Posted by us321 1/15/2026
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.
If it's a self-contained, solar-powered node, it needs not be next to you, or to anyone. It should be safe and secure, to be of use during a natural disaster, or an outburst of violence.
Unless you plan to manually go up the hill with a flash drive each time.
The signals are difficult to spot once you are in some distance to the transmitter.
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.
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.
Non American here observing from outside. Given the move in a few months from a normative western society to one in which heavily armed masked men raid homes and businesses [1] to racially profile [2] for mass imprisonment and deportation. Given the current governments explicit redefinition of political opponents as terrorists [3]. And finally given the extent to which three letter agencies are integrated into US telecommunications infrastructure [4][5]. It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vance-door-to-door-ice/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/09/supreme-cour...
[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/trumps-domestic-terrorism-memo-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
I hear that, but we are so dependent on network connectivity for commerce (and entertainment) here that there would be riots from a different subset of the population if they turned that off.
You can harass brown people and murder activists here, but if you turn off the TikTok spigot, disable access to finance, or frankly fuckin' DoorDash or Uber, people are going to have a meltdown. Modern life here just grinds to a halt without data services.
You're thinking nationally. Think smaller.
It's not tremendously hard to imagine the internet being selectively shut down in a state or city.
Look at the events of the past week. Now imagine the Insurrection Act being invoked in Minnesota, and the state's internet is cut off as Governor Walz's helicopter flees to Canada to avoid being arrested.
If you can't imagine that, remember that nobody could imagine COVID lockdown, either. We've shut down the national air system twice in the last 25 years. Unimaginable in 1999. Yet, here we are.
It's both strange and sad that this book doesn't seem to get much traction these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here
Trump is Windrip... or at least he would be, if he had his faculties about him. Even if you're a Trump supporter, you can't possibly go on denying that if you read this book.
I don't expect nationwide chaos and oppression, "Deus Ex"-style, any time soon, but we should be prepared to resist any local outbursts of it. Think local mobile networks blackouts and ISP POPs shutdowns, for instance.
Install the damn Briar app today, while it can be done trivially, and you have no use for it. It's like putting on a parachute before getting into a small plane: you plan to never use it, but if you would, there'd be no time to put it on when you're already in a free fall.
He has asked our NATO allies to help take over a NATO country's territory. This is what the American President does now. His delegation left the territory's administration in tears, and the US delegation stated afterwards that the US will take the territory.
He ordered federal officers to terrorize American cities, and a 37 year old white mom was shot 3 times in the face by one of them after she dropped her kid off at school. This is America. You seem to be missing perspective. What line has to be crossed for you?
Trump cares more about tariffing countries that don't support his Greenland conquest than the people rising up in Iran. Trump claims Ukraine is the impediment to peace with Russia, the country that invaded Ukraine. 6 times Ukraine has agreed to a Trump initiated peace process, Russia agreed 0 times.
The President stealing 500 million dollars and stashing it in his illegal bribers banks in the middle east, not enough. Actively working to take allies territory, with his people making their administration break down in tears after meeting with the US? Not enough. Extra-judicial murder of Americans after they drop their kids at school, not enough. DOGE. Refusing to release the Epstein files as REQUIRED by law. Forcing numerous law firms to bend the knee to him. Demanding a criminal investigation into the Fed chair. And on, and on, and on. In les than one year.
Do you really think an authoritarian government cares about what people think? If there is a majority that supports them? They don't.
If it loses a large number of supporters, and is forced to suspend even the illusion of democracy, a lot of things would change. It's hard to predict exactly what, but it would be ugly.
That's not to say that they won't. As you observe, they will do what they think they can get away with. But shutting down the entire Internet might be something that they can't get away with.
https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1inrm25/is_mesh...
https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1fy95kj/lets_ta...
Even without climate / natural disasters we need to have fallback infrastructures in general.
Just yesterday Verizon was down.
That said, I never said that my comment was about the US.
They also do so to prevent political violence from spreading, as social media does fan the flame of further violence. This is (in my opinion) a legitimate response to prevent hatred and mob violence from growing.
You are, possibly innocently, carrying propaganda water for a repressive autocratic regime that has killed thousands of its own citizens in the past week alone.
IRI desposts, starting fro Ali Khamenei down to the rest of their ideological "brothers and sisters" in the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (note no "Iran" in that name ..) are scared shitless that a Mussolini style future awaits them and their parasitical clans.
IRI has cut off internet and phone networks for days now because they know that before they can yet again reach "a deal" with the despicable Western elite who were instrumental in their rise to power (and staying there for all these years) need Media Cover from the audiances in the rest of the civilized world who would be exposed to numerous images and videos of bodies piled in streets and morgues, ARAB ISIS Style goons on pickup trucks with machine guns, and scenes of Iranian men and women of all shapes and ages loudly expressing their utter hatred of this EVIL REGIME from all corners of Iran, and they would not be able to "make a deal".
I strongly suggest, specially if you in anyway believe in any sort of Cosmic Judgment (Karmic or Abrahamic), to not stick your ignorant nose into the Iranian Revolution.
The people of Iran want to remove the yoke of this EVIL REGIME masqurading as God's Government on Earth. Let that outlandish and ludicrous pretention sink in before you get up to be a useful idiot for the Islamic Republic occupying Iran, ok?
You may be passionately in favour of one side, but hastily imputing motives to, and disparaging, people who you do not know, will not aid in convincing anyone of your claims; it merely undermines your credibility.
I have sensors in eight of my plants that use LoRa to transmit moisture levels to an SBC running Forth that lights up a single segment in an LED bar to let me know which ones should be watered.
I like to think the electricity has made the plants super-intelligent and now they talk to each over over LoRa and plot against the cat.
> I like to think the electricity has made the plants super-intelligent and now they talk to each over over LoRa and plot against the cat.
This should be the next Pixar film.
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?
Considering the age and political orientation of most people here in this thread, and the age and political orientation of most eg. US hams, the situation would be quite different than most here imagine.
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.
The bits about Vance, Musk and "freedom of speech" are not only completely unnecessary, but well over the top.
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?
The government can block Bluetooth and Wi-Fi with jammers. Russian government already does this in schools during exams, and already doing it around important infrastructure.
Focus on fighting against governments.
It isn't without peril for the admins and users.
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.
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 ?
> 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 ?
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
To list a few: the risk of Polymarket going under, the risk of Polymarket mishandling your money, the risk of Polygon going under, the risk of Ethereum going under, the risk of USDC depegging, the risk of interests going up, and, most obvious of all, the risk of a civil war.
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)
I'd even consider the American one a big example.
Frankly, if the scenario comes to pass, currency value risk is just as likely to make it not pay out than anything else.
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.
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Civil wars are large-scale mobilizations. That’s what makes them uniquely destructive. Insurgencies are also destructive, but in a categorically-different way.
Right, and so are a lot of people. My point is that we still have a long way to go before that sentiment sets in.
Interesting, are you saying that the intentional use of USD somehow makes the US more vulnerable? What failure mode are you thinking of?
2. start civil war
3. ???
4. civil war with stone axes
One thing is for sure, any civil war in the us will not be short on guns.
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?
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.
If you shut off the internet and jam that frequency, nobody can talk to anyone else to coordinate about a new frequency (which is then also just trivially jammed).
Is the pain of that worth disabling communication?
Things don't stand still in "war". There's no "Solution" that will not be attacked, and there's no attack that cannot be worked around.
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)
Its more likely that our economy will tank and you will have more civil unrest.
Would you bet a large amount of money without some insider information?
I just wait and bet only if the market is wrong when the reveal is imminent.
Isn't this a realy good money laundering avenue? I sell you guaranteed outcomes, for a fee ofc.
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.
You are all sold this lie that "illegal immigrants take your jobs" or "bring drugs into the country", and you immediately adopt this as truth and don't even bother to fact check this because of your inherent racism.
In reality the vast amounts immigrants that are coming into US are putting 10 times back more into the economy than they are taking because they are all coming here to work. And they work at jobs that Americans don't want because they pay less. Not that there was even an unemployment crisis to begin with, so Americans had plenty of jobs.
The problem with immigration was the asylum process, where there were not enough staff to process all the requests and determine real ones from fake ones. This is why there was a border bill brought up in 2023-2024, authored by a Republican, that had bipartisan support. Trump killed that bill, saying on record that it would help his election chances. So in the end, more people would have been deported if the border bill would have passed than there are now, and there would have been way more filtering on who gets to stay and who doesnt.
All of this is true, none of this is debatable. No, your favorite right wing commentator opposing arguments are all bullshit.
And this is precisely why conservatives deserve no sympathy. Inherent racism is probably due to the shit job your parents did at raising you, which is at least excusable, but the stupidity of voting for someone who gives you the worse outcome compared to what you want, and then claiming its a better outcome, is not.
* 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.
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.
If you think it does you are overlaying your own biases onto the video.
she is obstructing the law enforcement. for what ???? defending illegal that defrauding tax payer billions of dollar ???? like if you still defending that shit then I guess there is treason that happening
Traffic was not obstructed as footage shows vehicles passing before the shooting.
She was not obstructing ICE in detaining an immigrant.
At the worse it was state traffic offense. Something ICE has no, nada, zero, jurisdiction over.
Traffic infringements are not treason, and ICE _should_ have deferred to state LEOs.
They did not.
They acted like untrained clowns. One officer told her to leave, a second told her to get out of the car while reaching into her car w/out authority to do so.
In countries that are serious about public law and order it is clear that the fault lies with the ICE agents.
And to underline: the historic problem with thuggery is the delegitimization of law enforcement.
Good was given conflicting instructions, none of which seem to have been legally issued. If you’re going to be shot and cursed out when stopped by the cops, at a certain point, the rational action becomes disarming by any means your security threat and then dealing with the legal consequences later. (If I’m being held up at gunpoint for no reason, I’m not considering the law when weighing my options for escape or disarming my opponent.)
Miller wants to invoke the Insurrection Act. The ICE agents are just as stupid and pawnish in this game as the left-wing agitator.
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.
Meshtastic is the name. It works today. Many cities have them. They aren’t useful in antigovernment scenarios because they are trivial to jam and deny use of.
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.
Rather than start with something free, that demonstrably doesn't work where it needs to.
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
I wasn't able to resist smiling reading this :)
(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.