Dowse
Dowse is a smart digital network appliance for home based local area networks.
Dowse is a smart digital network appliance for home based local area networks (LAN), but also small and medium business offices, that makes it possible to connect objects and people in a friendly, conscious and responsible manner.
- The project's own website: http://dowse.equipment/
Dowse aims to be a critical engineering project, abiding to the principles stated in the Critical Engineers Manifesto.
Dowse provides a central point of soft control for all local traffic: from ARP traffic (layer 2) to TCP/IP (layers 3 and 4) as well as application space, by chaining a firewall setup to a transparent proxy setup. A core feature for Dowse is that of hiding all the complexity of such a setup. Its motto is: "to perceive and affect all devices in the local sphere".
By replacing the outdated proprietary ISP ‘gateway’ with an open and user-visible device, Dowse creates a new platform that leverages its topologically unique access and influence in the domain of the local-area network. It introduces a visible, malleable, knowable communications hub to the language of the small network.
Dowse seizes on the power of the technologically/topologically necessary gateway/hub role to create development opportunities which cannot exist on other platforms. Dowse becomes the locus of a specific new class of end-user-visible applications which are able to perceive and affect all devices in the local sphere, whether they are open or closed.
The project is led by the team at Dyne.org.
