The phone companies failed at the fiber to the curb promise in most of the USA and many other places. (I have had fiber to the curb at my house since 1992 but all it provides is Comcast cable.)

But fiber is cheap now, and getting cheaper, and unlike wires it presents no electrical dangers. I propose a market in gear for neighbourhoods setting up a fast NLAN, by running a small fiber bundle through their backyards (or, in urban row housing, possibly over their roofs.) Small fiber conduits could be buried in soil more easily than watering hoses, or run along fences. Then both ends, meeting the larger street or another NLAN, could join up for super-high connectivity.

I would join both ends because then breaks in this amateur-installed line don’t shut it down. The other end need not be at super-speed, just enough so phones work etc. until a temporary above-ground patch can be run above the break.

Of course, you would need consent of all the people on the block (though at the back property line you only need the consent of one of the two sides at any given point.) Municipal regulations could also give neighbours access to the poles though they would probably have to pay a licenced installer.

An additional product to sell would be a neighbourhood server kit, to provide offsite backup for members and video storage. Depending on legal changes, it could be possible to have a block cable company handling the over-the-air DTV stations, saving the need to put up antennas. Deals could be cut with the satellite companies to place a single dish with fancy digital decoder in one house. The cable companies would hate this but the satellite companies might love it.

Of course there does need to be something to connect to at the end of the street for most of these apps, though not all of them. After all, fiber is not that much better than a bundle of copper wires over the short haul of a neighbourhood. But if there were a market, I bet it would come, either with fiber down main streets, fixed wireless or aggregated copper.

You may be familiar with Stegonography, the technique for hiding messages in other messages so that not only can the black-hat not read the message, they aren’t even aware it’s there at all. It’s arguably the most secure way to send secret data over an open channel. A classic form of “stego” involves encrypting a message and then hiding it in the low order “noise” bits of a digital photograph. An observer can’t tell the noise from real noise. Only somebody with the key can extract the actual message.

This is great but it has one flaw — the images must be much larger than the hidden text. To get down a significant amount of text, you must download tons of images, which may look suspicious. If your goal is to make a truly hidden path through something like the great firewall of China, not only will it look odd, but you may not have the bandwidth.

Spammers, bless their hearts (how often do you hear that?) have been working hard to develop computer generated text that computers can’t readily tell isn’t real human written text. They do this to bypass the spam filters that are looking for patterns in spam. It’s an arms race.

Can we use these techniques and others, to win another arms race with the national firewalls? I would propose a proxy server which, given the right commands, fetches a desired censored page. It then “encrypts” the page with a cypher that’s a bit more like a code, substituting words for words rather than byte blocks for byte blocks, but doing so under control of a cypher key so only somebody with the key can read it.

Most importantly, the resulting document, while looking like gibberish to a human being, would be structured to look like a plausible innocuous web page to censorware. And while it is rumoured the Chinese have real human beings looking at the pages, even they can’t have enough to track every web fetch.

A plan like this would require lots and lots and lots of free sites to install the special proxy, serving only those in censored countries. Ideally they would only be used on pages known to be blocked, something tools behind the censorware would be measuring and publishing hash tables about.

Of course, there is a risk that the censors would deliberately pretend to join the proxy network to catch people who are using it. And of course with live human beings they could discover use of the network so it would never be risk-free. On the other hand, if use of the proxies were placed in a popular plugin so that so many people used it as to make it impossible to effectively track or punish, it might win the day.

Indeed, one could even make the encrypted pages look like spam, which flows in great volumes in and out of places like China, stegoing the censored web pages in apparent spam!

(Obviously proxying in port 443 is better, but if that became very popular the censors might just limit 443 to a handful of sites that truly need it.)