Say I wanted to send out one important 1 min long video and I only have access to long distance calling and a PC at home. How could I send that file over? Would that just be dialup and if so why can’t that be used in this situation?
Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
91–100 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#92Bitchat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitchat
Surprised to not see it mentioned (more) in this thread. Uses Bluetooth and can bridge via Nostr.
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious what if the transmitter hops freq around? What is the tech to track these?
It's (scarily) available in the commercial sector[1][2] from space if you have the need to purchase their services. Suffice to say, military and intelligence agencies are probably a few generations ahead of this and you won't find them commenting on strategic capabilities on HN. 1. https://www.he360.com/ 2. https://spire.com/space-reconnaissance
Thanks! Technically, what do you think is the biggest obstacle to achieve military grade hopping? Is it just cost, or something you simply cannot buy from open market AND cannot make one if you have the knowledge?
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#94A while back there was a lot of hype on ultra wide band that is some sort of pulse code modulation and it being trails t to jamming. Can military jammers jam these too? Or is this similar to spread spectrum and the same jammers work for UWB as well?
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#95HAM radio is your best option.
Sure, if you are smart enough. Maybe mount a small transmitter on a tree then use a directional antenna at a very low power and use the tree as a repeater.
Or use NVIS, which at least makes triangulation harder.
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's (scarily) available in the commercial sector[1][2] from space if you have the need to purchase their services. Suffice to say, military and intelligence agencies are probably a few generations ahead of this and you won't find them commenting on strategic capabilities on HN. 1. https://www.he360.com/ 2. https://spire.com/space-reconnaissance
Thanks! Technically, what do you think is the biggest obstacle to achieve military grade hopping? Is it just cost, or something you simply cannot buy from open market AND cannot make one if you have the knowledge?
Military frequency hopping / spread spectrum isn’t really about preventing being noticed, it’s more about making it harder to jam. If you don’t have physical safety from the people “more powerful” than you who want to stop you, then they will still locate you easily and stop you using physical force.
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Radio spectrum is licensed, and licenses are very expensive. There are several bands for Amateur radio in US/EU/AU, but it is explicitly forbidden to use any kind of encryption on them. So no one can sell devices that use encryption on those bands. And I doubt Iran was friendly to amateur radio in the first place. E.g. in USSR it was crazy to think of any non-approved radio.
I mean who can stop you from transmitting anything you want at any frequency? Licenses etc only matter when the rule of law is a thing.
Parent was asking about jamming protection (frequency-hopping, encryption) devices.
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#98Old fashioned phone trees can be really useful IMHO OP. We used them when I worked in a school. If there was winter weather, you'd call say, everyone with a last name from A to G in the staff directory, someone else calls G to K, and so on and so forth. You can combine the phone tree with literal runners -- so basically, someone takes their burner and calls suburbs A,B,C and D and then the runners go out and pass the…
Presumably the phones are tapped? People have been claiming for years that US phone calls are subject to routine computer analysis (Echelon); these days that's a relatively cheap thing to do with LLMs. I suspect the literal runners solution is what's happening, although that's also very dangerous when the police control the streets. And don't forget the whatsapp group chat classic: secure communications where at leas…
>Presumably the phones are tapped?
If you simply list a location and time, it's hard to suss out whether it's a coffee or a protest. And there's a limit on how many people can be surveilled in real time, with the focus probably being on organizers not attendees. You're correct it's a possibility, but as a practical matter they can't listen to everyone, all the time -- but the key is to organize some "event" that overwhelms the regime, or days or weeks later they will possibly get around to your intercept and give you grief, yes.
But if the internet has been cut off and the bodies are piling up, sometimes you might choose to take a calculated risk.
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#99Get a dial up line into Europe. Maybe somebody like MiCT could help with setting up a modem pool.
33kbps is enough to get on IRC and spread the news.
Re: Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LoRa enthusiasts in my area seem to all have moved to Meshcore, largely because of a quirk in Meshtastic's routing algorithm that doesn't handle nodes with widely varying visibility/power/noisefloor well. They report regularly getting traffic hundreds of miles. There might be a couple mountaintop repeaters in the mesh though. For OP's situation I think runners and a store and forward system like Scuttlebutt/Briar…
Out of curiosity, how to Meshtastic and Meshcore compare to Reticulum?
At a glance, Reticulum assumes more resources on a node and more stable and well behaved links than the others, and places a much higher priority on crypto. I don't know how it fares in real world LoRa deployments.