Show HN: TxtNet Browser – Browse the Web over SMS, No Wi-Fi/Mobile Data Needed

TCP/IP over HF is already a thing! (And also ridiculously impractical :) ) https://www.isode.com/whitepapers/stanag-5066.html

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Thanks for your comment. In all my research, somehow I never came across either of those two projects! SMS without borders looks the most similar to what I'm trying to accomplish but their goal is much more focused. I would say the biggest difference is the fact that they are focused on supporting personal 2-way chat services like email and telegram, and because you have to have Internet access when you sign up with their service, they are able to generate encryption keys to obfuscate the communication through relays. Whereas with my project you are never assumed to have Internet access, even if I did implement encryption it would only be transport level, so the gateway could still read all your data. But the concept of being only able to access globally available websites makes it so that unless a government starts decoding messages in transit, you're not going to have any major upsides to encryption if you trust the server host. Another major difference is the fact that setting up your own SMSWB instance requires a lot of technical skill and infrastructure, which isn't the case with TxtNet. Both TxtNet and SMSWB are different enough that I would say they actually complement each other really well. Honestly I'm pretty impressed!

The Awala network is similar to what I was imagining in place of IP over SMS. I think the main problem with that approach is that for the average user, adapting most programs directly to the protocol would be confusing to use. The ping example provided in your demo video is of course only a PoC, but translating that to, say, a web browser could be confusing to users who don't understand why when they request the website, they have to keep the tab open and then come back to it once they've connected a hotspot who happened to request the right websites (possibly much) earlier. But still, I think it's totally possible to adapt programs to make them fit this paradigm better and I'm excited to see what comes next out of the project! It seems like a very promising solution more resilient to intermittent connection failure and just from the looks of it, you've got really brilliant minds working on the project (I'm not an expert, but I did find that some of the encryption concepts mentioned in the SMS spec discussion went over my head!) You've also managed to secure funding from higher profile names, which is awesome.

Very cool! Found this from 9 years ago, deprecated now however. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8304409

If you mean any kind of custom tailored algorithm, not really. Given I'm only dealing with HTML right now, Brotli has been a good solution. If I end up transmitting other binary data like images, I think well established algorithms like gzip should be okay.