http://www.nma.tv A group of hackers want to launch a satellite to build their own private internet, free from government censorship. Angry with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) now pending in Congress, the hackers announced at this Year's Chaos Communication Congress that a spaced-based internet is just the first step of an ambitious plan to put "a hacker on the moon" in 23 years. The Hackerspace Global Grid, as the project has been dubbed, will be no east task. Launching satellites with rockets is expensive. Satellites sent up with balloons are less precisely placed and harder to keep track of. And the "hackernet" is likely to be slow because of the time it would take for the signal to travel between terrestrial computers and the satellite. The legal implications of the plan are also murky. The hackers hope their networks would be left alone because no government holds jurisdiction over outer space. But governments could disable the satellites if they want to take the network down.
