61–70 of 127 posts
Hi there, I am on developement team of Newnode, a successor of FireChat founded by two of the same people ( https://www.newnode.com/ ). We now provide both, a VPN and a Messenger, with purpose to help people evade censorship and enable device-to-device connectivity. You can find the source code at https://github.com/clostra/newnode
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Interesting. My understanding was that IMEI could be traced to what vendor it was sold to, then they could pull the purchases and either see the card used to buy it, or find the video when the transaction occurred. Guess it depends on whether there is a method to pin which the exact phone without needing to scrub the purchases records.
You are significantly overestimating the level of recordkeeping by random sellers of used and/or ultra-cheap phones. Manufacturers, major retailers, and carriers may keep this information, but bodegas and street vendors certainly do not.
Hi there, I am on developement team of Newnode, a successor of FireChat founded by two of the same people ( https://www.newnode.com/ ). We now provide both, a VPN and a Messenger, with purpose to help people evade censorship and enable device-to-device connectivity. You can find the source code at https://github.com/clostra/newnode
Well now we can put the speculation to rest, exactly how many CIA agents visited to shut down your radical operation??
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I think a combination of LoRa, bluetooth, and WiFi might be the alternative. I've seen videos of LoRA functioning below the noise floor (perfect for evading RF triangulation), and at 200km (perfect for reaching past physical borders). The major weakness is line of sight (and availability), but bluetooth and WiFi can help there.
Theoretically it can't be below the noise floor right? I don’t know much about radio stuff fwiw that just seems impossible by definition
First, as a definition, below the noise floor means that the power of my signal at any given time is smaller than the power of the ambient noise in my channel, and usually this implies that you're only interested in a particular segment of frequency spectrum (e.g. within the 10MHz band centered at 1.8GHz). If we were doing a simple frequency-shift keying or amplitude-modulated signal, once the noise power exceeds the signal power, there is basically no hope of recovering anything useful, as those are both demodulation schemes that rely upon obtaining instantaneous estimates of the frequency or amplitude of the signal of interest.
However, spread-spectrum methods make a time/frequency tradeoff, where the signal of interest is "spread" across multiple points in time and frequency. A very simple example of this is to say "if I want to transmit a 1, instead of transmitting one cycle of a sinusoid at 18.GHz, I will transmit 10 cycles". Then, at the decoder stage, you average across 10 cycles of your carrier in order to detect whether a signal was sent or not. By doing this averaging across time, you get a 10x gain versus the noise which is expected to cancel itself out as often as not.
True spread-spectrum techniques are more advanced than this, they actually use wave shapes that are more complicated than just a sinusoid to make it easier to detect when they start and stop (whereas with a sinusoid there's a fair amount of ambiguity if you shift one period to the left or right) but the fundamental idea of averaging across time is the same.
Through this mechanism we are able to rescue out signals from far below the noise floor, although it reduces your maximum transmission rate. When dealing with digital radio systems we can even rescue out signals from below our quantization floor, although not too much lower, as eventually you lose the ability to average out a signal that is fluctuating by significantly less than a single bit.
Whenever I talk about making tradeoffs in transmission speed to aid in reception, I am reminded of the ELF systems in submarines [0]. While they did not use spread-spectrum techniques, (they just jumped between two frequencies, 76Hz and 80Hz) they still correlated across time to boost up their effective SNR. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines#...
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I've bought a fair number of test devices. Nobody at a corner shop or mall phone repair kiosk has ever ID'ed me or kept track of the IMEI of a device I bought.
Interesting. My understanding was that IMEI could be traced to what vendor it was sold to, then they could pull the purchases and either see the card used to buy it, or find the video when the transaction occurred. Guess it depends on whether there is a method to pin which the exact phone without needing to scrub the purchases records.
There are so many links in that chain that need to line up, from the manufacturer keeping track of it to the distribution system to keep track of what batch goes where to the vendor keeping track of what phone IMEI is sold when or to who. Even if all those link up you need to get at the video within the rotation time for their video storage or link to their financial transaction data.
I would not be surprised if it is still as easy to evade as shown in the show (and as easy to get wrong).
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You are significantly overestimating the level of recordkeeping by random sellers of used and/or ultra-cheap phones. Manufacturers, major retailers, and carriers may keep this information, but bodegas and street vendors certainly do not.
This is certainly approaching murder investigation levels of effort by law enforcement, but I don't think it's ridiculous to imagine a POS system being used that keeps transaction records for a year or two.
Hi there, I am on developement team of Newnode, a successor of FireChat founded by two of the same people ( https://www.newnode.com/ ). We now provide both, a VPN and a Messenger, with purpose to help people evade censorship and enable device-to-device connectivity. You can find the source code at https://github.com/clostra/newnode
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Seriously though, if you are going to take a phone to a protest, buy an Android used at a bodega and don't put anything personal on it. Expect to lose it.
Even then, most burner phones have serial numbers they can track to the sale.
Hi there, I am on developement team of Newnode, a successor of FireChat founded by two of the same people ( https://www.newnode.com/ ). We now provide both, a VPN and a Messenger, with purpose to help people evade censorship and enable device-to-device connectivity. You can find the source code at https://github.com/clostra/newnode
The thing I see is that if you really want to make a huge P2P network, you need a reason to have the app installed for reasons other than P2P. The problem I've always seen with FireChat was that I'd never get anyone to talk to me and then when there was an emergency no one would be able to download. So we need to have the features built into something with more normal day-to-day utility.
[0] https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-airdrop/37402