Posted by us321 19 hours ago
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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'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.
I wasn't able to resist smiling reading this :)
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.
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?
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