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This 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.

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.

You also make yourself a bright shining beacon to anybody looking for a resistance network because Lora operates on very specific frequencies. It would be easy to spot you with an RF scanner.

Obviously, put that relay node on a hill, on some structure where you don't live. Or maybe on the roof of your tall apartment building, among all the satellite dishes and their associated boxes. Pretend to be one of those.

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.

Until you actually need to use it. You need to get the data you want to transmit over to it. Where you'll either have another transmitter at your location. A cable snaking back to your location. Or a directional antenna pointed at your location.

Unless you plan to manually go up the hill with a flash drive each time.

Any licensed wireless networking gear is going to operate in very specific frequencies. The government requires it! If we were going for "the best" gear for avoiding detection you would have frequency hopping with jumps far enough apart that a listener has a harder time pinpointing a transmitter. Making repeaters roving makes it even harder for your adversary.

The same government can trivially make these frequencies completely unusable by just blasting noise across all the ISM frequency bands. As far as I read, it is already happening in Russia, making LoRA anything but long-range...

If the place you are at is at that point in the conflict, RF scanners are the least of your worries.

Semtech LoRa Modems are wide frequency range modems. Latest generation also supports (non-LoRa) frequency hopping.

The signals are difficult to spot once you are in some distance to the transmitter.

I guess if you're protesting against the government, you don't have to comply with regulations and can use more power and basically the entire spectrum :)

But better having the government shooting down your 10€ ballo.. node with a F-35 instead of a 50€ node.

If you have the government as adversary and no military force to back it up, you might want to reconsider doing that as it makes you very detectable from far away.

And instead of "just" getting teargassed and sent home, you get thrown to a concentration camp for organizing communications for the domestic terrorists there to overthrow the government, attack ICE, <insert whatever you want here, something you're pro- or against>.

Meshtastic citywide nets use a single frequency. Jamming it is trivial.

Even more trivial to flood with garbage traffic, as the whole network will amplify your attack.

LoRa locally is often installed/managed by municipal governments.

It's mostly LoRaWAN which is great for very-low-rate telemetry and very simple control tasks.

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.

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.

Keeping things in perspective, no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term.

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.

> no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term

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_...

>It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically.

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.

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'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.

The "advantage" of software and remote controlled updates is that you can turn all that off very selectively.

Keeping things in perspective, no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term.

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.

It only takes a few small steps to slip from still-sorta-normal towards oh-who-could-have-thought. Did anyone expect a mob actually storming the Capitol a month before the events? Did anyone expect a federal immigration agent deliberately shooting and killing an innocent US citizen? Things like that happen "gradually, then suddenly".

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.

Trump seized 500 million dollars worth of oil, and deposited the cash from it's sale in the country that gave him personally a free jumbo jet. You seem to be missing that perspective has changed greatly. What is OK for a President has changed to an INSANE degree.

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.

> It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters

Do you really think an authoritarian government cares about what people think? If there is a majority that supports them? They don't.

The current government can still claim to have a democratic mandate. At least for the moment, it relies on the goodwill (even of its opponents) to at least pretend that elections matter.

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.

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.

In practice it seems that Meshtastic isn't really up to the task, unfortunately:

https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1inrm25/is_mesh...

https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1fy95kj/lets_ta...

Who's going to pay to create all the nodes. You need a lot of them in normal times when it is just enthusiasts sending test messages and if large numbers of people start sending real messages you will need more.

paying to create the nodes isn't the hard part. The hard part is the protocol isn't designed for this and is easily overwhelmed. In case of adversarial attack, it's trivially going down because the protocol is easily attacked, as we see at any popular gathering like Defcon.

And even if you do, when the mesh becomes too big, the signalization/routing takes up all the available bandwidth.

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.

Ah, I did assume your were talking about the US; my apologies. My comment applies to the US, and perhaps other countries with the potential to enter a similar situation.

> 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?

My message was in no way intended to comment on the legitimacy of either the government of Iran or of its potential overthrow. There are circumstances in which the overthrow of a government is justified.

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.

Bro, relax, this rhetoric and your claims are so extreme and not backed up by reality. Killed thousands? According to the "Human Rights Activists" in London? Or the ones in Washington? Because none of that has actually come from Iran, and the few videos that have come out show people hit by hunting rifles (aka, non-police weapons) or shot in the back by other "protestors". We know Mossad has armed the rioters, nobody in the "civilized world" with an IQ over 80 is falling for your propaganda anymore. Take a chill pill, and stop instigating causing everyone to hate the Iranian expats

dude literally just go search "Tehran hospital" on twitter, there's hundreds of videos and images of endless body bags, and multiple independent major media outlets all reporting casualties in the thousands, not just Iran International

The notoriously reliable source of (mis)information Twitter. I see lots of videos, including people talking about rioters, foreign-backed militias, and lots of inflammatory words, but no pictures or videos of thousands of bodies. I feel for the dead, especially those shot in the back to instigate foreign intervention, they didn't deserve to be harmed. But I lay the blame on their murderers and their backers and funders.

i saw tons of body bag pictures and videos, and unless you want to tell me they're fake and only AI, then it seems you're not trying really hard to find them because you're pretty set in your opinion despite evidence to the contrary

Did you see thousands? Or dozens? I'm not saying there were 0, just that the scale and intensity of the GP's claim, and yours, is unjustified by the evidence.

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...

Apple is already blocking protest coordination apps in Hong Kong at the demand of the CCP, and ICE oversight/tracking apps in the USA.

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.

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.

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.

Love it.

> 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.

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).

How I got into it was tiredness of centralised platforms that dictate how we use those platforms. Often archival, search functions are non-trivial in things like Whatsapp, Discord etc. We made our own mesh application based on wifi and batman but ofc we couldnt convince our friends and family to switch over.

> we couldnt convince our friends and family to switch over.

What was the deal breaker for them?

The ubiquity (network effect) and ‘convenience’ of other apps. This was more than a decade ago and our devices were an extra thing you needed to carry (travel router).

If/when you feel like trying again, Tailscale has made mesh routing available at a consumerish level.

Amateur radio is one of the first thing that gets banned in wars, including eg. WW2 in US and the start of ukraine war in ukraine.

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.

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.

Not submitting to state censorship requests is not a great example of what is the problem with Big Tech as discussed here.

I wasn't referring to the state censorship request, but rather to the 'flocking' to self-proclaimed champions of free speech in the current Trump administrations as a cry for help.

I personally find that the fact that a private company compels a list of IPs and domains that they want blocked to get blocked more alarming than that.

When did CF do this?

A week ago.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/cloudflare-may-p...

How much of internet can Cloudflare turn off in italy? They picked a fight with the cloud gorilla.

About 20% of sites, and there’s some big services behind Cloudflare so that percentage doesn’t even tell the full story.

When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.

> When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns 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.

If the sports league is influential enough to have a standing court order to be able to unilaterally block IP ranges for the entire country, I'd imagine that organized crime might take an interest. I have no idea if it's the case but when something already seems to have an outsized influence it wouldn't be crazy to imagine that others interested in that power would also take an interest.

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.

Which directly contravenes the Digital Services Act. And is only in place because LaLiga has strong ties to the mafia.

More than mafia, ex-francoists oligarchs. And these could be stomped down tomorrow from CF by cancelling all the tangent services for those, even for Spanish banks and related industries (tourist and construction avoiding both attacks and serious disbalancing harms). The Ibex 35 would near collapse overnight and Tebas being kicked out from their own people.

In case of Spain, not the Mafia but ex-Francoist idiots. And if you want to know, our (ex?)-Fascists even bribed European mafias. Literally.

It is more about government tax warfare. They fined CF because it didn’t censor what the italian government wanted them to censor, so they fined CF.

Big Tech is going to optimize for profits. They are gonna bow down to whomever is in charge.

Not really, you are framing this issue and dropping key words to make it political, are you a bot farming for engagement, please stop.

Not OP but, oh common. This entire thing IS political. Big Tech IS in bed with the authoritarian US apparatus, they have been very transparent about it. What are you expecting to gain from your message? Pedantry points?

OP, not a bot. CF definitely chose to be political in the message, so regardless of what Italy did or who is right and wrong, posting that message is just a message that reliance on CF can just be a bad idea long-term.

Just for context, did you see this from CF's CEO? https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492

The bits about Vance, Musk and "freedom of speech" are not only completely unnecessary, but well over the top.

There were strong signals from the CF CEO that they align with the Trump administration.

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?

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.

Most of Ukraine doesn't need to do it. The internet infrastructure is largely intact and very decentralised. The biggest challenge is the lengthy power outages, but mobile networks keeps running thanks to generators.

Ukraine is being assisted by NATO and commercial corporations based in US and Europe, that would not be a DIY start-from-nearly-nothing example which would be relevant to popular protest movements.

There are a few videos of various Ukraine Telecoms talking about how they're keeping themselves connected.

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“?

Take heed, Americaneez -- and prepare, because this may be in your future sooner than prediction markets would have you believe [1].

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.

1: https://polymarket.com/event/us-civil-war-before-2027

Not to side track too much from this discussion, but I looked at that PolyMarket event: "US civil war before 2027?" Currently, it is priced at 91.3 USD cents for No. If you bet 100 USD, the payout for No will be 109.43. That is very good return -- ~9.5% for 12 months of lending (as PolyMarket required full payment at the time of trade). That is twice the (retail) risk free rate at the moment. I am actually tempted to buy a large part of the order book. Am I missing something obvious?

Also, if you enjoy troll humor, the comments section is very funny.

> Am I missing something obvious?

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 ?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46521773

    >  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 ?

> Am I missing something obvious?

The low volume places a rather disappointing cap on your profits.

PolyMarket bets are becoming ever more problematic the wider it gets known, carrying the manipulation incentives from stock markets into every bettable aspect of society.

> 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

> Am I missing something obvious?

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.

Several civil wars aren't known as such until long after

Examples, please.

The English Civil Wars (1642–1651).

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

I'd even consider the American one a big example.

It's similar to selling options out of the money. You get compensated because nobody likes to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller.

I will when that bet is the steamroller taking out the entire country.

And the Pennies are the currency of the entire country?

Frankly, if the scenario comes to pass, currency value risk is just as likely to make it not pay out than anything else.

If there's a civil war in the US I don't see how services like this would even stay up to collect from

Not at all. Do you really think there is a risk of civil war in the United States in 2026? To me: It sounds like crazy people. I will make that be all day long!

The problem is, lets say protestors actually start getting violent across multiple state. Would that be considered a mini civil war?

If you haven't been paying attention to American politics, there are currently widespread protests due to a woman being shot by ICE last week. It looks like the current administration may be seeking violent unrest in the hopes of delaying elections.

> looks like the current administration may be seeking violent unrest in the hopes of delaying elections

Civil war requires two militaries. Tiananmen Square wasn’t a civil war.

Not wrong, but don't forget there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here, though admittedly some parties have more affiliated with them than others. It's not a stretch to assume should fighting in the streets escalate beyond ICE shenanigans that larger armies would not quickly congeal from the pocket groups and individuals.

> there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here

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.

The devil lives in the fine print, always.

> devil lives in the fine print

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.

Generally, if you yourself aren't willing to pick up a gun and start fighting, chances are, the vast majority of the people aren't either.

I am, under the right circumstance. I'm not a pacificist, at least not historically. Although, we can banter all day with tough words, but the reality is that none of us can really predict how we will react to a situation until we are in it.

>I am, under the right circumstance.

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.

I believe there are plenty of weapons around in the US in general and the police and military is also not 100% behind Trump and MAGA.

But if there is a civil war, what were you going to be able to do with the USD anyway?

Interesting - I found this quantitative historical study [0] showing that while a civil war does significantly increase the likelihood of inflation, only 36% of countries analyzed which had a civil war between 1975-1999 ended up in an inflationary crisis. And with the USD having such a strong foundation, I would expect the risk to be significantly lower.

[0] https://kjis.org/journal/view.html?uid=302&vmd=Full

I am speculating wildly but I would expect the exact opposite due to different actors trying to destabilize the US to the point of no recovery in such an event.

> to the point of no recovery

Interesting, are you saying that the intentional use of USD somehow makes the US more vulnerable? What failure mode are you thinking of?

Exchange it for something else before the war started?

Or is it the financial backers of the protests that want a civil war?

Your entire party is literally lizard people, so no argument you can make is valid.

I love comments like this. You pop out of your (presumably New Zealand) prepper bomb shelter to get enough WiFi signal to make a post. I will bet against people like you all day long and make lots of money. How much are you willing to bet that there will be civil war in the US in 2026? Let's meet on PolyMarket!

You have a very unusual opinion of me!

There were large protests in the wake of a law enforcement officer killing someone in 2020 too. Notably, there was not a civil war, even though the Trump administration used the protests as cover for bad behavior then too

2020 was a single accidental case as the result of a poor system. Many people even from within the system on all levels agreed something went wrong and apologized. Today's situation is different, as the whole system is weaponized on purpose from one specific layer/group against the other layers/groups of the system. It's an internal conflict within the system itself, and a prime-example for justifying a civil war. And at the time Trump was still on the leash of his own adminstration.

1. ban guns

2. start civil war

3. ???

4. civil war with stone axes

There are more currently owned guns in circulation in the US than people.

One thing is for sure, any civil war in the us will not be short on guns.

There are a few like this. You can bet on Jesus not coming back in the calendar year for a little pocket money.

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?

Polymarket and other prediction markets dont take risk on the trades. Two sides are needed to make a market so you’re likely to get your payout. So all the people taking the “safe” bet lose their collateral and the winners get the proceeds if the unlikely event happens.

PolyMarket repeatedly paid out bets on Trump creating peace between Palestine and Israel even though he hasn't.

I Googled about this but could not find any reliable sources. Can you share some evidence that this is true?

802.11s with BATMAN routing works very well - you can have commercial quality links with tons of nodes.

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.

If there is really a civil war, won't these frequencies just get jammed?

The point to any preparation for any adverse event is to prepare more than one solution to a problem, and to have a solid understanding of your actual adversary. By asking that question, you have already defeated yourself on the sake of whomever you have decided is the dominant force. This is the sort of nihilism that stops us from meaningful change, because we destroy ourselves in either sloth or despair.

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.

Meshtastic works on commercial frequencies. If they block those then a good number of non-wifi/bluetooth devices will just stop working.

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.

All Semtech LoRa modems are wide-range modems. You can switch to basically every other frequency.

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.

Nah. The citywide meshtastic grids that exist presently operate on one single frequency citywide.

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).

And then every single other device on that frequency is also useless

Is the pain of that worth disabling communication?

You could just flood Meshtastic channel with valid traffic specifically

Then people's garages would start randomly opening? =)

Jamming is a double-edged sword, there are common frequency bands used by everyones equipment like 2.4GHz, 5GHz or the ISM band. If you jam those indiscriminately, your own stuff stops working as well.

Any actual adversarial situation is a constant back and forth of "This works, whoops now it's countered, well now we countered that" forever.

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.

The US is huge — you can’t jam everything everywhere. Talking about just cities, you still can’t jam everything everywhere.

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.

This reminds me the way the software was distributed in eastern countries when there was no internet. People went to market to meet other people, and they were peddling/colporting (look up the term in French) cassettes with the software.

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 :)

To save others the search: Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters"

"Colporter" is not an especially fancy word, it just means "to peddle" in English.

And for anything you really need to keep hidden, there's always culportage.

> look up the term in French

Wasn't that also called SneakerNet, back in the time? We used it in western Europe as well (both term and distribution method)

Also, amusingly, France is most definitively in Western Europe, so I’m a bit confused about GP’s link between Eastern Europe and “go look up this French word”.

Why would anti-fascists jam EMS frequencies?

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Won't someone think of our boys in blue?!?!

What's the nice, HN friendly way of telling someone "you're full of shit"?

Ive used "Your mouth is moving. Might want to see to that."

"Please provide a source" is my go to

Yeah, someone recently made a fork of the meshtastic firmware to support bitchat:

https://github.com/evansmj/firmware-bitchat-plugin

Iran doesn't have the ability to control what you see online. If BigCorps play along, the US can largely do that, to much much greater extend. So they don't really need to bring the internet down, they can just have LLMs create custom "reddit pages" on the fly.

We won't have a Civil war. We need one for sure, but the problem is that most people lives are very comfortable right now, and the average person doesnt care enough to die over any of the stuff they believe in.

Its more likely that our economy will tank and you will have more civil unrest.

Is market manipulation or insider trading even regulated on polymarket?

There is no insider trading on a bet, it's kind of the point.

Would you bet a large amount of money without some insider information?

Insider trading on prediction markets is the whole point. They don't exist to provide a fair platform for normal people to make money, they exist to create accurate predictions by providing a monetary incentive for people to be correct. Whether "correct" means that you were just lucky, that you had insider knowledge, or that you were able to influence the result, is irrelevant.

If I know the outcome, why would I bet largw before the outcome is to be publicly revealed?

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.

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All my life ive heard this, yelled at me by deeply anti democratic anti socials. People voted for trumps policies. Again, yes even after jan 6. Better luck next time, but for 4 years this is what they ordered.

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.

People don't get to vote to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.

If they're in the country illegally are they citizens?

That's an easy one. They're people, and still have rights. That's non-negotiable.

If you're in a country illegally, yes you do have rights but the right to stay is not one of them.

Here is the thing

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.

ICE is violating my fourth amendment rights as a full US citizen when they demand proof of citizenship on the sole basis of my skin tone and occupation. There is zero constitutional basis for that. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-approaching-people-...

They are human, that's all you need to know.

No sane country recognizes all the same rights and privileges of a citizen in a non-citizen.

All, no. But many, yeah. The Constitution and many of it's Amendments call out people or persons. The 14th Amendment even specifies what a citizen is, and in the next breath says persons cannot be denied due process by the States, not citizens.

Be specific. Which rights?

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Perhaps heed the HN guidelines and avoid obviously false hyperbole.

* 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".

> the left cant even fight

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.

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I'm sure the ICE agents swapping head-shot porn on their phones find that hilarious.

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.

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> the officer is in fact got run over

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.

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I don’t think that video proves anything definitively fwiw. It doesn’t capture any harm to the officer nor any heightened or escalating behaviors afterwards. Nor does it show an officer in a using force inappropriately.

If you think it does you are overlaying your own biases onto the video.

like I said before, I agree that its unfortunate event and how it ends but you must also understand why this is happening in the first place

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

She had a car across a single lane of a state road.

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.

> At the worse it was state traffic offense. Something ICE has no, nada, zero, jurisdiction over

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.

Are you saying there is a vacuum? Because vacuum usually get filled with crazy militants

Please, sell me a USB-C device that gives me mesh networking on my phone.

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.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0F7LD3BQG

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.

Worth checking out meshtastic and their ecosystem of much longer range mesh tech.

https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/

Pragmatically, cost and ease of access is especially important in suppressed countries or ones with unstable infrastructure. While the devices you're talking about has lots of conveniences, distribution and price dominate in lower income regions.

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'd like to start with something that works, and then make it affordable.

Rather than start with something free, that demonstrably doesn't work where it needs to.

Does anyone remember yik-yak? It wasn't anonymous and resilient like briar, but it was great in its time to discover people near-by and start chatting.

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?

No they sadly don't have that, and that's the major issue of connectivity. All chat recipients have to be online/reachable to receive your messages, which is okay, but useless in mobile environments where you can't afford that constant traffic.

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).

> 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.

Is this even technically possible?

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Jodel is a successor to yik-yak.

Isn't this borderline false advertising?

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.

I think it's not a great submission due to the poorly editiorialized title which is not representative of the content (user manual of Briar).

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.

I mean the whole thing is confusing - is OP actually Iranian? Do we have evidence that Briar is being used in Iran, and is effective? Why was the Farsi manual linked to an English website, when the English is next to it?

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.

Why isn't your comment the top one? You're absolutely right. Where is the proof or study of the title? Or at least the title should be rephrased as a question to its users? (What I tried the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592912) This should be reported (to dang).

I have Briar, but never had anyone to use it with. As an emergency text messaging tool, I guess it can be used, but not for any media transfer. The picture quality is abysmal. I also tried using it to sync some notes across devices, looking for a good use case of it all, but there was also some issue there. I believe once you created a "forum" you can no longer delete them. The desktop app is very slow. Sometimes had to wait for 10-20s for it to do something. I guess it is really just an emergency/offline text message tool.

A good use of briar is having it on your phone already so that during a natural disaster you can connect with others that already have it at community relief spots. Keep it just in case and it will come in clutch when you need it most!

Briar comes with ways of sharing it offline, so enough for one person to have 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.

I looked into the iOS issue once, and in the EU at least, it should be possible to add a minimal implementation of the store API to an app, so other iPhones could download the app from an iPhone hosting it.

After discovering the amount of pain involved with that API, I quickly discarded the idea though

You can just airdrop iOS apps to people. I don’t think the recipient needs network connectivity to receive it.

Source? I guess you're thinking of long tap → Airdrop, but that essentially shares a link to the Appstore via Airdrop. You're not transfering the app itself.

> Note: If you are not sure if your device is Android, check the Play Store app. If available, your device is Android

I wasn't able to resist smiling reading this :)

Mobile phones with "Mesh networking" built-in have now started to appear in the market. E.g Tecno Spark Go 3 - https://www.tecno-mobile.com/phones/product-detail/product/s... - recently launched in India has a feature called Freelink 2 that claims to connect with other Tecno phones to provide "connectivity" without wifi or cellular network up to a range of 1.5 kms. More here: https://www.intelregion.com/tech/how-to-use-your-techno-phon... .

(Personally, I don't think any government is going to allow 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.

As someone who lives in a democratic country, I am quite loathe to trust any foreign-controlled communication platform. I also do not support or endorse violent politics. Seeing how social media has triggered political riots in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and now in Iran (probably with the aid of foreign sponsors / agents) to destabilise these countries, I am fully in favour of governments clamping down hard on such kind of "dark networks" that they don't have oversight over. Note that this is nothing new - governments always have been mindful that foreign agents in their country should not have a way to communicate with their masters, and that is why everything from radios to satellite phones require some form of license to operate.

Isn't it well known that the "protestors are foreign agents" line is just extremely transparent bs that governments use to silence dissent?

a great many countries ban satellite phones too.

I tried to set up Briar recently so my partner and I could text on the plane. We tried everything including manual exchange of the special links and QR code pairing and nothing worked. This was even while we still bad ground internet access.

During a hackathon 7 years ago, a team and I set out to make a decentralized blockchain messaging platform over Bluetooth Low Energy. It was intended for situations when the internet was out. We didn't finish the technicals in 24hr, but it was a fun challenge. I looked it up and there are a lot of solutions now, here is the top one on search: https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat

Is this actually true? Is anyone in Iran using Briar?

Presumably OP is, at least.

I would be very surprised if they were. Bluetooth's range is far too limited for this to be useful or to make a workable mesh.

Seems like the GPG of comms.

Yeah, the problem with these mesh networks is that for them to work, you need high transmit powers typically not found in off the shelf stuf (because it would be illegal).

A would-be opressor can just have a van full of antennas drive through the neighborhood and triangulate all those transmitters, after which you'll get caught.

It's like using high-powered flashlights to covertly message each other.

Just the layout seems so awful. As if noboy ever optimised this for real people.

When I tested all the p2p messengers I could get my hands on for Android and iOS about two years back, the only one that worked at all without having a router around was Briar. Glad to see it helping people.

>> "The adversary has a limited ability to persuade users to trust the adversary’s agents - thus the number of social connections between the adversary’s agents and the rest of the network is limited." [1]

This assumption seems risky.

[1] https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

This seems like a fairly reasonable assumption for the Briar case. An adversary would have to get a user accept a Briar link in error. Contrast with things like Signal[1] that base their trust on phone numbers.

Note that Briar groups are controlled by one moderator. Other participants of the group can not add members. Note also that Briar has the concept of introductions. So it is easy to avoid making the sort of identity errors commonly made by other schemes.

[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg

Would ssb (secure scuttlebutt) with Yubikeys have a similar usecase? [0]

[0]: https://opencollective.com/secure-scuttlebutt-consortium/upd...

What about Jack Dorsey's Bitchat . Could be useful in india (especially Kashmir) where govt shut down internet during protest

Check the news from the past year. If you care about security or privacy, Bitchat doesn't actually have either according to !any independent security audits), so I'd stay away.

If you dont care about those things, I'd look at Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol apps instead.

Bitchat seems like a good solution. It will be even more effective once Bluetooth 6 becomes more widespread in a year or two.

Could be useful in Bangladesh and Baluchistan too.

"Raliv, Tsaliv ya Galiv" didn't need the internet or fancy mesh networking - rabble-rousing Friday mosque-sessions were sufficient for ethnociding the native population over the course of many centuries.

Dude.

Back in 2014 when briar or something similar came up, we found the app.needed to signed in "online" first then it could be used offline.

There were apps used in 2019 but it wasnt enough.

The government "banned" 14 appps including element "because use by terrorists" meant anyone using element after the ban got a loud knock on the door by the stazi with 100-300 personnel, fully ready to engage in battle.

Have seen horror stories.

They used isp data to locate homes where element was used and then staked them out and made a big show of attacking at night.

Then the usual. Phones are confiscated and literal spyware installed.

That was Bridgefy that required initial online access to setup. Briar doesn't and never has.

Traceability of Briar users, if not the actual content, is certainly potentially worse than something like what Bitchat claims (don't use Bitchat it's provably not secure or private at all) with it's traffic obfuscation and multihop. However, the lack of multihop also makes it less promiscuous, so someone would have to be monitoring when you came in contact with the transfer source or destination, unlike multihop that just broadcasts to anyone so they can hopefully relay it.

that's why its difficult to trust these apps? i've been out of the game for years and i would rather be on the fence about the whole thing.

the problem i saw back in 2019 was adoption. it just happened suddenly and the scaremongering done by the government was top notch. literally any anti-government tweet or post was "deemed social media misuse", how dare you question the might of the great nation.

https://thewire.in/rights/kashmir-fir-vpn-social-media this is fresh "misuse".

what i am saying is, in that heated environment, no one wanted to be the one holding the short straw so this tech did not play out, simply out of personal safety.

few years ago we had clubhouse and https://kashmirlife.net/sleuths-silently-listen-to-clubhouse...

which someone like me knew "out of habit" so i didn't even try the app but people did and paid the price.

Why are people downvoting him? He's right (even though if his dream for "Azad" Kashmir came true, it would mean my family is Kishtwar would probably have to leave for Punjab or Himachal with only the clothes on their backs, but the current status quo means he might be detained indefinetly as well) - the DoT, Home Ministry, and State STFs have been rolling out fusions centers since the mid-2010s [0].

The rules are much more strict/draconian in JK [1]

[0] - https://www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/AdvNATGRIDCOT_151...

[1] - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/centre-blocks-14-mobi...

https://the420.in/delhi-police-upgrades-drdo-netra-surveilla...

https://www.crazyengineers.com/threads/netra-is-indian-gover...

Wait really? Was this only in Kashmir? I've had Element on my laptop for years.

Yes - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/centre-blocks-14-mobi...

yep. only restricted in kashmir

I'm not sure so many Iranians have $1000 iphones to use hipster bitchat; cheaper android clients are more the norm.

While bitchat was originally iOS only during release, they released the Android version shortly after https://bitchat.free/ (scroll down)

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I think meshtastic would be a lot more performant in mesh scenarios due to the added range of LoRa. But of course it's special hardware and thus suspicious during an insurrection. And probably just not available.

I doubt this will actually work though except in the densest city.

Meshtastic also struggles with high density and high traffic networks. Some modifications can be made to work better, but with the default settings it really grinds to a halt, and modifying the settings to be better suited requires some expertise and foresight. It works amazingly in off grid, relatively sparse networks, but it's got some major limitations.

Yeah I always wonder with these mobile ever changing mesh networks: how do they prevent messages from aimlessly looping around the network? With all the mobile devices they're too dynamic to make routing tables and broadcasting everything leads to network saturation really quickly. You could give them a very short TTL but then the reliability will suffer a lot.

Meshtastic has a TTL of up to 7 and (from what I've been able to understand) uses flood routing largely. In Northern Colorado (where I'm at) we don't have a particularly dense mesh, but are turning down from 7 because of congestion.

Meshcore seems to (I'm still learning on this) use a TTL of 64 and flood to find a route to a destination, then uses source routing for future packets, reverting to flooding again if that path fails (say a mobile repeater moves out of range).

You need 2 kind of networks: one stable with fixed nodes, with very low refresh rates of the routes, and another one for mobile nodes.

The decision that every station is always a (delayed) router was a bad one. Also the old firmware was super chatty eating a lot of valuable ISM TX time.

They must clean up their role mess and switch to a "all clients are totally quiet - until they are set to a different mode for a reason"-strategy.

FYI: Meshtastic has "CLIENT_MUTE" and "CLIENT_BASE" roles to help with this, though they do recommend using the normal "CLIENT" role (which routes traffic) as the default. https://meshtastic.org/blog/choosing-the-right-device-role/

Eh, Meshtastic was originally for sparse off grid comms less than big public networks. In that role (which is still what I mostly use Meshtastic for) every client repeating messages makes more sense.

Hooray! As a Rabin fan, I love Briar and so tremendously excited to be reading this. Thank you, all who are involved with this magnificent project!!

Too bad Briar and similar anonymous E2E messengers would be banned soon across the EU and UK.

"We can't have the tax-cattle talking behind our backs about our failures and corruption that fucked up their living standards .. err I mean think of what the far right, pedos and russian spies could do with anonymous messaging, so we'll be banning it to protect our democratic values."

- EU & UK leadership

I completely disagree with your base premise: I think EU leadership (national + EU) performed on an average level over the last three decades, and the EU as an insitution did even better than I would've expected given its limitations/constraints.

If you could pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years?

I actually don't think they performed very well. I just look at the EU GDP that's now half the size of the US compared to bigger than US 20 years ago, and at standard of living of middle working class, which has slowly been going downhill in the last 15-20 or so years for a lot of people(worst of all southern europe) and at a more accelerated rate in the last 3-4 years. All due to their decisions and policies and I hold them accountable for it.

Like you don't need the unfair power of hindsight to know that tying your energy independence to Russia (your military adversary and the reason NATO exists) was a bad decision back then, or that staying dependent on US military and tech was bad for sovereignty, or that pursuing unrealistic climate goals was a bad decision, or that opening your borders to millions of unvetted people from unstable regions with high crime and low education was bad, since many people have been saying all these were bad decisions 20 years ago but they were ignored because the gravy train was still running and the EU political elite never game much of a shit about what the peasants though anyway. And now that the gravy train has stopped and the piper has to be paid, our leadership class are trying to gaslight us and deflect the blame for their recklessness at best or just suppress voices of dissent at worst.

And even if we were to assume they performed super well, that doesn't mean I should now swallow tyrannical laws designed to suppress our freedoms while they give themselves exemptions, just because different people from a different era who are no longer in power made some good decisions 30 years ago under the same umbrella of the EU since the EU-EC of today as an org is a vastly different beast than the EU of 30 years ago. There wasn't even a common currency and central bank 30 years ago.

You are exactly not answering the question though.

It is easy to complain about energy dependence, struggles with immigration/integration and precarious national budgets, but the conditions for those weren't caused by recent decision in my view (instead, namely, lack of local oil/gas, unstable north africa/middle east and bad demographics with too many old people).

All those problems are really costly and difficult to solve. Sure, the EU could've tried a super-scale Messmer plan 20 years ago, and could then maybe rival current renewable power with nuclear output, but this would have been orders of magnitude more costly.

Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).

It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).

I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum. If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.

>You are exactly not answering the question though.

WHich question did I not answer?

>weren't caused by recent decision in my view

No, but they could admit it was a fuckup of the political class, and tell us how they're planning to fix it, instead of gaslighting us for complaining about it and doing more mistake that further damage our economy. We can't stop the music chair song from playing just yet. Just one more round I promise.

How about the recent EU Mercosur trade deal? They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports. This is a totally new strategic blunder, they can't keep blaming the past anymore.

>Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).

This is disproven and untrue but has been repeated so many time it became the poster child argument of pro-illegal immigration EU propaganda. That open borders will magically save our economy. It didn't. Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.

Regarding Japan's economy, is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did, it got fucked starting from 1985 when the US forced them to sign the Plaza Accord in order to counter their massive trade deficit US had with Japan(and other powerful export economies), which increased the value of the Yen making Japanese imports suddenly expensive and uncompetitive. Then to combat this, the Japan central bank fucked up themselves by printing money like crazy with ultra low interest rates which instead of stabilizing the exports, caused a massive speculative real estate and golf membership(yes that's true) bubble which imploded in 1990, dealing the final blow to their economic growth since they ran out of levers to pull other than suppressing their labor into a losing race to the bottom with other low wage manufacturing economies of Asia. I recommend you read more on the Plaza Accord, it's pretty eye opening.

Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.

Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this? No. But they have the nerve to blame us for not having kids in a stagnating economy with crazy real-estate prices then gaslight us that salvation lies in illegal immigration instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.

>It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).

Good point. If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?

>I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum. If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.

yeah, the environment is important, but all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it. Great success. And even Europeans will stop caring about the environment when they won't be able to have a job, or afford to pay rent or heating anymore.

> WHich question did I not answer?

The "what policies should a perfect government have enacted instead, with hindsight". But your last post adds a lot on that front.

> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.

Hard disagree on this. Just consider two poster children for continuous positive economical growth: Poland and Vietnam. Did that economic outlook effect positive population growth? Clearly no (for both cases, and it's not even close).

My personal view: Easy access to contraceptives (people want to fuck more than raise children), and realignment of economical incentives: Children are no longer the default retirement plan (nor are they needed by the parents themselves as cheap workforce).

Both of those factors are icky to counteract for a modern democracy.

> If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?

No, because those did not occur synchronously. The imported, lower-skill workforce was most needed earlier (pre 2000s), with the big youth unemployment problems mostly occuring later (2000s and after).

Immigration rates are also much easier to control than local birth rate, and, most importantly, dont suffer from a two-decade lag.

Restricting foreign workers would have most certainly been a big economic hit (this is somewaht obvious; because foreign workers are mostly raised and educated for free), especially for countries like Germany, even with perfectly boosting population growth at the perfect times to compensate.

> Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.

Poland has been playing catchup inside a huge, wealthy, low-barrier market. Would their growth have been comparable if wages had started at a German level in 1990? IMO clearly not.

> all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked except now we made ourselves poorer for it

Two big problems with that view.

First: The planet "getting fucked" is not binary. If you want to limit warming to a somewhat reasonable degree (and the worst-case timelines are not reasonable), then action has to be taken at some point, and pretty obviously the biggest culprits need to get the ball rolling, or no one is ever gonna do anything.

Second: The EU has already fucked the planet much harder than any developing nation, China included, despite being not even half the population of India or China. You could make a case that the US is slightly worse, but thats completely irrelevant; the relative moral net-obligation on the EU to act is clearly pretty large already for a long time now, and a few outliers (US, oil states) being even worse does not absolve the Europeans from anything.

Lastly, those efforts to combat climate change clearly had already huge global effects. Or do you honestly think that massive Chinese buildout of solar/wind power would have happened without those technologies getting developed, refined and proven in Europe over the last decades?

I don't necessarily disagree with your outlook completely: I think a bunch of things could have been done better, especially refugee handling, and possibly immigration vs economy tradeoffs. But still: a lot of those decisions had to be made without hindsight, and I don't think expecting much better than what we got is reasonable.

You also have to consider that lots of those decisions were made in a different time (with different values/outlooks): It was much harder to let refugees become homeless, executed or starved when a lot of Europeans saw thair own past actions (=> colonialism) as a big driver for those crises (and I'd argue that this only really changed, somewhat justifiably, post Arab spring).

> WHich question did I not answer?

  pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years

For example: Germany in that period was never no way going to accept nuclear power. Their leadership regrets it in hindsight, but at the time, forcing it on the people would have been undemocratic.

> They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports.

20 years ago the biggest problem with the EU's farming system was massive overproduction.

Like, "newsworthy scandal" levels of overproduction.

> Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-gdp-growth?tab=lin...

Poland mainly missed out on the downside of the global financial crisis, rather than being special otherwise. Few percent difference between Poland, Germany, Japan, Europe collectively, and the USA all around the same level.

> is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did

Europe did not in fact import millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare. This would have been a self-evidently stupid thing to do, which is why that is not what happened.

Europe did take around two million asylum seekers in total, before the pandemic. Important thing about asylum: they get sent back as soon as their homes stop being warzones, or sooner if they're deemed to have been taking the piss. Right now there's about 4 million Ukrainians, who would probably count as "second world" given the etymology; do you want to count them as "uneducated"? I wouldn't. But then, I have Ukrainian neighbours.

Economic migrants, who are important for the economy, are a bigger group. Mixing up asylum seekers and economic migrants because they're both "migrants" is as much of an error as declaring that all Canadians and Mexicans are "Americans" because they're from the continent of America.

> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.

If this were so, even royal families would not have had any kids before 1850, there certainly wouldn't be a massive population boom in e.g. India where they've only recently connected (almost) everyone to the electricity grid.

> Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this?

I was born in 1983. I remember being warned of overpopulation, there was literally zero public concern about a demographic crisis, and even in the last few years people are mostly warning this will affect us by the time I reach pension age.

I also remember ongoing press campaigns in the UK demonising single mothers.

> instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.

That's a new one.

You think there's a law banning people from criticising the lack of support for families? Have you seen, like, any election campaign ever? One reliable theme throughout, no matter how effective the policy would be if examined closely, is at least one party saying they support families.

> EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it.

China's also going green. India… isn't, but the pain point hits them much sooner than we expect it to hit us, so they probably will. Like, it becomes reliably lethal to work in parts of India before it's expected to make heatstroke deaths more than a passing headline in Europe.

The US was going green, then Trump happened. He's against renewables and doesn't believe in climate change, while also wanting to invade Greenland for reasons that only make sense if one or both of those are good bets; he insists on keeping coal plants open when the owners of those plants don't want that because gas is cheaper; he's lying a lot in general, but specifically by saying China doesn't use the renewables they're exporting. He's all over the place, wildly incoherent, and is mad enough he could lead to WW3 where none of this matters anyway (P(WW3 this year due to him)~=0.05).

Any source for this?

> Any source for this?

Ever heard about Chat Control and CSAM?

Chat Control and CSAM will not ban E2E messengers

Mandatory client-side scanning of encrypted messages has been removed from the proposal following opposition from the European Parliament and several member states, preserving E2EE integrity

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...

And you believe they won't try again and again until they push it through? All of these have already been rejected multiple times, and yet some parts of it are already enacted, some will be soon, and the rest will come after a few more tries.

It's important to differentiate between speculation and facts, just because something is in our belief doesn't make it a fact.

> It's important to differentiate between speculation and facts, just because something is in our belief doesn't make it a fact.

It's called "opinion". You can also have one. Try it, it's liberating, even if it's not a fact.

Best to download the *.apks now so you can help others sideload them and stay safe.

Whoa, I was just mentioning in another post how I have my family member install bitchat just in case for emergencies. This is a very interesting alternative. With a travel router, I can significantly expand the chat radius compared to bitchat's purely BLE approach.

Edit: Boo, no iOS app

It doesn't look likely that there will ever be an iOS app[1], unless Apple makes key changes in the way iOS works[2].

[1] https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#will-t...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/685525

You should definitely read the news about bitchat. It doesnt actually have basically any security or privacy from all the dozens of independent security audit findings. Jack even said it was vibe coded and never audited.

Boo, native apps.

If it's not native then we need to give powerful Bluetooth capabilities to web pages which isn't very good.

I don't know why you think it's not good, but it seems it will happen: https://webbluetoothcg.github.io/web-bluetooth/#introduction

Right.

Downvote all you want (native app developers, is that you? <3), the web is here, has been here, and will continue to flourish.

> This specification takes several approaches to make such attacks more difficult:

> Pairing individual devices instead of device classes requires at least a user action before a device can be exploited.

People said the same thing about allowing the browser to trigger the microphone and the camera.

Use sane browser and or OS inherited permissions, and sane permission-promoting and gating,

and it’s a non-issue.

(Have you seen the prompts for Location, Microphone, WebUSB, and other “scary” features in the browser?

There’s really not much room for misinterpretation!)

I like briar for the fact that i already have the hardware...

I like meshtastic for not needing the network related devices for their hardware

What I'd like is something that is platform agnostic... I want an app that i can install, a (tor like) server i can setup that will anonymously route and fwd messages and really cheap and easy hardware that will let me pop up mini repeaters on demand. Would also like to be able to send images and maybe videos, but for the network to be smart enough to only send them when the bandwidth is there

I may just stick with briar in the mean time, but seriously none of them seem to offer what i want.

Briar mentions "mailboxes", where you can stick up collectors wherever you want. It's not as nice as repeaters that would build a multihop mesh network for you, but one advantage of not doing multihop is that you get at least initial insecure identification before any identifiable secure communication is attempted so even if the Military Police are watching you, they won't be able to tell you even have Briar unless they can spoof a device for someone you have as a contact and have a waiting message for (or the BLE device ID of one of your mailbox devices). Those aren't hard to spoof, but learning what they are can be more difficult than if you're broadcasting to anyone that will listen like multihop requires.

I'm curious about the iOS situation

I doubt iOS has a large market share in Iran.

Also, for something like this you don't want a platform that requires you to essentially use the App Store and nothing else.

iOS is around 10%, Android around 90%. (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/iran/%20)

   Briar is available on Google Play for devices running Android.

The one you just summarized perfectly.

10% of devices or less.

Unfortunately, due to safety reasons Apple cannot allow you to leave the walled garden, it is only in your own best interest. All communication services on our iOS devices require at least one US-based NSA-integrated middleman. /s

Don’t forget the horror stories of people relying on iCloud to have all their personal life there only to get locked out for silly reasons.

Google is no better here, I would say they are even worse since they are scanning your files actively. Remember story of Father who was asked by doctor to send his baby son private parts photos due to covid and Google not only locked him out but also notified Police. Even after getting statement from Law Enforcement there was no crime they didn't restore his access. Guy lost 20 years of live history due to algorithm.

I feel the narrative on these kind of issues should be updated. We've been using their framing of "algorithms" but it is taking away all responsibility from the US tech workers who are actually designing and running Google.

The guy lost 20 years of life history due to US tech workers at Google wrongfully blocking his account and then ignoring his pleads for reactivation.

When US tech workers can show up to take cash and bonus payments from Google, they can also show up to take responsibility for Google's impact.

Seriously though, given all the NSA has done: Could the NSA launch a "beach head" inside Apple?

Can anyone vouch what is most useful to the protestors that we can support? What's actually being used? What do they need for communication? Does anyone there actually use Briar?

I worry that some of these things are well meaning but ultimately a waste of time like Elon's submarine doodad.

You could route by annonimized habbit. Knows a social construct called market every day at 8:00, means i can route via the social constructs permanent residents, e.g. a trader, who stores it and is closer onion of habbits wise to the goal. He knows a social organism called bus7 who is composed of one permanent changing on daily basis, many transient but always by habbit part of that moving org. These drive by a home router who knows the family, recipients he sees every day. If you are patient you can route via habbits of social organisms. Takes half a day of wait and burst hop to get there though. No idea how to annonymise that routing. No idea how to handles one offs like tourist travels for data smuggling.

I'm still unclear how the stated goal of the title is achieved. My first assumption reading the title that it works something like airtags, but that is obviously nonsense. unless you are standing right next to the guy you want to message, how exactly does it work?

https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

Looks like clients re-host posts to their friends in a p2p fashion.

Thanks. Basically it depends on c travelling to another town. Also taking the risk of being caught with the content on it's phone. It looks like a great app and every little helps but hardly a game changer, unless i'm underestimating how bad it is in Iran?

If it works via tor it's probably also slow, but that's a small price to pay for not relying on a central server for people with legitimate concerns or problems with connecting.

I suspect use cases are more likely community organizing and info sharing. It supports forums and private groups that are E2EE, and "blog" posts that can include RSS reblogging.

The forums and private groups do bidirectional syncing and merging of all updates with anyone in the forum/group, so that gives you the equivalent of near-infinite multihop among trusted peers for large forums/groups. And it means every person has a complete copy, so it's nearly impossible to find all copies to censor it. With the blogging of reblogged RSS feeds, you can even have people acting like news carriers for viral-ike person-to-person information transfer as well. Even if that does require a little more manual curation by the "transmission vectors" than forum/group posts.

Remember too that when things get bad enough people become ready to give up thier lives if necessary, and this may just be a way to reduce (but not eliminate) the need to actually sacrifice thier life for their cause. Large groups of people may collectively believe it's worth being individually captured and imprisoned or murdered to ensure the larger group is aware of what's happening.

A relevant talk from 39C3 Congress regarding Russia:

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-coding-dissent-art-technology-an...

Coding Dissent: Art, Technology, and Tactical Media

This presentation examines artistic practices that engage with sociotechnical systems through tactical interventions. The talk proposes art as a form of infrastructural critique and counter-technology. It also introduces a forthcoming HackLab designed to foster collaborative development of open-source tools addressing digital authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, propaganda infrastructures, and ideological warfare.

In this talk, media artist and curator Helena Nikonole presents her work at the intersection of art, activism, and tactical technology — including interventions into surveillance systems, wearable mesh networks for off-grid communication, and AI-generated propaganda sabotage.

Featuring projects like Antiwar AI, the 868labs initiative, and the curatorial project Digital Resistance, the talk explores how art can do more than just comment on sociotechnical systems — it can interfere, infiltrate, and subvert them.

This is about prototypes as politics, networked interventions as civil disobedience, and media hacks as tools of strategic refusal. The talk asks: what happens when art stops decorating crisis and starts debugging it?

The talk will also introduce an upcoming HackLab initiative — a collaboration-in-progress that brings together artists, hackers, and activists to develop open-source tools for disruption, resilience, and collective agency — and invites potential collaborators to get involved.

what's still missing is encrypted stealth radio communication. something that uses a wide range of frequencies, low power with big timing windows to be indistinguishable from other things happening on air. It should look like noise and regular signals (like non-decryptable LTE packages combined with noise that could also as well just come from a power-supply)

Quantum may surpass this, as legal restrictions exist for general public broadcasting encrypted radio. What you describe probably already exists in implementation in use cases where it is legally protected and judiciously implemented.

So this is a sabotage agency operation? I am old enough to remember the "Arab spring" "intelligence" operation. Are people really naive about these types of Sabotage Agency supported projects and entities, regardless of the interest and curiosity about the technology?

And no, I know these things as a matter of fact for reasons that will need to remain my own.

Briar is a peer-to-peer encrypted messaging app that has received funding from multiple organizations, including the Open Technology Fund (OTF), which is financed by the U.S. government through the Agency for Global Media [1][2][3]. The OTF was established in 2012 as a program of Radio Free Asia, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, and became independent in 2019 while continuing to receive congressional appropriations [3].

## Government Funding and Transparency

Briar openly discloses its funding sources on its website, listing support from the Open Technology Fund alongside other organizations like NLnet Foundation, the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, Access Now, Internews, and others [1][4]. This transparency is notable—the project does not hide its connection to U.S. government-funded initiatives. The OTF itself supports numerous widely-used internet freedom tools, with over two billion people worldwide reportedly using OTF-supported technologies daily [5].

## The Security Trade-off Question

Your skepticism about government-funded privacy tools reflects a legitimate concern that civil liberties advocates have raised [6]. However, Briar's open-source nature allows independent security audits—it was examined by Cure53 in 2017 and received positive assessments [2]. The project was developed by researchers and activists including Michael Rogers and Eleanor Saitta starting in 2011, with stated motivations around supporting freedom of expression and protecting activists and journalists [4][7].

## Technical Design vs. Political Origins

The technical architecture of Briar—peer-to-peer encryption, mesh networking capability, and operation over Tor—represents genuine attempts to resist surveillance regardless of funding sources [8]. Unlike some mesh networking apps that researchers have found vulnerable (such as Bridgefy, which had serious security flaws allowing impersonation and surveillance), Briar's design philosophy emphasizes decentralization [9]. The question becomes whether government funding necessarily compromises such tools, or whether open-source transparency and independent auditing can mitigate such concerns.

Citations: [1] About - Briar https://briarproject.org/about/ [2] Briar (software) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briar_(software) [3] Open Technology Fund - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund [4] About Us - Briar https://briarproject.org/about-us/ [5] Trump's Reshuffling of US Foreign Aid Endangers Internet Freedom https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/trumps-reshuffling... [6] US: Fight Continues for Open Technology Fund's Independence https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/08/20/us-fight-continues-open-... [7] 3 - Concealing for Freedom – Mattering Press https://www.matteringpress.org/books/concealing-for-freedom/... [8] Briar Desktop got another round of funding https://briarproject.org/news/2022-briar-desktop-nlnet-fundi... [9] The privacy perils of using a mesh network – and why we urgently ... https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/the-privacy-peril... [10] Briar - NLnet Foundation https://nlnet.nl/project/Briar/ [11] Briar Darknet Messenger Client For Android Secures Chats With ... https://hothardware.com/news/briar-darknet-messenger-client-... [12] History · changelog · Wiki - briar https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/changelog/... [13] Mesh Networks Won't Fix Internet Security - CITP Blog https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2014/04/22/mesh-networks-won... [14] Congressional Remit | OTF - Open Tech Fund https://www.opentech.fund/about/congressional-remit/ [15] Radio Free Asia | OTF - Open Tech Fund https://www.opentech.fund/security-safety-audits/radio-free-... [16] RCFP supports Radio Free Asia's lawsuit challenging funding cuts https://www.rcfp.org/briefs-comments/radio-free-asia-v-unite... [17] The Trouble With the Open Technology Fund https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/the-trouble-with-... [18] Trump restores funding for Radio Free Europe, Tech Fund - The Hill https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5217360-trump-a... [19] Trump administration under pressure to restore funding to groups ... https://kesq.com/news/national-politics/cnn-us-politics/2026... [20] Supporting the Open Technology Fund https://www.thefai.org/posts/supporting-the-open-technology-...

How does Briar work when a government shuts down the internet?

It mentions Bluetooth and Wifi. My guess is that it tries to find other Briar devices connected to the same Bluetooth and wifi hotspot but what if the users are not on the Bluetooth/wifi? Does it share ALL messages encrypted with every Briar user in the hope later they come in contact with the final user?

Okay I saw the link below: https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

So it seems it's more effective for blog posts because everyone is sharing the same blog post.

I'm not sure what happens with direct messages.

It's important for mobile apps to be available outside of Google and Apple's app store, so kudos to briar for being on F-Droid as well: https://f-droid.org/ .

In fact, (smartphone) software distribution over ad-hoc networks is itself of some importance.

Minneapolis needs this now.

For iOS users, "Bitchat" from Jack Dorsey is pretty similar. I'm not sure whether it syncs with Wi-Fi though, only Bluetooth

Just the default web-layout shown here is ... awful. How can people use that? That design is like 1990 ... but worse.

It's a manual for setup (in Farsi, you can click to other languages) that needs to be as accessible as possible to the least technology a literate people in the world as well as the ultra techy. Often people that have extremely limited data connection or no data connection as well. It has to be as simple as possible, and as clear as possible.

Check the main landing page and you can see it's a relatively modern site, they just gave a very restricted target audience the manual needs to be available for.

What's wrong with it?

I guess too many links at the beginning, but other than that it looks like your average website, just RTL.

How could people in 1990 use their stuff? They just did.

Design is not so important for getting information across

Ehhhh... To me Briar has great potential that is dwarfed by limitations... It's trying to be sort of like FireChat [1] but with less or subpar features... For real, someone should make a fire chat OSS project with some proprietary E2EE on top of the the OSS one based on Signal protocol. Maybe add some duress mode on top

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat

still very risky

Perhaps Americans should start preparing with Meshtastic / Meshcore, just in case....... ..,..the Emperor seems hellbent on bringing martial law into effect.

Do you think the govt will not force Google to revoke developer certs once developer verification is in place to prevent sideloading or not order Google/Apple to forcibly uninstall them ?

These are great tools in American toolkit if it wants to do a regime change in other countries. Their effectiveness within America are questionable.

There are fully hardware based meshtastic devices: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/realizing-meshtastics...

The Government can't revoke the certs on those.

The government isn't going to hand to do that, that's already what Google's planning to do anyway. They'd just have to tell Google to take down certain apps so they're no longer on the Google "approved" list, which would deactivate them on your device during next network connection (like most Google "services" on Android, I'm sure these too would bypass the system VPN as well) as well as making them unavailable from the sole allowed download source. You know, like they did with ICE Block already.

The military can very easily find and eliminate repeaters very quickly and almost certainly would.

Then get more? Sounds like a fantastic way to waste military resources. I have no clue why this mythical US military might and efficiency idea persists after so many failed interventions.

Here's a funny example of making it harder to find: https://youtu.be/W_F4rEaRduk?t=178

>the more people who use it, the more robust and far-reaching and reliable it gets.

I was under the opposite impression, that meshtastic's whole problem is that it doesn't scale well at all.

Meshtastic uses naive flooding, which is fine for sparse networks (ie you and your three friends out hiking), but which doesn’t scale well at all.

I'm genuinely interested in learning more about the shortcomings of meshtastic if you have a link to share. Groups like the Anarchist Black Cross seem really supportive of the tech for disaster situations. Even Benn Jordan claimed it played an important role during the floods in NC

My understanding is that it relates to the flood routing in meshtastic. I haven't heard a real-world failure example, but another comment on this post mentioned defcon being a case (I don't know anything about that).

I did find this assessment:

https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...

And here is Meshtastics explanation of the rationale behind 'managed flood routing':

https://meshtastic.org/blog/why-meshtastic-uses-managed-floo...

I think I first heard about the differences from Andy Kirby, one of the MeshCore creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNWf0Mh2fJw

Fair, meshcore is supposedly better for that.

Personally I just using it as a transport layer for Reticulum. Slow and finicky but easier to link distant nodes.

I'd really like to learn more about Reticulum. Are you using a specific app on top of it? Do you have a meaningful user network you communicate with, or is it still more just proving out the system?

Triangulation is damn easy. If the US can put on bomb on a suspect satellite phone user back in the 2000's (and they did!), they can certainly send a bomb on that today.

Sat phones during the second gulf war (maybe even the first) became a liability. The transmission lit them up like a god damn beacon saying, "Bomb goes here!".

Triangulation, the math isn't the hard part. Where exactly on the continental United States are you proposing dropping ordinance? MOVE in 1985 was controversial even back then.

Good luck if your mesh network is on 2.4/5/6ghz.

It'll blend in with background radiation from home routers.

It can have challenges, but triangulation can be done with signals that have recognizable patterns or features -- even in a sea of other co-channel noise sources.

If you can observe the signal strength of your neighbor's home router while standing next to your own even if the signals differ in strength by some orders of magnitude (which is easy on Android; no idea bout iOS), then anyone else can also do the same.

The intervention part is an administrative problem the military isn't designed for. For the core mission of collecting intelligence, eliminating targets, and occupying land, the US has an unrivaled track record over the last 85 years.

No, just blast the hell out of the ISM bands on which they operate. This seem certainly feasible for a military apparatus the size of the US.

I'm sure everybody's going to stay on ISM bands to remain compliant with government regulations while being attacked by the government.

This deserves a /s

The economic impact of that would be massive re: business operational impact.

Directional radios would still win out on p2p links.

You must have missed the S-tier op that went down January 3rd.

That was a single mission planned over months. We're talking about a continuous subjudagtion.

The interventions fail only after enormous slaughter, which people are understandably keen to not be subject to

As if compliance had such a great success rate.

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I don't think it's going to be military killing a Americans. As of now it more looks like federal government.

Nevertheless, sure, in the rural areas, but less so in the cities, reflections and bending of the waves make it much harder, and a single repeater with solar panel and battery could plausibly be made under $50.

A military won't be killing all Americans, just the ones it can label as "terrorists" to the people who elected them.

They are being made. I have a four node network already in my suburb. There is a software project that is written in Python that essentially turns lorawan nodes into BBSs similar to briar.

That's a great news!

Repeater coupled with [autonomous] drone to change [hard-to-get-to rooftop, treetop and the likes] location every 10 minutes like in a combat zone.

Repeaters built into collars and put on feral cats.

Is this a real thing???

In Ukraine - pretty close.

Why would they bother? Super low bandwidth unencrypted communication they can triangulate if they really need to sounds like a perfect thing to let keep running and just monitor. Then you can triangulate just the "seditious" people who incriminate themselves.

I guess if you were relying on the meshtastic network as a backbone network replacement, which I'm not sure much of anyone is even currently setup for and I've heard isnt really feasible with the naive meshtastic toy implementation, you could be sending encrypted traffic. But then you have to have pre-shared encryption keys for participants and it will significantly lose it's usefulness for adding new adopters.

They're incredibly easy to build and even disguise as lawn ornaments as Benn Jordan showed in a recent video. When it costs us less money and time to build them than it costs the gov't to find/destroy them it's a worthy investment

Maybe ham repeaters but when we are talking lorawan they will have a hell of a time taking the networks down that are already established. Just in my suburb we have more than 6000 nodes because of the helium network.

You can build a Meshcore/-tastic station for less than 15€ if you are into PCB design. It's like fighting against off-the-shelf drones.

At no time from 2001-2021 did the Taliban find themselves short on VHF repeaters. If one gets taken down, put up another one.

It would be futile. It's a big country full of 340,000,000 people.

Great way to waste resources though.

Isn't stopping abuses of the power of the military the reason for the 2nd Amendment?

Why don't the people in Minnesota go open carry and let ICE agents think twice before drawing their weapons on people?

Renee Good was killed after dropping off her six-year-old child at school. I agree with you, but people like her have children and are not trying to die in the street just for looking at somebody the wrong way. And it's one thing to open carry, it's another thing to become a trained and confident marksmen.

And as someone who has had half a dozen police officers simultaneously pointing guns at my head, mistaking me for someone else in public, once you're in that situation, escalation is only going to lead to death. Out here, police shoot you if your hand goes anywhere near your waist.

>Isn't stopping abuses of the power of the military the reason for the 2nd Amendment?

It was for establishing well ordered militias. They could be used to help defend the country in a time of war.

> Why don't the people in Minnesota go open carry and let ICE agents think twice before drawing their weapons on people?

Most of the demonstrators believe that "the pen is mightier than the sword", and non-violence is the way to achieve political means. (Ghandi, MLK jr.)

When the peace-niks start amassing guns, that's when you have a tipping point in this country.

What's the definition of a well-ordered militia? A bunch of farmers that go shooting together?

Alexander Hamilton explains his definition of what "well-regulated" is - and the purpose of a citizen militia - in contrast to the standing army in the Federalist Papers, No. 29. Most of the idea has become much more federalized than intended with the National Guard, but it has long since been misused for its intended purpose.

A bunch of farmers that go shooting drunk. /s

Seriously though, everyone back in the 1700s realized that all Americans were American. I'm not sure that's true any more.

> Seriously though, everyone back in the 1700s realized that all Americans were American. I'm not sure that's true any more.

What was an American in the 1700s? A person born in America?

I think the most you can say is that they recognized that many male propertied white protestant Americans are American. Maybe some more qualifiers are necessary.

Because the pro 2nd amendment people with "Don't tread on me" tattoos are going to "Tread on me harder, daddy!".

It seems very unlikely the US would take the approach of shutting down the internet to prevent communication. All the internet infrastructure is hardwired for US surveillance data collection, so it's already a perfect honeypot. Why shutdown your honey pot?

More likely to be useful in the US is communication that is actually private, secure, and not centralized, but the underlying communication channel if unlikely to be relevant. Signal for example would almost certainly have thier IP blocked in the area, or their servers taken down because their completely centralized and therefore easy to block. Realistically something that can leverage an adversarial network to implement mesh communication that can be obfuscated (so it's not easily detected and blocked) is more useful in the US.

Meshtastic is both extremely range limited and trivial to DDOS. It's a fun toy protocol but it's not resistant to nation state disruption at all.

It's only line-of-sight, but isn't the range 10s-100s of kilometres in open areas? Some repeaters on hills/mountains etc. could connect large areas potentially.

It's trivially jammable, as evidenced by the network not working at popular events such as Defcon with default firmware settings.

Nope. Uses only one frequency that quickly gets crowded and if you are in urban areas you'd be lucky to get more than 200 meters.

It is a toy. A cheap Quangsheng/Baofeng for 20 euros can reach a few kilometers in urban area, use multiple frequencies and go for 100 kilometers easily on LoS. They even reach Australia from Europe when using a wire antenna large enough.

I've tested >60km links with Meshtastic without problems and had plenty of SNR left.

I looked a bit into meshtastic and was told that if a node was physically compromised then messages could be intercepted. That cant be right, right?

There was a well known crypto weakness, CVE-2025-52464, that allowed man in the middle decryption of meshtastic traffic. It was fixed by a firmware patch that improved crypto discipline.

Bad randomness in generating keys, for anyone else wondering

From what I understand no, the relay node has no access to the messages.

If you compromise sending or receiving node then sure, of course.

Why bother? Just jam the fucking hell out of it. Most critical infrastructure is not on the ISM bands.

A lot of things are.

You could theoretically even shut down airplane printers in the cockpit if the jamming was strong enough.

You'd be surprised the things that are tied to ism wifi and bluetooth

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"domestic"? That could be anywhere, what do you mean?

I am in the US but I think the statement applies for >70% of the earth. China, Europe, the UK (big time), India, etc. Maybe not so bad in like, Japan -_(--)_-

Can you expand on that? I'm from a developing country and we're very worried about what's going on in America. Is the situation really as bad as Iran?

No. It's nowhere near Iran, but it's bad by typical US standards.

Our situation has disturbing echoes, but thankfully thousands of protesters haven't yet been murdered here.

The death toll, especially of non-citizens, is piling up however.

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Who am i scoring a cheap shot on? ICE?

Good

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