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Any situation when mobile internet cannot be used. That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings, i.e. street concerts, or places where mobile coverage is poor in general.
> That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings[...] Oops! You (unintentionally?) make it sound like protests are illegal.
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> instead of just retrieving the messages from the cache on a confiscated phone why wouldn't encryption be a part of recipe here rendering government acquisition of such a cache moot?
From white paper: >At its core, BitChat leverages the Noise Protocol Framework (specifically, the XX pattern) to establish mutually authenticated, end-to-end encrypted sessions between peers.
choosing to build an application on top of bluetooth is like saying, "we've constructed a highway over the most stable terrain known to man: volcanic marshes prone to seasonal flooding." how do you know when the messaging app is broken, and how do you know when bluetooth is just exercising its ability to hate mankind?
This is not meant to be an efficient, every day messaging platform.
It's for people who are afraid of the government turning off the internet/cell network (kinda justified if you live in Iran or Uganda), or those networks going offline due to natural disasters (see Jamaica)
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One of these bluetooth messaging app was made by a developer who was on a cruise ship with family, and the Internet over satellite costs an arm and leg. So he wrote an app to communicate with his families over bluetooth. Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you? Seems like bluetooth is the perfect way to communicate for devices that are cl…
On a cruise ship, isn't the cheap walkie talkies still a thing? Or did those die with cell phones? For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless, not much I can do on it, might as well sue a purpose built device. They're also very cheap. Even better if Nextel still worked on phones (but without service).
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In Iran right now... Internet shut down while the regime keeps slaughtering people at the order of 4x9/11.
Internet is exploited by US as a tool for regime change [1] in coordination with sponsored on the ground terrorism. [1] [1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
Meshtastic + budget kit ($10-$35) is way better. BlueTooth alone is kind of useless. It's max ~100 meters/yards vs 2-20 km (12 miles). And the community is great.
Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate.
Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)
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On a cruise ship, isn't the cheap walkie talkies still a thing? Or did those die with cell phones? For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless, not much I can do on it, might as well sue a purpose built device. They're also very cheap. Even better if Nextel still worked on phones (but without service).
The boat could do a captive portal and provide it's own LAN?
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I'd consider end-to-end encryption to also be table-stakes, at least opportunistically after the first message in each direction. With encryption cached messages are far less harmful (though still leaking very useful metadata), without encryption it seems almost trivial to spy on any communications
E2E encryption probably isn’t enough to protect activists trying to organize. Without doing onion routing where you pre-compute some nodes it in the network that it MUST transit prior to delivery and having them decrypt it until it arrives to the recipient (like Tor) you still leak who’s talking to who.