alt Hacker NewsIs 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.
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Mesh networks like meshtastic have shown that they can be run on very low power meaning they can continue to route messages with the power from small solar panels. This makes them more useful in disaster or wide scale power outage scenarios than only as an anti-authority measaure.
Governmental blockout is one thing but…
Even without climate / natural disasters we need to have fallback infrastructures in general.
Just yesterday Verizon was down.
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.
> Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown.
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.
> 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
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?
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.