During a hackathon 7 years ago, a team and I set out to make a decentralized blockchain messaging platform over Bluetooth Low Energy. It was intended for situations when the internet was out. We didn't finish the technicals in 24hr, but it was a fun challenge. I looked it up and there are a lot of solutions now, here is the top one on search: https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
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Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of internet can Cloudflare turn off in italy? They picked a fight with the cloud gorilla.
When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.
> When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.
Mafia has a vested interest in broadcast rights of football matches in Spain?
Spain blocks Cloudflare because the football league La Liga has a court order that allows them to point to IP ranges that are hosting/fronting live streams of football matches, and get ISPs to block access to those ranges.
Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
#273Mobile phones with "Mesh networking" built-in have now started to appear in the market. E.g Tecno Spark Go 3 - https://www.tecno-mobile.com/phones/product-detail/product/s... - recently launched in India has a feature called Freelink 2 that claims to connect with other Tecno phones to provide "connectivity" without wifi or cellular network up to a range of 1.5 kms. More here: https://www.intelregion.com/tech/how-to-u…
> (Personally, I don't think any government is going to allow this.)
Then that's a pretty clear signal for how free that government is.
Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
#274Please, sell me a USB-C device that gives me mesh networking on my phone.
I'd like a Small, Medium, and Large option. Ideally, each would have a passthrough charger, so I can charge my phone even with the device plugged in to my phone.
The Small is just the device, and I guess it would drain my phone's battery. The Large would have a 25,000mAh and be just small enough to legally take on an airplane in the United Stated. The Medium has a smallish battery, maybe?
Give me what you can. Wifi. FRS. CB. LoRa. The ability to switch between those? The ability to broadcast across all of those in some spread-spectrum broadcast?
Make me use your special App that I have to install on my phone.
Make the device also act like a storage device. The Small has usb storage big enough to store the APK for the app for me to side-load.
The Large has enough usb storage for, I dunno, all of Wikipedia and medical texts, and open maps, and a few other things, and the Kiwix app to side-load.
Make the Medium and the Large also be able to be a hotspot, for other people nearby to be able to connect to, so they can download the app and browse Kiwix, and send messages through my phone? Or just let my phone be that hotspot, I guess?
And most importantly, give me messaging. Secure point-to-point, exchanging keys by touching our phones together, or using QR codes, or something.
Or broadcast messaging. With configurable repeating.
And then make the Base Station version of this, which has solar panels, and a battery, and it's just a repeater. You install and forget.
If you're only going to build one thing, build the Small version I described. Next, I guess, would be the Base Station. Next would be the Large.
Where is the Kickstarter? I'll back it right now. I'll buy 2 Large, 6 Small, and 4 Base Stations. Right now.
Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meshtastic also struggles with high density and high traffic networks. Some modifications can be made to work better, but with the default settings it really grinds to a halt, and modifying the settings to be better suited requires some expertise and foresight. It works amazingly in off grid, relatively sparse networks, but it's got some major limitations.
The decision that every station is always a (delayed) router was a bad one. Also the old firmware was super chatty eating a lot of valuable ISM TX time. They must clean up their role mess and switch to a "all clients are totally quiet - until they are set to a different mode for a reason"-strategy.
FYI: Meshtastic has "CLIENT_MUTE" and "CLIENT_BASE" roles to help with this, though they do recommend using the normal "CLIENT" role (which routes traffic) as the default. https://meshtastic.org/blog/choosing-the-right-device-role/
Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
#276Please, sell me a USB-C device that gives me mesh networking on my phone. I'd like a Small, Medium, and Large option. Ideally, each would have a passthrough charger, so I can charge my phone even with the device plugged in to my phone. The Small is just the device, and I guess it would drain my phone's battery. The Large would have a 25,000mAh and be just small enough to legally take on an airplane in the United Stat…
Pragmatically, cost and ease of access is especially important in suppressed countries or ones with unstable infrastructure. While the devices you're talking about has lots of conveniences, distribution and price dominate in lower income regions.
For a side project, sure. But in first world countries, the odds of infrastructure breakdown or suppression of Internet is incredibly rare. In Iran's case, suppression is a weapon so phone only makes a lot of sense.
Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meshtastic also struggles with high density and high traffic networks. Some modifications can be made to work better, but with the default settings it really grinds to a halt, and modifying the settings to be better suited requires some expertise and foresight. It works amazingly in off grid, relatively sparse networks, but it's got some major limitations.
Yeah I always wonder with these mobile ever changing mesh networks: how do they prevent messages from aimlessly looping around the network? With all the mobile devices they're too dynamic to make routing tables and broadcasting everything leads to network saturation really quickly. You could give them a very short TTL but then the reliability will suffer a lot.
Meshtastic has a TTL of up to 7 and (from what I've been able to understand) uses flood routing largely. In Northern Colorado (where I'm at) we don't have a particularly dense mesh, but are turning down from 7 because of congestion.
Meshcore seems to (I'm still learning on this) use a TTL of 64 and flood to find a route to a destination, then uses source routing for future packets, reverting to flooding again if that path fails (say a mobile repeater moves out of range).
Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if there is a civil war, what were you going to be able to do with the USD anyway?
Interesting - I found this quantitative historical study [0] showing that while a civil war does significantly increase the likelihood of inflation, only 36% of countries analyzed which had a civil war between 1975-1999 ended up in an inflationary crisis. And with the USD having such a strong foundation, I would expect the risk to be significantly lower. [0] https://kjis.org/journal/view.html?uid=302&vmd=Full
I am speculating wildly but I would expect the exact opposite due to different actors trying to destabilize the US to the point of no recovery in such an event.
Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.
> When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them. Mafia has a vested interest in broadcast rights of football matches in Spain? Spain blocks Cloudflare because the football league La Liga has a court order that allows them to point to IP ranges that are hosting/fronting live streams of fo…
If the sports league is influential enough to have a standing court order to be able to unilaterally block IP ranges for the entire country, I'd imagine that organized crime might take an interest. I have no idea if it's the case but when something already seems to have an outsized influence it wouldn't be crazy to imagine that others interested in that power would also take an interest.
Moreover, I think the point of the parent comment is that they're blocking quite a bit more than just football games. It sounds like the claim is that the blocking is willfully broad because of other influences, not necessarily the the purported more narrow intent is necessarily from those influences.
Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
#280This should be a lesson for all of us. We should start building and maintaining lightweight mesh networks, just in case. We shouldn't take the world of cooperating ISPs and Meta and Cloudflare and Google and AWS for granted.
Is that the right threat model, though? Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown. Thats' why it's happening in Iran. They want to disrupt the co-ordination of a coup, and their opponents only need to win in the short term after which it doesn't matter. In the US, the threat is censorship and tracking- suppression over the long term. Mesh networks are not great for that,bec…
Governmental blockout is one thing but…
Even without climate / natural disasters we need to have fallback infrastructures in general.
Just yesterday Verizon was down.