alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
Replies
Is that the right threat model, though?
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.
Yeah until google, apple & friends boot them from the stores and block side loading as well. Then we're all screwed, as they will have 100% grip and visibility on comms and won't allow third party encrypted comms. Just wait and see friends, that day is around the corner. Which means all sensitive comms will move back offline...
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).
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.
You should not fight against companies, they do not have bad intention.
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.
How is Ukraine doing this? I suppose Starlink isn't available to everyone.
Except people also forget the part state police, and collaborators, play on running such meshes.
It isn't without peril for the admins and users.
Not gonna do much of the gov turns violent.
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.
and what kinda protocol to „browse“?
There is Mesh(core|tastic) around. Both use LoRa.
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.