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 advantaged
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advantaged (pronounced advantage - 'd') is a scalable, resilient networking
daemon addressing internet access in the wake of natural disasters. Climate
change has produced and will continue to produce devastating storms,
hurricanes, and sea level rise at rates that humanity has never seen before.
Given the prominence of this issue, several past HackMIT teams have banded
together to tackle this challenge by developing applications which allow
affected households to call out for food, water, or transportation to a
hospital. These have been incredibly impressive, and we applaud all the
progress which has hitherto been made.

However, we find it concerning that all these previously proposed solutions
require a high-bandwidth internet connection to function. Sadly, this is not
often what reality looks like. In the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, 15% of the
population in Baton Rouge and New Orleans were without an Internet connection
for days after the storm. In such a situation, the options are slim for the
affected, especially those who are otherwise disadvantaged. We aspire to change
this.

We introduce advantaged, a cutting-edge mesh networking solution designed to
democratize the internet in the aftermath of severe storms like Ida. advantaged
restores internet service in densely populated areas utilizing existing
infrastructure, namely the vast majority of smartphone and laptop wifi
antennas.  advantaged's network is resilient in the face of changing
topologies, and utilizes a reactive routing algorithm and a multithreaded
codebase to achieve a balance of scalability and performance. Notably,
advantaged is a low level solution which interfaces with the operating system
itself, meaning that _all_ existing web browsers, native applications, and core
utilities connect to the advantaged network seamlessly with no code changes.

We've tested advantaged exhaustively - in fact, we built half the codebase
while connected to the advantaged network rather than a traditional internet
connection.  In the recent past, hurricane recovery has left countless people
vulnerable for days on end with no means of communication. This is simply
unacceptable, and is a problem that has gone unaddressed for too long.
Accordingly, it's imperative the aims of our project are considered, especially
as government response time has been shown to be lacking in speed and coverage. 
The ability to communicate swiftly and meaningfully using proven technology
is critical as the future of natural disasters grows increasingly uncertain.