it. So, it really goes about the size of this conference room. You have to be really next to it to use it. And that means there's this less risk of

that context collap that collapse that we get on the internet, right? So when someone looks at something here or does something with this, it's not your mom and your kids and your co-worker and your boss and your neighbors and like your friends like it's the people who live here. So it's much much more manageable. So I started thinking, well, what technology exists for this? And my first thought was I could do a plain HTML website like whip out the really old '9s style websites from back in the day, but that seemed kind of boring. Um, and there's these multiple projects that compress educational websites for offline use. So Quicks has like Wikipedia and Gutenberg, TED Talks, a

bunch of other stuff. Something called Rachel that's really focused on uh kids stuff. So off kids stuff. Uh so there's the con academy, a bunch of kids books, some lesson plans, also more TED talks. People love adding that. Um and then there's these things like Calibri, Moodle, Nextcloud, etc., etc., which are file sharing systems, learning management systems, um and some blogging systems. So I found there's this tech that's called Internet in a Box that's designed for rural schools. And so it manages all that stuff that I talked about on the prior slide. And it creates a hotspot and this Wi-Fi capture portal. It also includes something called Caliber Web, which if you're familiar with the

Caliber book system, it's kind of like that. It's a fork of it. I think can use it as a backend. Much nicer front-end system. Um, and it all fits on a Raspberry Pi 3. So, um, or later, right? So, you can do it quite small. So sometimes I always wonder like how you know how hard would this to be for someone else. Uh if you can follow a knitting pattern or you have ever googled an error message you would be good here. Um but just to be honest about what my skills are is I you know studied compsai years ago not a developer never pushed production code. Um I'm currently a mental health counselor so my tech skills have really

rusted right. I I got out before the AI nonsense. Um I use Linux Mint, but I'm not a Linux admin. Um I love to tinker with stuff. This was actually the first time I'd ever used a Raspberry Pi. I'm pretty crafty person. The most important skill on there is that final bullet. I am willing to post questions on GitHub. Uh so there are a couple of things that came up in both the ones that I created for this where I needed some assistance from the maintainers. They are incredibly responsible responsive. Um I posted stuff and they issued me a patch overnight. Uh so the technical specs, uh Raspberry Pi 3 or higher, that gives you the Wi-Fi

hotspot. Uh usually you need about two gigs of RAM to kind of keep everything going. I got two one TBTE SD cards. Um I have not used anywhere near that amount of content. Maybe use 128 gig. Um, the antenna, which I'll talk about later, I had an old UPS, so I put it on one so that it would blast through power outages and give people something to do. Um, and of course, very important to have this indoor ledge. Decup's optional. >> So, I thought a little bit about the power. This one was a little bit tricky. I originally really wanted the pie out in the physical library with a cool solar panel on top. That seemed really

neat. Um, however, if you live here, you know what our Seattle winters look like. This is, I mean, the most sun we usually get. Um, and so by the time I started specking that out, it looked like there was a really big battery, a lot of panels. If I was going to put all that out there, I kind of felt like I needed a lock box. Um, and so I started thinking, can I just get the access point to the box from inside rather than taking the box out to where I wanted the access point? And it turns out Panda antennas are 80 bucks. So, that was a very quick fix. If you do backups or monitoring for a li

living, please cover your ears for the next slide. You're about to be horrified. Um, my backups really are just copy the entire SD card to a new one. So, you know, something goes wrong, I can sort of roll back. Um, the extent of my monitoring is I have this simple script on my local laptop that looks for the SSID for the Wi-Fi to see if it's up. If it doesn't, it pops a note and says, "Hey, you might want to do something with that." I found that if I left it running for a week and a half or so without any intervention, something went wonky with the networking stack. So, I created a cron job to reboot it once a week.

Solved. Uh, a really important part of um, honeypotss is that they're attractive, right? And so, one of the things you kind of have to do with like the internet in the box piece is you really need to curate because if you put everything on there, it's going to be just overwhelming for a random passer by. Um, so it's really set for, like I said, for rural schools. You can go on and on with the amount of stuff you can add for it. There's no search across the technologies. So, for those of you who are internet olds like myself, think of this as a Yahoo directory you're building. This is not something where Google exists in the world yet. Um, and

so, you know, something isn't part of your vision for one of these boxes, probably just delete it. Um, so this gives you an example. This is me scrolling through the they're called Zenacks for quicks. So, all of this is content that I could add to the box. And you'll notice that it is still going and I'm mostly just filling time up here to get you through this video. There is really an enormous amount of stuff and it's hard to convey exactly how much that is without doing something like this. We're almost there. I believe Ted is near the bottom with T. And this isn't even the Rachel pieces and Calibri and so forth, right? So what I included um so I included

books and local information. Uh this was what was backed by caliber web. Um let me put up creative commons comics. Carrot and pepper is one of my favorite one of those. Uh so that it was very clearly all ages. Um I included Pokemon as sort of a signal that this is for all ages and fun not meant to be super serious. I included Wikipedia and Gutenberg and some wiki books just because I thought they were interesting. Um, appropriedia is like a sort of low tech more solar focused. You can almost kind of think of it as solar punk for developing countries type wiki. Uh, restarters and I fix it or for fixing things. That was sort of to seed a

little bit of my right of repair opinions in my neighborhood. So, this is what the books look like. You'll notice there on the far left I have like my local phone book and the digital fridge. Um, you'll also notice that two of the Carrot and Pepper books don't look like they fully loaded. The Wi-Fi is we it is not speedy. Um, so I took a picture a little bit too quick there. There's also this is what the project Gutenberg looks like. Again, pretty pretty simple. Nothing unusual there. And then this is what uh the sort of offline versions of Wikipedia and the Pokemon Wikipedia look like. There's also one of these here. So if you have not yet been to the Bides

community library, which is across from the t-shirt section, um there are two amazing things in it. One is you can take any of the physical books you see and there's one of these little W we free digital libraries that you can connect to and it's loaded with things that I thought might be more appropriate for Bside. So there's sort of some wellness stuff, a little bit of technical things, um some pieces about security for all. Um and then I'm still suiting the right to repair stuff. So there's some of that in there as well. Um this is not secretly part of the CTF hacking contest, so don't go nuts on it. Um I don't think it's particularly

hardened and that actually brings me to the security for it. Um so for the most part um it's through obscurity and isolation. This isn't you know a critical community infrastructure. The power decision made it a little bit easier because the physical security right it's now in my home. You have to break in if you want it. Uh network isolation. It actually starts with the adapter being you can put it both on your Wi-Fi and have a hot spot. So you can like load things up before you do that. And then once I was done, I just deleted the connection to mine. So it really is just the Pi box if you get into it. Um, and so I actually

found that the most dangerous uh thing to this Pi, at least at home, is dusting. If you if you knock off the antenna by accident while you're doing it, um when the cron job comes around and reboots things, the network stack gets very upset that it cannot find the Wi-Fi that or the adapter for the uh antenna that it thinks it's there and kind of just falls over. So, don't dust. Um, the other piece for this is, you know, just thinking about like honeypotss are attractive. Um, I did some CSS editing to smooth out internet in a boxes kind of rough edges. I used a projector to get branding on the side of the box. Um, you can see my super

technical setup here with a stack of books and some shims shoved in to try to get the projector level for the end of the hall. Um, and then as I sort of put up the the physical box, I also added like a dog leash holder uh so people can linger if they want to. It's also useful to advertise your honeypot so that people know that it exists. Open Street Map has this really cool feature that's called bookcases and they've defined that quite broadly. Um, it's basically anything that's a public box that has things people can take from it. So there's like mutual aid fridges on there, tool libraries, little libraries, etc. Um, so you can even see

here we're currently where that red arrow is and there are some boxes not that far from us, right? So if you have nothing better to do, you can drive around and go look at whatever those boxes are.

So uh sort of for future things I want to do um internet a box comes with AWS stats um and it shows about two or three connections a month. So not huge amount of usage although that's been growing some over time I think as people start to find it and trust it. Um it was up and down due to the dusting a lot at the beginning. Um, the physical library definitely shows weekly use. Like books go in and out of there pretty regularly. Um, and that's been really interesting to see. Now that I have this, I actually feel like I have something to talk to the neighbors about. And so I'm kind of thinking about a like potluck or

barbecue um sometime this summer. Um, and I'm really thinking about putting a bench next to it because I uh specifically got the antenna so that it would go across the street, which is where the children wait for the school bus. Little bit sneaky that way. Um, and I would love to have a bench on my side so that parents can maybe sit there while their kids are across the street waiting for the bus. >> So, lots of other community uses for this. Um, I originally thought about it as potentially like offline disaster information. We get a lot of wind storms around here and sometimes power will go out for a couple of days. U, I

eventually decided that wasn't that interesting for like 90% of the time. So, I have a little bit on there, but not much. The second bullet I think is really interesting, right? This is very censorship resistant. It is, like I said, about the hotspots about the size of this room. And so if there's stuff that like goes out across different ones of these, again, someone to find it has to be very close to where you are. And then you could also do these themed little libraries, right? You could have crafts with supplies and some patterns. Um I've heard of someone who did like a gardening one where it's a seed exchange and then all the books that they have

online or excuse me are uh gardening books. Um similarly with some of these others. So there's basically an endless set of things that you might use this to create in your area. A couple considerations for this, right? Um not all books are creative commons or public domain. So decide what your legality riskreward is for this. Uh there's also social parts of internet in a box. Uh so there's something kind of like email where people can kind of load and unload messages there and send them to each other. There's some message boards, etc. All of that probably requires ongoing moderation, right? At a minimum, I found that public spaces require trash removal, and that's probably true for a digital space as

well. And so, I decided not to do that because I didn't want to have to do that on a weekly basis, but something you could do. Uh so I will I don't know whether we make these slides available online or not but you can write me my info is at the end just where to find information about how to do this. You can find me I do talks about burnout and imposttor syndrome through O'Reilly the book company with the animals on front. Uh I do coaching counseling through selfwit. My social side of me is on Masttoon because I'm an introvert who does not like to talk to people. Um, and I'm happy if anybody emails me if you

want more info or slides or anything like that. And with that, does anybody have any questions? And if you don't, um, please scan and give feedback. >> Yeah, I see person in front there. >> I have something to talk about. >> I love that idea. >> I deploy like Wi-Fi public housing villages.

>> That sounds amazing. I I would I would love to learn more about that. >> Yes. Yes. And behind you was a person Fantastic. >> Yes.

>> Yes. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Yeah. Mostic is a is a great example. One of the things I've sort of been thinking about is do I want to like put up a repeater at my house and then sort of maybe distribute something to my neighbors or something like that. So yeah, >> I think once you get into it, it's like this baby step kind of opens up this range of things after that. Great comment. Yeah. >> Would you be willing to make a copy of your card? >> Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Anything? Yeah, go ahead. >> If there is a I don't have them posted currently. Um, is there cat? Do we have a spot where we put things after this?

>> Not. That's a good idea. We might >> um >> set something up because I have a next cloud server I posted. >> Yeah. I would say barring that, just write at Gmail and I'd be happy to send you some. Cool. Anything else? >> Thank you all so much.