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A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

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Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

#281

Post by shimman »

roboman wrote: post #268
modeless wrote: post #217

It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is…

Please site the relevant sections of this supposed law you claim exists.

Or even better, where is the tech that can do this disregarding the law? Let's not act that something being illegal never stopped it from achieving mass adoption.

Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

#282

Post by sowbug »

modeless wrote: post #245
lxgr wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission. Is this even true? I still have two Gotennas from before they pivoted to military use cases, and they were legal to use both in the US and in Europe (on different bands auto-configured via GPS, as far as I remember). REI also currently stock…

Wow, you're right, data is technically allowed on FRS frequencies. I didn't realize that. It's not unrestricted though. There are a lot of regulations that constrain how FRS radios can work, much more than for 2.4 Ghz.

You might have conflated the prohibition on encrypted/coded communication with a blanket ban on data vs. voice. Those frequencies are supposed to be used for public communication, which has been interpreted as a requirement that anyone can listen in (as opposed to any member of the public privately communicating with any other member). See 47 CFR Part 95, plain language voice communication.

These days, I'm not sure anyone would seriously rely on a system that sent only unencrypted point-to-point data, so for that use case your original point stands.

Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

#283

Post by ShroudedNight »

thesuitonym wrote: post #210
eloisius wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither E2EE or Tor are enough to protect someone being targeted by state level actors. They're helpful, but if you're a high enough value target, they only slow down your adversary. If you're relying on algorithms on your computer to protect you, you should be prepared to meet the hacking wrench. [1] [1] https://xkcd.com/538/

If the political environment gets bad enough, you may expect to die anyway, and the TTL difference that obfuscation provides means the difference between making a small improvement before the inevitable, or not.

Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

#285

Post by mannyv »

modeless wrote: post #217

It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is…

File this under "lies that someone said on the interwebs."

Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

#286

Post by fenwick67 »

shimman wrote: post #281
roboman wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please site the relevant sections of this supposed law you claim exists.

Or even better, where is the tech that can do this disregarding the law? Let's not act that something being illegal never stopped it from achieving mass adoption.

Well obviously cell phones have very powerful tx/rx so my question would be "what is stopping us from using this for p2p", I assume the answer is we don't have software access to the radio, and I assume that's for regulatory reasons but idk

Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

#287

Post by ninalanyon »

alecco wrote: post #280
NoiseBert69 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations). 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-ope…

Sounds good. But there are ~10x fewer nodes in my area :(

The nearest Meshtastic and Meshcore nodes to me are 20 km away over hilly granite terrain.

Anyway how would either network fare in the Iranian situation where the authorities are actively trying to shutdown communications? Sure the authorities could simply flood the network with traffic.

Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

#288

Post by ninalanyon »

twism wrote: post #199
curtisblaine wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can PWAs run (and interact with Bluetooth) in the background? Edit: no they can't, so PWA would be not very useful at this.

Could still work in some cases where a certain amount of users are in and out of the website and in proximity e.g. protests

Doesn't help if internet is down.

Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

#289

Post by rm30 »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #279
rm30 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smartphone is just an advanced walkie-talkie, currently limited only by the mobile operator, the law, the radio chipset, and the OS. In a true emergency, who can stop you from modifying that architecture? Once you treat the device as an independent radio node (using its DSP power to run custom modems) you can establish a mesh network with a range of several kilometers. We have a '4x4 car in our pockets; we’ve jus…

Not disagreeing with you, but you’re papering over a lot of complexity. Note that cellular radios are highly specialized and the filtering circuits are tuned to specific bands. It’s not exactly like having a software defined radio in your pocket. Next, at the modem level, you’ll need to implement and then sideload custom firmware. Finally, you’ll need to expose the right APDUs to the kernel to manage the whole thing.…

I was pushing on the walkie-talkie case to gain the maximum results from existing phones, that's a true emergency case.

You’re absolutely right that the 5G/LTE baseband is a black-box nightmare to repurpose. But I’m not looking to hack the cellular modem; I’m looking for the dormant '4x4 car' already available.

For instance, many chipsets have an integrated FM receiver that is essentially a high-sensitivity VHF radio. By taking the raw audio output and applying a Software Modem (AFSK/FSK) in the user-space, you bypass the kernel/firmware complexity entirely. You don’t need to sideload a modem driver if you treat the audio jack or the internal FM bus as your physical layer.

The 'complexity' is real if you try to fight the manufacturer's fences, but it vanishes if you understand the full stack. A pair of wired headphones becomes your dipole antenna, and the phone's CPU becomes your DSP engine. It’s not about rebuilding the Ferrari; it’s about realizing there’s a VHF engine hidden in the chassis that doesn't need 'permission' to receive bits. You just need a software demodulator the catch them, but for sending you'll need an external transmitter (an USB SDR or jack-to-FM).

Re: A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

#290

Post by [deleted] »

squarefoot wrote: post #238
modeless wrote: post #217

It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is…

A small USB pluggable module that supports LoRa plus an app using Codec2 or similar low rate codec for voice encoding could fill the gap, although having it bundled with the phone would make it a lot less cumbersome to use. For non phone portable solutions, the LilyGo T-Deck Plus/Pro come to mind, but they're not phones so that would imply a 2nd device to carry around.

[deleted]
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