This 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.
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,because if you run a mesh network then you have declared yourself against the regime. Steganography may be better.
An amusing point is that secure steganography depends on redundancy with entropy- noise. A few years ago, it looked increasingly difficult because of lossy compression. Today, we're awash in randomly generated content, so it should be possible to make secure steganography quite high bandwidth. Although, it's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of it,because the randomness is the input to a diffusion model,not the output - you might need to run the model backwards to obtain your steganographic content. Which I guess is possible,although expensive.
> Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown.
No. They also do so to prevent political violence from spreading, and fanning the flame of further violence. This is (in my opinion) a legitimate response to prevent hatred and mob violence from growing.
There is concern that the US may also go from chronic concerns to acute ones. Opponents of the government accuse it of serious crimes, and are already perceiving violence used to suppress dissent. The administration is not popular and may lose a lot of power in the upcoming election.
It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters, but the point of the exercise is to prepare for the unimaginable.
You raise a good point, and I think USians should do all of it: generally encrypt communication, try to conceal as much metadata as they can AND put up mesh networks. It is not the right threat model until it is.
That said, I never said that my comment was about the US.
With tiny solar repeater that placed on a strategic hill you can cover lots of kilometers. Being sensitive down to -145dBm opens a lot of doors.
I was able to build energy harvester nodes that fit into 5cm x 5cm x 4cm boxes that roughly cost around 20€. Without energy harvesting capability with a normal TI BQ wide range charge controllers (that stuff costs $1.5-2.5@pcs and eats every power source up to 18V! With pseudo-MPPT!) you can bring the entire thing down to <<15€. That's mass producable throw-away stuff.
Currently available LoRa-gear is either USB-power optimized (looking at you Heltec) or just awfully overpriced as soon as a solar panel is attached to it.
You also make yourself a bright shining beacon to anybody looking for a resistance network because Lora operates on very specific frequencies. It would be easy to spot you with an RF scanner.
I guess if you're protesting against the government, you don't have to comply with regulations and can use more power and basically the entire spectrum :)
If you have the government as adversary and no military force to back it up, you might want to reconsider doing that as it makes you very detectable from far away.
I built a basic LoRa network so I could send data from my washing machine in the apartment cellar to my Home Assistant box in my apartment several floors up. It very much did occur to me that the technologies/skills I was learning would also be useful to create a decentralized mesh network for general communication.
But we won't, because those are hard to maintain versus the convenience of letting providers do it for us, hence why we keep getting suckered into handing over control to these centralized powers.
But also because it seems fun in the meantime. In fact a state that doesn't plan to turn off the internet should probably want a cohort of amateur radio operators ready to turn into a signals corps.
Maybe in the battlefields of the future we'll be fighting with lorawan cyberdecks rescued from desk drawers, and meshtastic hackers will be the equivalent of fighter pilot aces.
On that topic, I'm in this thread hoping to hear about how anyone got into resilient mesh networks and what they're doing with them now (outside of overthrowing the Ayatollah).
How I got into it was tiredness of centralised platforms that dictate how we use those platforms. Often archival, search functions are non-trivial in things like Whatsapp, Discord etc. We made our own mesh application based on wifi and batman but ofc we couldnt convince our friends and family to switch over.
The ubiquity (network effect) and ‘convenience’ of other apps. This was more than a decade ago and our devices were an extra thing you needed to carry (travel router).
Given the recent threats from Cloudflare against Italy and siding with Vance, Musk and co., this is definitely not a far-fetched reality. Big Tech has demonstrated which side they are going with.
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.
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.
Not OP but, oh common. This entire thing IS political. Big Tech IS in bed with the authoritarian US apparatus, they have been very transparent about it. What are you expecting to gain from your message? Pedantry points?
There were strong signals from the CF CEO that they align with the Trump administration.
They threatened to pull the plug on all Italian customers.
This is relevant to this conversation: CF recently acted in a way that makes some people think it might cut its services to people for political reasons.
I don't find your comment particularly well articulated or continaing anything besides name calling (the "bot farming"). Can you articulate your opinion on the matter?
Most of Ukraine doesn't need to do it. The internet infrastructure is largely intact and very decentralised. The biggest challenge is the lengthy power outages, but mobile networks keeps running thanks to generators.
Ukraine is being assisted by NATO and commercial corporations based in US and Europe, that would not be a DIY start-from-nearly-nothing example which would be relevant to popular protest movements.
Nobody cares until is too late. And it is also very hard to get it right, given most p2ps eventually become centralized, or depend on a centralized mesh of hosts. Otherwise I totally agree with the statement, not sure whether is practically possible.
As someone who lives in a democratic country, I am quite loathe to trust any foreign-controlled communication platform. I also do not support or endorse violent politics. Seeing how social media has triggered political riots in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and now in Iran (probably with the aid of foreign sponsors / agents) to destabilise these countries, I am fully in favour of governments clamping down hard on such kind of "dark networks" that they don't have oversight over. Note that this is nothing new - governments always have been mindful that foreign agents in their country should not have a way to communicate with their masters, and that is why everything from radios to satellite phones require some form of license to operate.
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
Please, 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.
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.
Not to side track too much from this discussion, but I looked at that PolyMarket event: "US civil war before 2027?" Currently, it is priced at 91.3 USD cents for No. If you bet 100 USD, the payout for No will be 109.43. That is very good return -- ~9.5% for 12 months of lending (as PolyMarket required full payment at the time of trade). That is twice the (retail) risk free rate at the moment. I am actually tempted to buy a large part of the order book. Am I missing something obvious?
Also, if you enjoy troll humor, the comments section is very funny.
Considering reports like "Polymarket refuses to pay bets that US would 'invade' Venezuela" [1] one risk is poorly written small print, meaning you might not actually be betting on the thing you think you're betting on. This could also err in your favour, of course - but it's still a source of risk.
There's also the risks involved in cryptocurrency generally - it's the wild west, rife with scams, hacks, unexpected fees, and paperwork.
And thirdly, prediction markets often lack market depth, so if you want to invest a non-trivial amount the price can move a lot. You want to gamble $2,000 to win $190? No problem. You want to gamble $200,000 maybe no-one will take your bet. Can you be bothered to go through all the KYC paperwork rigmarole for $190 ?
PolyMarket bets are becoming ever more problematic the wider it gets known, carrying the manipulation incentives from stock markets into every bettable aspect of society.
> Total garbage. Spread by a $9bn company with a 1m-follower account, a post viewed by 4.5m people. Pure disinformation for financial gain, with serious consequences for actual human lives.
Shashank Joshi - @shashj - Jan 12 - https://x.com/shashj/status/2010766014829478393
There are a few like this. You can bet on Jesus not coming back in the calendar year for a little pocket money.
Funny, because a bit like the yes side of the civil war scenario, if JC comes back and someone is the sort of person to bet that he will, then do they really need the payout in those circumstances; and will the gambling website be in a position to pay out?
Polymarket and other prediction markets dont take risk on the trades. Two sides are needed to make a market so you’re likely to get your payout. So all the people taking the “safe” bet lose their collateral and the winners get the proceeds if the unlikely event happens.
If you haven't been paying attention to American politics, there are currently widespread protests due to a woman being shot by ICE last week. It looks like the current administration may be seeking violent unrest in the hopes of delaying elections.
Not wrong, but don't forget there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here, though admittedly some parties have more affiliated with them than others. It's not a stretch to assume should fighting in the streets escalate beyond ICE shenanigans that larger armies would not quickly congeal from the pocket groups and individuals.
> there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here
That’s still not a civil war in the conventional sense. If it gets entrenched and coördinated it could be come something we’ll debate, e.g. the Troubles. But insurgency != civil war.
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.
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.
There were large protests in the wake of a law enforcement officer killing someone in 2020 too. Notably, there was not a civil war, even though the Trump administration used the protests as cover for bad behavior then too
2020 was a single accidental case as the result of a poor system. Many people even from within the system on all levels agreed something went wrong and apologized. Today's situation is different, as the whole system is weaponized on purpose from one specific layer/group against the other layers/groups of the system. It's an internal conflict within the system itself, and a prime-example for justifying a civil war. And at the time Trump was still on the leash of his own adminstration.
802.11s with BATMAN routing works very well - you can have commercial quality links with tons of nodes.
The problem is transmitter power, residential Wifi radios are limited to a very low transmit power, like 0.1W, if you do more than that, you're breaking the law, and you're very easy to find if they come looking.
The point to any preparation for any adverse event is to prepare more than one solution to a problem, and to have a solid understanding of your actual adversary. By asking that question, you have already defeated yourself on the sake of whomever you have decided is the dominant force. This is the sort of nihilism that stops us from meaningful change, because we destroy ourselves in either sloth or despair.
Won't they get jammed? Yes, absolutely, on local levels. This is electronic warfare and happens in any actual battlespace.
Does that mean it is completely useless in emergency situations (of which civil war is one)? No.
Meshtastic works on commercial frequencies. If they block those then a good number of non-wifi/bluetooth devices will just stop working.
Including, but not limited to: garage door openers, some (older) car key fobs, some RC equipment, wireless weather sensors, remotely readable metering devices (electricity, water) and a crapton of other things.
All Semtech LoRa modems are wide-range modems. You can switch to basically every other frequency.
An idea would be to move to SX128x modems with work around 2.4GHz. You recycle Wifi-gear for directional stuff. This also enabled you to hide below Wifi traffic.
Jamming is a double-edged sword, there are common frequency bands used by everyones equipment like 2.4GHz, 5GHz or the ISM band. If you jam those indiscriminately, your own stuff stops working as well.
The US is huge — you can’t jam everything everywhere. Talking about just cities, you still can’t jam everything everywhere.
But yes, targeted suppression/oppression (depending on your allegiance) will almost certainly use jamming — in fact, I’ve spoken with some Antifa about how they jam EMS frequencies at their events.
This reminds me the way the software was distributed in eastern countries when there was no internet. People went to market to meet other people, and they were peddling/colporting (look up the term in French) cassettes with the software.
The same can happen now - people would walk down the streets to certain places, to become hubs of information, but with no physical contact. Of course those places would be were the jammers would head to.
Actually this sounds like a good theme for book... however as long as I live on this world, I've noticed that if I invent something, there are already two people on the internet who have invented it already, so... please give me the title :)
To save others the search: Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters"
Also, amusingly, France is most definitively in Western Europe, so I’m a bit confused about GP’s link between Eastern Europe and “go look up this French word”.
To prevent coordinated police response during their assaults on police with bricks, frozen water bottles, and fireworks during so-called “direct action” while dressed in paramilitary “black bloc”. You know, like any other violent militia.
Also, Antifa are against fascism the way the DPRK is for democracy.
Insider trading on prediction markets is the whole point. They don't exist to provide a fair platform for normal people to make money, they exist to create accurate predictions by providing a monetary incentive for people to be correct. Whether "correct" means that you were just lucky, that you had insider knowledge, or that you were able to influence the result, is irrelevant.
All my life ive heard this, yelled at me by deeply anti democratic anti socials. People voted for trumps policies. Again, yes even after jan 6. Better luck next time, but for 4 years this is what they ordered.
ICE going after fraud and illegals. Voted for.
Closed borders. Voted for.
Isolationist imperialism and a end of the western free trade world order.Voted for.
A loose Canon. Voted for.
A screeching social priest caste driven ou the door. Voted for.
The people have spoken and the reject progressive policies (more accurately they dont care, but reject the package it comes in). Se la vi.
Trump has a ton of work todo before he reaches the starting point of the mullahs. 12000 dead in 3 days. Thats ice shooting 8 people trying to run them over every day. Politics has not platform here, including rejected by the masses cosplay revolutionaries hijacking real disasters. Do something good, help iranian civilization recover.
All, no. But many, yeah. The Constitution and many of it's Amendments call out people or persons. The 14th Amendment even specifies what a citizen is, and in the next breath says persons cannot be denied due process by the States, not citizens.
New York and California have enough GDP, weapons factories and in-state fissile materials to make a civil war at least interesting. (They’re also both primed to land foreign armies on their shores and air strips).
In repression, guns and muscles count. In a civil war, they’re as effective as Maduro’s guard was.
I'm sure the ICE agents swapping head-shot porn on their phones find that hilarious.
In history mothers against authoritarian rule, against the draft, raising awareness, etc. have been suprisingly effective at slowing violence, attracting press coverage, kick starting civil rights, etc.
The officer that shot through the front window, stepped to the side, shot twice more through the side window while on two feet, and stomped away unharmed muttering "fucking bitch" .. that officer?
Does anyone remember yik-yak? It wasn't anonymous and resilient like briar, but it was great in its time to discover people near-by and start chatting.
Does anyone if briar relays traffic? like if at least one person in a wifi network has briar and they also connect by bluetooth to another person within an adjacent wifi network, does it relay messages from one end of the city to the other over dozens of devices?
No they sadly don't have that, and that's the major issue of connectivity. All chat recipients have to be online/reachable to receive your messages, which is okay, but useless in mobile environments where you can't afford that constant traffic.
The broadcast type channels though are what the article talks about, they are great for off the grid and mesh environments.
Relaying and scattering traffic across neighboring peers (and handshakes via multicast DNS, for example) would fix a lot of the issues you'll get with Briar, but I guess that would imply a refactor of the codebase.
For these types of NAT breaking issues, a lot of protocols rely on STUN/TURN/TURTLE routing.
For my experimental software router I'm relying on broken firewall deep packet inspection, so I'm using exfil / smuggling protocols. Currently still works, according to my local setup of the great firewall (it's source leak was legit btw).
> Relaying and scattering traffic across neighboring peers (and handshakes via multicast DNS, for example) would fix a lot of the issues you'll get with Briar, but I guess that would imply a refactor of the codebase.
I mean the whole thing is confusing - is OP actually Iranian? Do we have evidence that Briar is being used in Iran, and is effective? Why was the Farsi manual linked to an English website, when the English is next to it?
From a quick Google search it seems there's no reference to Briar having any connection to Iran other than this discussion, and other places linking to it.
I have Briar, but never had anyone to use it with. As an emergency text messaging tool, I guess it can be used, but not for any media transfer. The picture quality is abysmal. I also tried using it to sync some notes across devices, looking for a good use case of it all, but there was also some issue there. I believe once you created a "forum" you can no longer delete them. The desktop app is very slow. Sometimes had to wait for 10-20s for it to do something. I guess it is really just an emergency/offline text message tool.
A good use of briar is having it on your phone already so that during a natural disaster you can connect with others that already have it at community relief spots. Keep it just in case and it will come in clutch when you need it most!
Briar comes with ways of sharing it offline, so enough for one person to have it.
Most likely how they got it in Iran, as I doubt that critical mass of people had it installed in advance. Most likely doesn't work on iPhones though - no sideloading.
I looked into the iOS issue once, and in the EU at least, it should be possible to add a minimal implementation of the store API to an app, so other iPhones could download the app from an iPhone hosting it.
After discovering the amount of pain involved with that API, I quickly discarded the idea though
Source? I guess you're thinking of long tap → Airdrop, but that essentially shares a link to the Appstore via Airdrop. You're not transfering the app itself.
I tried to set up Briar recently so my partner and I could text on the plane. We tried everything including manual exchange of the special links and QR code pairing and nothing worked. This was even while we still bad ground internet access.
When I tested all the p2p messengers I could get my hands on for Android and iOS about two years back, the only one that worked at all without having a router around was Briar. Glad to see it helping people.
Yeah, the problem with these mesh networks is that for them to work, you need high transmit powers typically not found in off the shelf stuf (because it would be illegal).
A would-be opressor can just have a van full of antennas drive through the neighborhood and triangulate all those transmitters, after which you'll get caught.
It's like using high-powered flashlights to covertly message each other.
"We can't have the tax-cattle talking behind our backs about our failures and corruption that fucked up their living standards .. err I mean think of what the far right, pedos and russian spies could do with anonymous messaging, so we'll be banning it to protect our democratic values."
I completely disagree with your base premise: I think EU leadership (national + EU) performed on an average level over the last three decades, and the EU as an insitution did even better than I would've expected given its limitations/constraints.
If you could pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years?
I actually don't think they performed very well. I just look at the EU GDP that's now half the size of the US compared to bigger than US 20 years ago, and at standard of living of middle working class, which has slowly been going downhill in the last 15-20 or so years for a lot of people(worst of all southern europe) and at a more accelerated rate in the last 3-4 years. All due to their decisions and policies and I hold them accountable for it.
Like you don't need the unfair power of hindsight to know that tying your energy independence to Russia (your military adversary and the reason NATO exists) was a bad decision back then, or that staying dependent on US military and tech was bad for sovereignty, or that pursuing unrealistic climate goals was a bad decision, or that opening your borders to millions of unvetted people from unstable regions with high crime and low education was bad, since many people have been saying all these were bad decisions 20 years ago but they were ignored because the gravy train was still running and the EU political elite never game much of a shit about what the peasants though anyway. And now that the gravy train has stopped and the piper has to be paid, our leadership class are trying to gaslight us and deflect the blame for their recklessness at best or just suppress voices of dissent at worst.
And even if we were to assume they performed super well, that doesn't mean I should now swallow tyrannical laws designed to suppress our freedoms while they give themselves exemptions, just because different people from a different era who are no longer in power made some good decisions 30 years ago under the same umbrella of the EU since the EU-EC of today as an org is a vastly different beast than the EU of 30 years ago. There wasn't even a common currency and central bank 30 years ago.
You are exactly not answering the question though.
It is easy to complain about energy dependence, struggles with immigration/integration and precarious national budgets, but the conditions for those weren't caused by recent decision in my view (instead, namely, lack of local oil/gas, unstable north africa/middle east and bad demographics with too many old people).
All those problems are really costly and difficult to solve. Sure, the EU could've tried a super-scale Messmer plan 20 years ago, and could then maybe rival current renewable power with nuclear output, but this would have been orders of magnitude more costly.
Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).
It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).
I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum.
If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.
>You are exactly not answering the question though.
WHich question did I not answer?
>weren't caused by recent decision in my view
No, but they could admit it was a fuckup of the political class, and tell us how they're planning to fix it, instead of gaslighting us for complaining about it and doing more mistake that further damage our economy. We can't stop the music chair song from playing just yet. Just one more round I promise.
How about the recent EU Mercosur trade deal? They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports. This is a totally new strategic blunder, they can't keep blaming the past anymore.
>Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).
This is disproven and untrue but has been repeated so many time it became the poster child argument of pro-illegal immigration EU propaganda. That open borders will magically save our economy. It didn't. Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
Regarding Japan's economy, is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did, it got fucked starting from 1985 when the US forced them to sign the Plaza Accord in order to counter their massive trade deficit US had with Japan(and other powerful export economies), which increased the value of the Yen making Japanese imports suddenly expensive and uncompetitive. Then to combat this, the Japan central bank fucked up themselves by printing money like crazy with ultra low interest rates which instead of stabilizing the exports, caused a massive speculative real estate and golf membership(yes that's true) bubble which imploded in 1990, dealing the final blow to their economic growth since they ran out of levers to pull other than suppressing their labor into a losing race to the bottom with other low wage manufacturing economies of Asia. I recommend you read more on the Plaza Accord, it's pretty eye opening.
Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this? No. But they have the nerve to blame us for not having kids in a stagnating economy with crazy real-estate prices then gaslight us that salvation lies in illegal immigration instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.
>It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).
Good point. If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?
>I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum. If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.
yeah, the environment is important, but all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it. Great success. And even Europeans will stop caring about the environment when they won't be able to have a job, or afford to pay rent or heating anymore.
The "what policies should a perfect government have enacted instead, with hindsight". But your last post adds a lot on that front.
> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
Hard disagree on this. Just consider two poster children for continuous positive economical growth: Poland and Vietnam. Did that economic outlook effect positive population growth? Clearly no (for both cases, and it's not even close).
My personal view: Easy access to contraceptives (people want to fuck more than raise children), and realignment of economical incentives: Children are no longer the default retirement plan (nor are they needed by the parents themselves as cheap workforce).
Both of those factors are icky to counteract for a modern democracy.
> If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?
No, because those did not occur synchronously. The imported, lower-skill workforce was most needed earlier (pre 2000s), with the big youth unemployment problems mostly occuring later (2000s and after).
Immigration rates are also much easier to control than local birth rate, and, most importantly, dont suffer from a two-decade lag.
Restricting foreign workers would have most certainly been a big economic hit (this is somewaht obvious; because foreign workers are mostly raised and educated for free), especially for countries like Germany, even with perfectly boosting population growth at the perfect times to compensate.
> Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
Poland has been playing catchup inside a huge, wealthy, low-barrier market. Would their growth have been comparable if wages had started at a German level in 1990? IMO clearly not.
> all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked except now we made ourselves poorer for it
Two big problems with that view.
First: The planet "getting fucked" is not binary. If you want to limit warming to a somewhat reasonable degree (and the worst-case timelines are not reasonable), then action has to be taken at some point, and pretty obviously the biggest culprits need to get the ball rolling, or no one is ever gonna do anything.
Second: The EU has already fucked the planet much harder than any developing nation, China included, despite being not even half the population of India or China. You could make a case that the US is slightly worse, but thats completely irrelevant; the relative moral net-obligation on the EU to act is clearly pretty large already for a long time now, and a few outliers (US, oil states) being even worse does not absolve the Europeans from anything.
Lastly, those efforts to combat climate change clearly had already huge global effects. Or do you honestly think that massive Chinese buildout of solar/wind power would have happened without those technologies getting developed, refined and proven in Europe over the last decades?
I don't necessarily disagree with your outlook completely: I think a bunch of things could have been done better, especially refugee handling, and possibly immigration vs economy tradeoffs. But still: a lot of those decisions had to be made without hindsight, and I don't think expecting much better than what we got is reasonable.
You also have to consider that lots of those decisions were made in a different time (with different values/outlooks): It was much harder to let refugees become homeless, executed or starved when a lot of Europeans saw thair own past actions (=> colonialism) as a big driver for those crises (and I'd argue that this only really changed, somewhat justifiably, post Arab spring).
pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years
So, they'd have to be things that were democratically acceptable at the time.
For example: Germany in that period was never no way going to accept nuclear power. Their leadership regrets it in hindsight, but at the time, forcing it on the people would have been undemocratic.
> They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports.
20 years ago the biggest problem with the EU's farming system was massive overproduction.
Like, "newsworthy scandal" levels of overproduction.
> Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
Poland mainly missed out on the downside of the global financial crisis, rather than being special otherwise. Few percent difference between Poland, Germany, Japan, Europe collectively, and the USA all around the same level.
> is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did
Europe did not in fact import millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare. This would have been a self-evidently stupid thing to do, which is why that is not what happened.
Europe did take around two million asylum seekers in total, before the pandemic. Important thing about asylum: they get sent back as soon as their homes stop being warzones, or sooner if they're deemed to have been taking the piss. Right now there's about 4 million Ukrainians, who would probably count as "second world" given the etymology; do you want to count them as "uneducated"? I wouldn't. But then, I have Ukrainian neighbours.
Economic migrants, who are important for the economy, are a bigger group. Mixing up asylum seekers and economic migrants because they're both "migrants" is as much of an error as declaring that all Canadians and Mexicans are "Americans" because they're from the continent of America.
> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
If this were so, even royal families would not have had any kids before 1850, there certainly wouldn't be a massive population boom in e.g. India where they've only recently connected everyone to the electricity grid.
> Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this?
I was born in 1983. I remember being warned of overpopulation, there was literally zero public concern about a demographic crisis by the time I reached pension age.
I also remember ongoing press campaigns in the UK demonising single mothers.
> instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.
That's a new one.
You think there's a law banning people from criticising the lack of support for families? Have you seen, like, any election campaign ever? One reliable theme throughout, no matter how effective the policy would be if examined closely, is at least one party saying they support families.
> EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it.
China's also going green. India… isn't, but the pain point hits them much sooner than we expect it to hit us, so they probably will.
The US was going green, then Trump happened. He's against renewables and doesn't believe in climate change, while also wanting to invade Greenland for reasons that only make sense if one or both of those are good bets; he insists on keeping coal plants open when the owners of those plants don't want that because gas is cheaper; he's lying a lot in general, but specifically by saying China doesn't use the renewables they're exporting. He's all over the place, wildly incoherent, and may lead to WW3 where none of this matters anyway.
Mandatory client-side scanning of encrypted messages has been removed from the proposal following opposition from the European Parliament and several member states, preserving E2EE integrity
And you believe they won't try again and again until they push it through? All of these have already been rejected multiple times, and yet some parts of it are already enacted, some will be soon, and the rest will come after a few more tries.
>> "The adversary has a limited ability to persuade users to trust the adversary’s agents - thus the number of social connections between the adversary’s agents and the rest of the network is limited." [1]
This seems like a fairly reasonable assumption for the Briar case. An adversary would have to get a user accept a Briar link in error. Contrast with things like Signal[1] that base their trust on phone numbers.
Note that Briar groups are controlled by one moderator. Other participants of the group can not add members. Note also that Briar has the concept of introductions. So it is easy to avoid making the sort of identity errors commonly made by other schemes.
I think meshtastic would be a lot more performant in mesh scenarios due to the added range of LoRa. But of course it's special hardware and thus suspicious during an insurrection. And probably just not available.
I doubt this will actually work though except in the densest city.
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.
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).
Coding Dissent: Art, Technology, and Tactical Media
This presentation examines artistic practices that engage with sociotechnical systems through tactical interventions. The talk proposes art as a form of infrastructural critique and counter-technology. It also introduces a forthcoming HackLab designed to foster collaborative development of open-source tools addressing digital authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, propaganda infrastructures, and ideological warfare.
In this talk, media artist and curator Helena Nikonole presents her work at the intersection of art, activism, and tactical technology — including interventions into surveillance systems, wearable mesh networks for off-grid communication, and AI-generated propaganda sabotage.
Featuring projects like Antiwar AI, the 868labs initiative, and the curatorial project Digital Resistance, the talk explores how art can do more than just comment on sociotechnical systems — it can interfere, infiltrate, and subvert them.
This is about prototypes as politics, networked interventions as civil disobedience, and media hacks as tools of strategic refusal. The talk asks: what happens when art stops decorating crisis and starts debugging it?
The talk will also introduce an upcoming HackLab initiative — a collaboration-in-progress that brings together artists, hackers, and activists to develop open-source tools for disruption, resilience, and collective agency — and invites potential collaborators to get involved.
Check the news from the past year. If you care about security or privacy, Bitchat doesn't actually have either according to !any independent security audits), so I'd stay away.
If you dont care about those things, I'd look at Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol apps instead.
"Raliv, Tsaliv ya Galiv" didn't need the internet or fancy mesh networking - rabble-rousing Friday mosque-sessions were sufficient for ethnociding the native population over the course of many centuries.
Back in 2014 when briar or something similar came up, we found the app.needed to signed in "online" first then it could be used offline.
There were apps used in 2019 but it wasnt enough.
The government "banned" 14 appps including element "because use by terrorists" meant anyone using element after the ban got a loud knock on the door by the stazi with 100-300 personnel, fully ready to engage in battle.
Have seen horror stories.
They used isp data to locate homes where element was used and then staked them out and made a big show of attacking at night.
Then the usual. Phones are confiscated and literal spyware installed.
That was Bridgefy that required initial online access to setup. Briar doesn't and never has.
Traceability of Briar users, if not the actual content, is certainly potentially worse than something like what Bitchat claims (don't use Bitchat it's provably not secure or private at all) with it's traffic obfuscation and multihop. However, the lack of multihop also makes it less promiscuous, so someone would have to be monitoring when you came in contact with the transfer source or destination, unlike multihop that just broadcasts to anyone so they can hopefully relay it.
that's why its difficult to trust these apps? i've been out of the game for years and i would rather be on the fence about the whole thing.
the problem i saw back in 2019 was adoption. it just happened suddenly and the scaremongering done by the government was top notch. literally any anti-government tweet or post was "deemed social media misuse", how dare you question the might of the great nation.
what i am saying is, in that heated environment, no one wanted to be the one holding the short straw so this tech did not play out, simply out of personal safety.
Why are people downvoting him? He's right (even though if his dream for "Azad" Kashmir came true, it would mean my family is Kishtwar would probably have to leave for Punjab or Himachal with only the clothes on their backs, but the current status quo means he might be detained indefinetly as well) - the DoT, Home Ministry, and State STFs have been rolling out fusions centers since the mid-2010s [0].
The rules are much more strict/draconian in JK [1]
Whoa, I was just mentioning in another post how I have my family member install bitchat just in case for emergencies. This is a very interesting alternative. With a travel router, I can significantly expand the chat radius compared to bitchat's purely BLE approach.
You should definitely read the news about bitchat. It doesnt actually have basically any security or privacy from all the dozens of independent security audit findings. Jack even said it was vibe coded and never audited.
How does Briar work when a government shuts down the internet?
It mentions Bluetooth and Wifi.
My guess is that it tries to find other Briar devices connected to the same Bluetooth and wifi hotspot but what if the users are not on the Bluetooth/wifi?
Does it share ALL messages encrypted with every Briar user in the hope later they come in contact with the final user?
Unfortunately, due to safety reasons Apple cannot allow you to leave the walled garden, it is only in your own best interest. All communication services on our iOS devices require at least one US-based NSA-integrated middleman. /s
Google is no better here, I would say they are even worse since they are scanning your files actively. Remember story of Father who was asked by doctor to send his baby son private parts photos due to covid and Google not only locked him out but also notified Police. Even after getting statement from Law Enforcement there was no crime they didn't restore his access. Guy lost 20 years of live history due to algorithm.
I feel the narrative on these kind of issues should be updated. We've been using their framing of "algorithms" but it is taking away all responsibility from the US tech workers who are actually designing and running Google.
The guy lost 20 years of life history due to US tech workers at Google wrongfully blocking his account and then ignoring his pleads for reactivation.
When US tech workers can show up to take cash and bonus payments from Google, they can also show up to take responsibility for Google's impact.
Can anyone vouch what is most useful to the protestors that we can support? What's actually being used? What do they need for communication? Does anyone there actually use Briar?
I worry that some of these things are well meaning but ultimately a waste of time like Elon's submarine doodad.
So this is a sabotage agency operation? I am old enough to remember the "Arab spring" "intelligence" operation. Are people really naive about these types of Sabotage Agency supported projects and entities, regardless of the interest and curiosity about the technology?
And no, I know these things as a matter of fact for reasons that will need to remain my own.
It's a manual for setup (in Farsi, you can click to other languages) that needs to be as accessible as possible to the least technology a literate people in the world as well as the ultra techy. Often people that have extremely limited data connection or no data connection as well. It has to be as simple as possible, and as clear as possible.
Check the main landing page and you can see it's a relatively modern site, they just gave a very restricted target audience the manual needs to be available for.
I like briar for the fact that i already have the hardware...
I like meshtastic for not needing the network related devices for their hardware
What I'd like is something that is platform agnostic... I want an app that i can install, a (tor like) server i can setup that will anonymously route and fwd messages and really cheap and easy hardware that will let me pop up mini repeaters on demand.
Would also like to be able to send images and maybe videos, but for the network to be smart enough to only send them when the bandwidth is there
I may just stick with briar in the mean time, but seriously none of them seem to offer what i want.
Briar mentions "mailboxes", where you can stick up collectors wherever you want. It's not as nice as repeaters that would build a multihop mesh network for you, but one advantage of not doing multihop is that you get at least initial insecure identification before any identifiable secure communication is attempted so even if the Military Police are watching you, they won't be able to tell you even have Briar unless they can spoof a device for someone you have as a contact and have a waiting message for (or the BLE device ID of one of your mailbox devices). Those aren't hard to spoof, but learning what they are can be more difficult than if you're broadcasting to anyone that will listen like multihop requires.
I'm still unclear how the stated goal of the title is achieved. My first assumption reading the title that it works something like airtags, but that is obviously nonsense. unless you are standing right next to the guy you want to message, how exactly does it work?
Thanks. Basically it depends on c travelling to another town. Also taking the risk of being caught with the content on it's phone. It looks like a great app and every little helps but hardly a game changer, unless i'm underestimating how bad it is in Iran?
If it works via tor it's probably also slow, but that's a small price to pay for not relying on a central server for people with legitimate concerns or problems with connecting.
I suspect use cases are more likely community organizing and info sharing.
It supports forums and private groups that are E2EE, and "blog" posts that can include RSS reblogging.
The forums and private groups do bidirectional syncing and merging of all updates with anyone in the forum/group, so that gives you the equivalent of near-infinite multihop among trusted peers for large forums/groups. And it means every person has a complete copy, so it's nearly impossible to find all copies to censor it.
With the blogging of reblogged RSS feeds, you can even have people acting like news carriers for viral-ike person-to-person information transfer as well. Even if that does require a little more manual curation by the "transmission vectors" than forum/group posts.
Remember too that when things get bad enough people become ready to give up thier lives if necessary, and this may just be a way to reduce (but not eliminate) the need to actually sacrifice thier life for their cause. Large groups of people may collectively believe it's worth being individually captured and imprisoned or murdered to ensure the larger group is aware of what's happening.
Perhaps Americans should start preparing with Meshtastic / Meshcore, just in case.......
..,..the Emperor seems hellbent on bringing martial law into effect.
It seems very unlikely the US would take the approach of shutting down the internet to prevent communication. All the internet infrastructure is hardwired for US surveillance data collection, so it's already a perfect honeypot. Why shutdown your honey pot?
More likely to be useful in the US is communication that is actually private, secure, and not centralized, but the underlying communication channel if unlikely to be relevant. Signal for example would almost certainly have thier IP blocked in the area, or their servers taken down because their completely centralized and therefore easy to block. Realistically something that can leverage an adversarial network to implement mesh communication that can be obfuscated (so it's not easily detected and blocked) is more useful in the US.
Then get more? Sounds like a fantastic way to waste military resources. I have no clue why this mythical US military might and efficiency idea persists after so many failed interventions.
Triangulation is damn easy. If the US can put on bomb on a suspect satellite phone user back in the 2000's (and they did!), they can certainly send a bomb on that today.
Sat phones during the second gulf war (maybe even the first) became a liability. The transmission lit them up like a god damn beacon saying, "Bomb goes here!".
Triangulation, the math isn't the hard part. Where exactly on the continental United States are you proposing dropping ordinance? MOVE in 1985 was controversial even back then.
It can have challenges, but triangulation can be done with signals that have recognizable patterns or features -- even in a sea of other co-channel noise sources.
If you can observe the signal strength of your neighbor's home router while standing next to your own even if the signals differ in strength by some orders of magnitude (which is easy on Android; no idea bout iOS), then anyone else can also do the same.
I'm genuinely interested in learning more about the shortcomings of meshtastic if you have a link to share. Groups like the Anarchist Black Cross seem really supportive of the tech for disaster situations. Even Benn Jordan claimed it played an important role during the floods in NC
My understanding is that it relates to the flood routing in meshtastic. I haven't heard a real-world failure example, but another comment on this post mentioned defcon being a case (I don't know anything about that).
The intervention part is an administrative problem the military isn't designed for. For the core mission of collecting intelligence, eliminating targets, and occupying land, the US has an unrivaled track record over the last 85 years.
I don't think it's going to be military killing a
Americans. As of now it more looks like federal government.
Nevertheless, sure, in the rural areas, but less so in the cities, reflections and bending of the waves make it much harder, and a single repeater with solar panel and battery could plausibly be made under $50.
They are being made. I have a four node network already in my suburb. There is a software project that is written in Python that essentially turns lorawan nodes into BBSs similar to briar.
Why would they bother? Super low bandwidth unencrypted communication they can triangulate if they really need to sounds like a perfect thing to let keep running and just monitor. Then you can triangulate just the "seditious" people who incriminate themselves.
I guess if you were relying on the meshtastic network as a backbone network replacement, which I'm not sure much of anyone is even currently setup for and I've heard isnt really feasible with the naive meshtastic toy implementation, you could be sending encrypted traffic. But then you have to have pre-shared encryption keys for participants and it will significantly lose it's usefulness for adding new adopters.
They're incredibly easy to build and even disguise as lawn ornaments as Benn Jordan showed in a recent video. When it costs us less money and time to build them than it costs the gov't to find/destroy them it's a worthy investment
Maybe ham repeaters but when we are talking lorawan they will have a hell of a time taking the networks down that are already established. Just in my suburb we have more than 6000 nodes because of the helium network.
Renee Good was killed after dropping off her six-year-old child at school. I agree with you, but people like her have children and are not trying to die in the street just for looking at somebody the wrong way. And it's one thing to open carry, it's another thing to become a trained and confident marksmen.
And as someone who has had half a dozen police officers simultaneously pointing guns at my head, mistaking me for someone else in public, once you're in that situation, escalation is only going to lead to death. Out here, police shoot you if your hand goes anywhere near your waist.
Alexander Hamilton explains his definition of what "well-regulated" is - and the purpose of a citizen militia - in contrast to the standing army in the Federalist Papers, No. 29. Most of the idea has become much more federalized than intended with the National Guard, but it has long since been misused for its intended purpose.
I think the most you can say is that they recognized that many male propertied white protestant Americans are American. Maybe some more qualifiers are necessary.
Do you think the govt will not force Google to revoke developer certs once developer verification is in place to prevent sideloading or not order Google/Apple to forcibly uninstall them ?
These are great tools in American toolkit if it wants to do a regime change in other countries. Their effectiveness within America are questionable.
The government isn't going to hand to do that, that's already what Google's planning to do anyway. They'd just have to tell Google to take down certain apps so they're no longer on the Google "approved" list, which would deactivate them on your device during next network connection (like most Google "services" on Android, I'm sure these too would bypass the system VPN as well) as well as making them unavailable from the sole allowed download source. You know, like they did with ICE Block already.
It's only line-of-sight, but isn't the range 10s-100s of kilometres in open areas? Some repeaters on hills/mountains etc. could connect large areas potentially.
Nope. Uses only one frequency that quickly gets crowded and if you are in urban areas you'd be lucky to get more than 200 meters.
It is a toy. A cheap Quangsheng/Baofeng for 20 euros can reach a few kilometers in urban area, use multiple frequencies and go for 100 kilometers easily on LoS. They even reach Australia from Europe when using a wire antenna large enough.
There was a well known crypto weakness, CVE-2025-52464, that allowed man in the middle decryption of meshtastic traffic. It was fixed by a firmware patch that improved crypto discipline.
I am in the US but I think the statement applies for >70% of the earth. China, Europe, the UK (big time), India, etc. Maybe not so bad in like, Japan -_(--)_-
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,because if you run a mesh network then you have declared yourself against the regime. Steganography may be better.
An amusing point is that secure steganography depends on redundancy with entropy- noise. A few years ago, it looked increasingly difficult because of lossy compression. Today, we're awash in randomly generated content, so it should be possible to make secure steganography quite high bandwidth. Although, it's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of it,because the randomness is the input to a diffusion model,not the output - you might need to run the model backwards to obtain your steganographic content. Which I guess is possible,although expensive.
No. They also do so to prevent political violence from spreading, and fanning the flame of further violence. This is (in my opinion) a legitimate response to prevent hatred and mob violence from growing.
Even without climate / natural disasters we need to have fallback infrastructures in general.
Just yesterday Verizon was down.
It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters, but the point of the exercise is to prepare for the unimaginable.
The places where this happens, like Iran now, are in extremely different situations than anything in the US, or any other Western country.
That shouldn’t discourage people running meshes though.
That said, I never said that my comment was about the US.
With tiny solar repeater that placed on a strategic hill you can cover lots of kilometers. Being sensitive down to -145dBm opens a lot of doors.
I was able to build energy harvester nodes that fit into 5cm x 5cm x 4cm boxes that roughly cost around 20€. Without energy harvesting capability with a normal TI BQ wide range charge controllers (that stuff costs $1.5-2.5@pcs and eats every power source up to 18V! With pseudo-MPPT!) you can bring the entire thing down to <<15€. That's mass producable throw-away stuff.
Currently available LoRa-gear is either USB-power optimized (looking at you Heltec) or just awfully overpriced as soon as a solar panel is attached to it.
The signals are difficult to spot once you are in some distance to the transmitter.
Maybe in the battlefields of the future we'll be fighting with lorawan cyberdecks rescued from desk drawers, and meshtastic hackers will be the equivalent of fighter pilot aces.
On that topic, I'm in this thread hoping to hear about how anyone got into resilient mesh networks and what they're doing with them now (outside of overthrowing the Ayatollah).
What was the deal breaker for them?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/cloudflare-may-p...
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.
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.
They threatened to pull the plug on all Italian customers.
This is relevant to this conversation: CF recently acted in a way that makes some people think it might cut its services to people for political reasons.
I don't find your comment particularly well articulated or continaing anything besides name calling (the "bot farming"). Can you articulate your opinion on the matter?
It isn't without peril for the admins and users.
(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.
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.
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.
LoRa mesh networking seems like the runner-up, but vague reports indicate (Meshtastic) doesn't handle crowds well.
I think Bitchat can use Meshtastic, so a LoRa radio paired with a phone could be a base for not just texting individuals, but community messaging.
1: https://polymarket.com/event/us-civil-war-before-2027
Also, if you enjoy troll humor, the comments section is very funny.
Considering reports like "Polymarket refuses to pay bets that US would 'invade' Venezuela" [1] one risk is poorly written small print, meaning you might not actually be betting on the thing you think you're betting on. This could also err in your favour, of course - but it's still a source of risk.
There's also the risks involved in cryptocurrency generally - it's the wild west, rife with scams, hacks, unexpected fees, and paperwork.
And thirdly, prediction markets often lack market depth, so if you want to invest a non-trivial amount the price can move a lot. You want to gamble $2,000 to win $190? No problem. You want to gamble $200,000 maybe no-one will take your bet. Can you be bothered to go through all the KYC paperwork rigmarole for $190 ?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46521773
The low volume places a rather disappointing cap on your profits.
> Total garbage. Spread by a $9bn company with a 1m-follower account, a post viewed by 4.5m people. Pure disinformation for financial gain, with serious consequences for actual human lives. Shashank Joshi - @shashj - Jan 12 - https://x.com/shashj/status/2010766014829478393
Funny, because a bit like the yes side of the civil war scenario, if JC comes back and someone is the sort of person to bet that he will, then do they really need the payout in those circumstances; and will the gambling website be in a position to pay out?
Civil war requires two militaries. Tiananmen Square wasn’t a civil war.
That’s still not a civil war in the conventional sense. If it gets entrenched and coördinated it could be come something we’ll debate, e.g. the Troubles. But insurgency != civil war.
[0] https://kjis.org/journal/view.html?uid=302&vmd=Full
2. start civil war
3. ???
4. civil war with stone axes
The problem is transmitter power, residential Wifi radios are limited to a very low transmit power, like 0.1W, if you do more than that, you're breaking the law, and you're very easy to find if they come looking.
Won't they get jammed? Yes, absolutely, on local levels. This is electronic warfare and happens in any actual battlespace.
Does that mean it is completely useless in emergency situations (of which civil war is one)? No.
Including, but not limited to: garage door openers, some (older) car key fobs, some RC equipment, wireless weather sensors, remotely readable metering devices (electricity, water) and a crapton of other things.
An idea would be to move to SX128x modems with work around 2.4GHz. You recycle Wifi-gear for directional stuff. This also enabled you to hide below Wifi traffic.
Still jammable - but much much more difficult.
But yes, targeted suppression/oppression (depending on your allegiance) will almost certainly use jamming — in fact, I’ve spoken with some Antifa about how they jam EMS frequencies at their events.
The same can happen now - people would walk down the streets to certain places, to become hubs of information, but with no physical contact. Of course those places would be were the jammers would head to.
Actually this sounds like a good theme for book... however as long as I live on this world, I've noticed that if I invent something, there are already two people on the internet who have invented it already, so... please give me the title :)
Wasn't that also called SneakerNet, back in the time? We used it in western Europe as well (both term and distribution method)
Also, Antifa are against fascism the way the DPRK is for democracy.
Would you bet a large amount of money without some insider information?
ICE going after fraud and illegals. Voted for.
Closed borders. Voted for.
Isolationist imperialism and a end of the western free trade world order.Voted for.
A loose Canon. Voted for.
A screeching social priest caste driven ou the door. Voted for.
The people have spoken and the reject progressive policies (more accurately they dont care, but reject the package it comes in). Se la vi.
Trump has a ton of work todo before he reaches the starting point of the mullahs. 12000 dead in 3 days. Thats ice shooting 8 people trying to run them over every day. Politics has not platform here, including rejected by the masses cosplay revolutionaries hijacking real disasters. Do something good, help iranian civilization recover.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kelly
seems better qualified to fight than, for example, the current day drinking daytime host self styled as head of "Dep. of War".
New York and California have enough GDP, weapons factories and in-state fissile materials to make a civil war at least interesting. (They’re also both primed to land foreign armies on their shores and air strips).
In repression, guns and muscles count. In a civil war, they’re as effective as Maduro’s guard was.
In history mothers against authoritarian rule, against the draft, raising awareness, etc. have been suprisingly effective at slowing violence, attracting press coverage, kick starting civil rights, etc.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_Plaza_de_Mayo
* https://libcom.org/article/1965-72-sos-australian-mothers-re...
* https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2025/0813/israel...
Not every soldier, not every weekend warrior LEO LARPing, is comfortable shooting women in the face.
it was self defense, its been debunk by countless video of different perspective that the officer is in fact got run over
maybe just maybe dont try to protect somalian pirates
The officer that shot through the front window, stepped to the side, shot twice more through the side window while on two feet, and stomped away unharmed muttering "fucking bitch" .. that officer?
Seems unlikely.
she literally try to run over law enforcement, its unfortunate situation but federal officer didn't doing wrong in here
I wasn't able to resist smiling reading this :)
Does anyone if briar relays traffic? like if at least one person in a wifi network has briar and they also connect by bluetooth to another person within an adjacent wifi network, does it relay messages from one end of the city to the other over dozens of devices?
The broadcast type channels though are what the article talks about, they are great for off the grid and mesh environments.
Relaying and scattering traffic across neighboring peers (and handshakes via multicast DNS, for example) would fix a lot of the issues you'll get with Briar, but I guess that would imply a refactor of the codebase.
For these types of NAT breaking issues, a lot of protocols rely on STUN/TURN/TURTLE routing.
For my experimental software router I'm relying on broken firewall deep packet inspection, so I'm using exfil / smuggling protocols. Currently still works, according to my local setup of the great firewall (it's source leak was legit btw).
Is this even technically possible?
The title implies that this is instrumenta in evading the govt block and monitoring on messaging.
The truth is it's not being actively used, and this is just a proposal, and might not be that practical or safe to use when the bad guys come looking.
Not sure what you meam about "advertising" as OP doesn't seem to have any relation to Briar but just a person in Iran trying to cope and help.
From a quick Google search it seems there's no reference to Briar having any connection to Iran other than this discussion, and other places linking to it.
Most likely how they got it in Iran, as I doubt that critical mass of people had it installed in advance. Most likely doesn't work on iPhones though - no sideloading.
After discovering the amount of pain involved with that API, I quickly discarded the idea though
[0]: https://opencollective.com/secure-scuttlebutt-consortium/upd...
Seems like the GPG of comms.
A would-be opressor can just have a van full of antennas drive through the neighborhood and triangulate all those transmitters, after which you'll get caught.
It's like using high-powered flashlights to covertly message each other.
- EU & UK leadership
If you could pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years?
Like you don't need the unfair power of hindsight to know that tying your energy independence to Russia (your military adversary and the reason NATO exists) was a bad decision back then, or that staying dependent on US military and tech was bad for sovereignty, or that pursuing unrealistic climate goals was a bad decision, or that opening your borders to millions of unvetted people from unstable regions with high crime and low education was bad, since many people have been saying all these were bad decisions 20 years ago but they were ignored because the gravy train was still running and the EU political elite never game much of a shit about what the peasants though anyway. And now that the gravy train has stopped and the piper has to be paid, our leadership class are trying to gaslight us and deflect the blame for their recklessness at best or just suppress voices of dissent at worst.
And even if we were to assume they performed super well, that doesn't mean I should now swallow tyrannical laws designed to suppress our freedoms while they give themselves exemptions, just because different people from a different era who are no longer in power made some good decisions 30 years ago under the same umbrella of the EU since the EU-EC of today as an org is a vastly different beast than the EU of 30 years ago. There wasn't even a common currency and central bank 30 years ago.
It is easy to complain about energy dependence, struggles with immigration/integration and precarious national budgets, but the conditions for those weren't caused by recent decision in my view (instead, namely, lack of local oil/gas, unstable north africa/middle east and bad demographics with too many old people).
All those problems are really costly and difficult to solve. Sure, the EU could've tried a super-scale Messmer plan 20 years ago, and could then maybe rival current renewable power with nuclear output, but this would have been orders of magnitude more costly.
Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).
It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).
I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum. If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.
WHich question did I not answer?
>weren't caused by recent decision in my view
No, but they could admit it was a fuckup of the political class, and tell us how they're planning to fix it, instead of gaslighting us for complaining about it and doing more mistake that further damage our economy. We can't stop the music chair song from playing just yet. Just one more round I promise.
How about the recent EU Mercosur trade deal? They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports. This is a totally new strategic blunder, they can't keep blaming the past anymore.
>Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).
This is disproven and untrue but has been repeated so many time it became the poster child argument of pro-illegal immigration EU propaganda. That open borders will magically save our economy. It didn't. Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
Regarding Japan's economy, is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did, it got fucked starting from 1985 when the US forced them to sign the Plaza Accord in order to counter their massive trade deficit US had with Japan(and other powerful export economies), which increased the value of the Yen making Japanese imports suddenly expensive and uncompetitive. Then to combat this, the Japan central bank fucked up themselves by printing money like crazy with ultra low interest rates which instead of stabilizing the exports, caused a massive speculative real estate and golf membership(yes that's true) bubble which imploded in 1990, dealing the final blow to their economic growth since they ran out of levers to pull other than suppressing their labor into a losing race to the bottom with other low wage manufacturing economies of Asia. I recommend you read more on the Plaza Accord, it's pretty eye opening.
Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this? No. But they have the nerve to blame us for not having kids in a stagnating economy with crazy real-estate prices then gaslight us that salvation lies in illegal immigration instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.
>It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).
Good point. If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?
>I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum. If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.
yeah, the environment is important, but all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it. Great success. And even Europeans will stop caring about the environment when they won't be able to have a job, or afford to pay rent or heating anymore.
The "what policies should a perfect government have enacted instead, with hindsight". But your last post adds a lot on that front.
> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
Hard disagree on this. Just consider two poster children for continuous positive economical growth: Poland and Vietnam. Did that economic outlook effect positive population growth? Clearly no (for both cases, and it's not even close).
My personal view: Easy access to contraceptives (people want to fuck more than raise children), and realignment of economical incentives: Children are no longer the default retirement plan (nor are they needed by the parents themselves as cheap workforce).
Both of those factors are icky to counteract for a modern democracy.
> If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?
No, because those did not occur synchronously. The imported, lower-skill workforce was most needed earlier (pre 2000s), with the big youth unemployment problems mostly occuring later (2000s and after).
Immigration rates are also much easier to control than local birth rate, and, most importantly, dont suffer from a two-decade lag.
Restricting foreign workers would have most certainly been a big economic hit (this is somewaht obvious; because foreign workers are mostly raised and educated for free), especially for countries like Germany, even with perfectly boosting population growth at the perfect times to compensate.
> Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
Poland has been playing catchup inside a huge, wealthy, low-barrier market. Would their growth have been comparable if wages had started at a German level in 1990? IMO clearly not.
> all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked except now we made ourselves poorer for it
Two big problems with that view.
First: The planet "getting fucked" is not binary. If you want to limit warming to a somewhat reasonable degree (and the worst-case timelines are not reasonable), then action has to be taken at some point, and pretty obviously the biggest culprits need to get the ball rolling, or no one is ever gonna do anything.
Second: The EU has already fucked the planet much harder than any developing nation, China included, despite being not even half the population of India or China. You could make a case that the US is slightly worse, but thats completely irrelevant; the relative moral net-obligation on the EU to act is clearly pretty large already for a long time now, and a few outliers (US, oil states) being even worse does not absolve the Europeans from anything.
Lastly, those efforts to combat climate change clearly had already huge global effects. Or do you honestly think that massive Chinese buildout of solar/wind power would have happened without those technologies getting developed, refined and proven in Europe over the last decades?
I don't necessarily disagree with your outlook completely: I think a bunch of things could have been done better, especially refugee handling, and possibly immigration vs economy tradeoffs. But still: a lot of those decisions had to be made without hindsight, and I don't think expecting much better than what we got is reasonable.
You also have to consider that lots of those decisions were made in a different time (with different values/outlooks): It was much harder to let refugees become homeless, executed or starved when a lot of Europeans saw thair own past actions (=> colonialism) as a big driver for those crises (and I'd argue that this only really changed, somewhat justifiably, post Arab spring).
For example: Germany in that period was never no way going to accept nuclear power. Their leadership regrets it in hindsight, but at the time, forcing it on the people would have been undemocratic.
> They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports.
20 years ago the biggest problem with the EU's farming system was massive overproduction.
Like, "newsworthy scandal" levels of overproduction.
> Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-gdp-growth?tab=lin...
Poland mainly missed out on the downside of the global financial crisis, rather than being special otherwise. Few percent difference between Poland, Germany, Japan, Europe collectively, and the USA all around the same level.
> is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did
Europe did not in fact import millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare. This would have been a self-evidently stupid thing to do, which is why that is not what happened.
Europe did take around two million asylum seekers in total, before the pandemic. Important thing about asylum: they get sent back as soon as their homes stop being warzones, or sooner if they're deemed to have been taking the piss. Right now there's about 4 million Ukrainians, who would probably count as "second world" given the etymology; do you want to count them as "uneducated"? I wouldn't. But then, I have Ukrainian neighbours.
Economic migrants, who are important for the economy, are a bigger group. Mixing up asylum seekers and economic migrants because they're both "migrants" is as much of an error as declaring that all Canadians and Mexicans are "Americans" because they're from the continent of America.
> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
If this were so, even royal families would not have had any kids before 1850, there certainly wouldn't be a massive population boom in e.g. India where they've only recently connected everyone to the electricity grid.
> Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this?
I was born in 1983. I remember being warned of overpopulation, there was literally zero public concern about a demographic crisis by the time I reached pension age.
I also remember ongoing press campaigns in the UK demonising single mothers.
> instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.
That's a new one.
You think there's a law banning people from criticising the lack of support for families? Have you seen, like, any election campaign ever? One reliable theme throughout, no matter how effective the policy would be if examined closely, is at least one party saying they support families.
> EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it.
China's also going green. India… isn't, but the pain point hits them much sooner than we expect it to hit us, so they probably will.
The US was going green, then Trump happened. He's against renewables and doesn't believe in climate change, while also wanting to invade Greenland for reasons that only make sense if one or both of those are good bets; he insists on keeping coal plants open when the owners of those plants don't want that because gas is cheaper; he's lying a lot in general, but specifically by saying China doesn't use the renewables they're exporting. He's all over the place, wildly incoherent, and may lead to WW3 where none of this matters anyway.
Ever heard about Chat Control and CSAM?
Mandatory client-side scanning of encrypted messages has been removed from the proposal following opposition from the European Parliament and several member states, preserving E2EE integrity
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...
This assumption seems risky.
[1] https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/
Note that Briar groups are controlled by one moderator. Other participants of the group can not add members. Note also that Briar has the concept of introductions. So it is easy to avoid making the sort of identity errors commonly made by other schemes.
[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg
I doubt this will actually work though except in the densest city.
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.
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).
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-coding-dissent-art-technology-an...
Coding Dissent: Art, Technology, and Tactical Media
This presentation examines artistic practices that engage with sociotechnical systems through tactical interventions. The talk proposes art as a form of infrastructural critique and counter-technology. It also introduces a forthcoming HackLab designed to foster collaborative development of open-source tools addressing digital authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, propaganda infrastructures, and ideological warfare.
In this talk, media artist and curator Helena Nikonole presents her work at the intersection of art, activism, and tactical technology — including interventions into surveillance systems, wearable mesh networks for off-grid communication, and AI-generated propaganda sabotage.
Featuring projects like Antiwar AI, the 868labs initiative, and the curatorial project Digital Resistance, the talk explores how art can do more than just comment on sociotechnical systems — it can interfere, infiltrate, and subvert them.
This is about prototypes as politics, networked interventions as civil disobedience, and media hacks as tools of strategic refusal. The talk asks: what happens when art stops decorating crisis and starts debugging it?
The talk will also introduce an upcoming HackLab initiative — a collaboration-in-progress that brings together artists, hackers, and activists to develop open-source tools for disruption, resilience, and collective agency — and invites potential collaborators to get involved.
If you dont care about those things, I'd look at Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol apps instead.
Back in 2014 when briar or something similar came up, we found the app.needed to signed in "online" first then it could be used offline.
There were apps used in 2019 but it wasnt enough.
The government "banned" 14 appps including element "because use by terrorists" meant anyone using element after the ban got a loud knock on the door by the stazi with 100-300 personnel, fully ready to engage in battle.
Have seen horror stories.
They used isp data to locate homes where element was used and then staked them out and made a big show of attacking at night.
Then the usual. Phones are confiscated and literal spyware installed.
Traceability of Briar users, if not the actual content, is certainly potentially worse than something like what Bitchat claims (don't use Bitchat it's provably not secure or private at all) with it's traffic obfuscation and multihop. However, the lack of multihop also makes it less promiscuous, so someone would have to be monitoring when you came in contact with the transfer source or destination, unlike multihop that just broadcasts to anyone so they can hopefully relay it.
the problem i saw back in 2019 was adoption. it just happened suddenly and the scaremongering done by the government was top notch. literally any anti-government tweet or post was "deemed social media misuse", how dare you question the might of the great nation.
https://thewire.in/rights/kashmir-fir-vpn-social-media this is fresh "misuse".
what i am saying is, in that heated environment, no one wanted to be the one holding the short straw so this tech did not play out, simply out of personal safety.
few years ago we had clubhouse and https://kashmirlife.net/sleuths-silently-listen-to-clubhouse...
which someone like me knew "out of habit" so i didn't even try the app but people did and paid the price.
The rules are much more strict/draconian in JK [1]
[0] - https://www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/AdvNATGRIDCOT_151...
[1] - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/centre-blocks-14-mobi...
https://www.crazyengineers.com/threads/netra-is-indian-gover...
Edit: Boo, no iOS app
[1] https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#will-t...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/685525
Downvote all you want, the web is here, and will flourish.
Use sane browser and or OS inherited permissions, and sane permission-promoting and gating,
and it’s a non-issue.
(Have you seen the prompts for Location, Microphone, WebUSB, and other “scary” features in the browser?
There’s really not much room for misinterpretation!)
It mentions Bluetooth and Wifi. My guess is that it tries to find other Briar devices connected to the same Bluetooth and wifi hotspot but what if the users are not on the Bluetooth/wifi? Does it share ALL messages encrypted with every Briar user in the hope later they come in contact with the final user?
So it seems it's more effective for blog posts because everyone is sharing the same blog post.
I'm not sure what happens with direct messages.
Also, for something like this you don't want a platform that requires you to essentially use the App Store and nothing else.
The guy lost 20 years of life history due to US tech workers at Google wrongfully blocking his account and then ignoring his pleads for reactivation.
When US tech workers can show up to take cash and bonus payments from Google, they can also show up to take responsibility for Google's impact.
I worry that some of these things are well meaning but ultimately a waste of time like Elon's submarine doodad.
And no, I know these things as a matter of fact for reasons that will need to remain my own.
Check the main landing page and you can see it's a relatively modern site, they just gave a very restricted target audience the manual needs to be available for.
Design is not so important for getting information across
I guess too many links at the beginning, but other than that it looks like your average website, just RTL.
I like meshtastic for not needing the network related devices for their hardware
What I'd like is something that is platform agnostic... I want an app that i can install, a (tor like) server i can setup that will anonymously route and fwd messages and really cheap and easy hardware that will let me pop up mini repeaters on demand. Would also like to be able to send images and maybe videos, but for the network to be smart enough to only send them when the bandwidth is there
I may just stick with briar in the mean time, but seriously none of them seem to offer what i want.
Looks like clients re-host posts to their friends in a p2p fashion.
If it works via tor it's probably also slow, but that's a small price to pay for not relying on a central server for people with legitimate concerns or problems with connecting.
The forums and private groups do bidirectional syncing and merging of all updates with anyone in the forum/group, so that gives you the equivalent of near-infinite multihop among trusted peers for large forums/groups. And it means every person has a complete copy, so it's nearly impossible to find all copies to censor it. With the blogging of reblogged RSS feeds, you can even have people acting like news carriers for viral-ike person-to-person information transfer as well. Even if that does require a little more manual curation by the "transmission vectors" than forum/group posts.
Remember too that when things get bad enough people become ready to give up thier lives if necessary, and this may just be a way to reduce (but not eliminate) the need to actually sacrifice thier life for their cause. Large groups of people may collectively believe it's worth being individually captured and imprisoned or murdered to ensure the larger group is aware of what's happening.
More likely to be useful in the US is communication that is actually private, secure, and not centralized, but the underlying communication channel if unlikely to be relevant. Signal for example would almost certainly have thier IP blocked in the area, or their servers taken down because their completely centralized and therefore easy to block. Realistically something that can leverage an adversarial network to implement mesh communication that can be obfuscated (so it's not easily detected and blocked) is more useful in the US.
Sat phones during the second gulf war (maybe even the first) became a liability. The transmission lit them up like a god damn beacon saying, "Bomb goes here!".
It'll blend in with background radiation from home routers.
If you can observe the signal strength of your neighbor's home router while standing next to your own even if the signals differ in strength by some orders of magnitude (which is easy on Android; no idea bout iOS), then anyone else can also do the same.
I was under the opposite impression, that meshtastic's whole problem is that it doesn't scale well at all.
I did find this assessment:
https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...
And here is Meshtastics explanation of the rationale behind 'managed flood routing':
https://meshtastic.org/blog/why-meshtastic-uses-managed-floo...
I think I first heard about the differences from Andy Kirby, one of the MeshCore creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNWf0Mh2fJw
Directional radios would still win out on p2p links.
Nevertheless, sure, in the rural areas, but less so in the cities, reflections and bending of the waves make it much harder, and a single repeater with solar panel and battery could plausibly be made under $50.
Why don't the people in Minnesota go open carry and let ICE agents think twice before drawing their weapons on people?
And as someone who has had half a dozen police officers simultaneously pointing guns at my head, mistaking me for someone else in public, once you're in that situation, escalation is only going to lead to death. Out here, police shoot you if your hand goes anywhere near your waist.
It was for establishing well ordered militias. They could be used to help defend the country in a time of war.
> Why don't the people in Minnesota go open carry and let ICE agents think twice before drawing their weapons on people?
Most of the demonstrators believe that "the pen is mightier than the sword", and non-violence is the way to achieve political means. (Ghandi, MLK jr.)
When the peace-niks start amassing guns, that's when you have a tipping point in this country.
Seriously though, everyone back in the 1700s realized that all Americans were American. I'm not sure that's true any more.
What was an American in the 1700s? A person born in America?
Great way to waste resources though.
These are great tools in American toolkit if it wants to do a regime change in other countries. Their effectiveness within America are questionable.
The Government can't revoke the certs on those.
It is a toy. A cheap Quangsheng/Baofeng for 20 euros can reach a few kilometers in urban area, use multiple frequencies and go for 100 kilometers easily on LoS. They even reach Australia from Europe when using a wire antenna large enough.
If you compromise sending or receiving node then sure, of course.
You could theoretically even shut down airplane printers in the cockpit if the jamming was strong enough.
You'd be surprised the things that are tied to ism wifi and bluetooth
The death toll, especially of non-citizens, is piling up however.