alt Hacker NewsThis community should be talking about meshcore more imho.
It's a peer to peer network based on Lora. It really only allows text messaging but with up to 20km hops between peers coverage is surprisingly huge. Incredibly useful if you go hiking with friends (if you get split up you can still stay in touch).
See https://eastmesh.au/ and scroll down to the map for the Victoria and now more widely Australia network that's sprung up.
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Great for small networks. Once bad actors find it, it will be attacked. See gnutella as the case study on unsupervised peer to peer networks
I really want to get into these Lora based mesh tools but the range in my experience is terrible. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, maybe it's a lack of nodes in my area.
I just tested the other day. I'm in the midwest US so it's winter, no leaves. I managed to get about a quarter mile before my two portable nodes couldn't talk to each other. T-Echo with muziworks whip antenna.
Without a bunch of solidly placed, high elevation, high gain antenna nodes, this just isn't really that usable.
Plus, all the other issues others have highlighted.
This isn't great advice if it's supposed to be an alternative to text messaging with a carrier (especially if you're using encrypted RCS).
For one, meshcore doesn't do a fantastic job of protecting metadata. Advertisements include your public key, and if I'm reading this[0] right, your GPS coordinates.
Second, the default public channel uses effectively no encryption at all.
Moreover, the network doesn't exhaustively prevent someone who intercepts a packet from identifying who sent it. It's no Signal.
[0] https://deepwiki.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/7.1-packet-struct...
What does this have to do with mobile carriers tracking GPS data? If you're implying we should use it instead of mobile phones that's not practical at all.
Meshcore and -tastic have the huge problem that the encryption keys are bound to the device and not the app.
I’ve been wondering this for a while and maybe someone has a clue.
Based on the very “bursty” nature of LoRA, how much does an adversary need to spend to radiolocate it? What’s the threat model there?
The crypto is bad and the networks are extremely low bandwidth and quite unreliable and are vulnerable to jamming or spam/overload.
I’ve deployed lots of nodes, and the technology reminds me of ipfs: people who don’t use it much vastly oversell its capabilities.
If you go hiking with friends who aren't total nerds, the proprietary options offer a more consumer-grade experience. (ie, usable by them)
> This community should be talking about meshcore more imho.
The fundamental problem of distributed networks is that you can either have centralized control of the endpoints, or your network becomes vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. So meshcore/meshtastic are great because they are used only by well-meaning people. If they become more popular, we'll start getting tons of spam :(
It is surprising that these networks aren't more popular. There are still many places and situation where connectivity isn't available
Reticulum gets around a lot of these problems, as the (better) encryption is app-level (or even more fine-grained.) Its also not tied to lora, so you can interop easily with other transports. I made a websocket transport for it, and there is already TCP and UDP, and a couple non-lora radio transports. I also made a (works on web) js and Arduino client lib, and it has a few native client libs, so it can sort of be used on anything, even over traditional networks, or web clients. Meshcore and meshtastic are way more popular, but reticulum seems so much better, to me, for most things. It can still have overload problems, like any radio network, but no client is required to forward, so you can build a different kind of network ("only forward messages that are for my peeps" and marked correctly.) It also has "it costs compute PoW to send to me" which can greatly cut down on spam.