I'd rather use Briar (https://briarproject.org/)
In both cases I think these may be characteristics of healthy judgment.
>iOS doesn’t allow apps to fork subprocesses. While on the desktop Tor is running as a separate process, on iOS Tor is hacked to run as a thread inside the app itself. Therefore, you can’t have a system-wide Tor process like desktop and Android. If Tor is running in one app, and you open a different one, it’s not automagically going to start using Tor.
https://www.quora.com/How-effective-is-the-Tor-app-for-iPad-...
https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#will-t...
Please view my participation in this discussion as certified proof of the objective verification of my moral essence. I hereby claim superiority now and forever over JD and any such users of said technologies. Sincerely and respectfully (without any possible hints of objectionableness), the undersigned.
I think they just ran out of funding and died with a whimper.
A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.
I dont think many people realise just how much European infrastructure Germany actually bankrolls. It is a lot.
For the U.S., yes, I'm assuming Medicare/Medicaid. For overseas: Vietnam and Portugal have affordable systems you can pay into, with private insurance options above that at $1,200 and $5,000 a year.
Wealth versus liquidity. I'm saying you sell everything you own, pay off your debts, and then take what's left to retire on. Someone with $10mm in home equity may still be strapped for cash on account of the mortgage.
If you dont inherently know this fact then you should be grateful for a very lucky and priviliged life.
Often one and the same since the first thing those in power try to do is make various activities by protestors illegal
Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc.
Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other.
300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.
technically possible but rather redundant and in most cases pointless. (yes, there are exceptions)
so i rather strongly disagree. 99% of my use of the internet is to talk to people across the globe. it's its primary use case. the example you mention is a fringe application, useful to a tiny minority.
"the network remains functional during internet outages"
that strongly implies that i can use this app to replace other apps that use the internet. but i can't, because it does not allow long distance communication the way internet based apps do.
so for 99% of my needs this app is not helping me. it does not make me independent of the internet. i have been in places where the internet was cut off due to political turmoil. and i have friends who have that happen to them. in all cases the main challenge was the lack of long distance communication. local communication was barely affected.
sms and phone still worked, and in fact the app that would have helped is one that can route data connections via sms and phone calls. like old acoustic modems.
infrastructure independence at a local level is nice, but much less serious or critical than independence for long distance communication. and long distance already starts at a few km.
Oops! You (unintentionally?) make it sound like protests are illegal.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-democracy-exist-witho...
They're definitely effective when most of the country wants the government out, but by that point a vote would certainly do just as well, and with fewer flying bricks.
Voting does not allow to express that a certain issue is politically important to you.
They also serve to draw attention to issues that aren't showing up on the ballot for whatever reason. The system doesn't always work in an ideal way. To that end protests are supposed to be annoying to those who don't care.
They are also a good communication tool for the world to see what the people are struggling with.
[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
https://www.reddit.com/r/InformedTankie/comments/ufq4oq/a_co...
https://forsea.co/bangkok-based-conspiracy-blogger-brian-ber...
There's a certain event-horizon where bitterness taints / skews perspective enough that even what would otherwise be helpful insights becomes so costly to disentangle from grudge-extrapolation that it's not obvious if any of it ends up being worth the cost of entry. At least to me, this person's work seems well beyond that point.
Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you? Seems like bluetooth is the perfect way to communicate for devices that are close to each other.
If I need to have all 4 members of the family meet me at the pool, first I need to go find each one of them. They could all be at different place. And then tell them individually to meet me at the pool? Is that the better solution you are proposing?
>Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you?
Why would that matter? Use Signal to protect the content, or use Cwtch to protect content and metadata. If you need to exchange secret communications that mustn't go through some server, why not discuss f2f with no phones around? You'd also eliminate attack vectors where your (chances are, Chinese Android) device spies on you, as well as anyone who has compromised it to read messages from screen.
Reliability? Why should we want to centralize things unnecessarily? It's nice as a fallback but then so too is P2P.
You shouldn't need any kind of permission to send a picture to your mum sitting next to you on the sofa.
I imagine in a situation like Iran, carrying a backpack full of WiFi gear to stay connected to the meshnet is a red flag.
Establishing a bunch of base stations is likely to raise red flags too.
It's pretty trivial for a nation-state that is jamming GPS to go around and jam WiFi or analyze WiFi spectrum for a meshnet operating in and around a protest area.
For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless, not much I can do on it, might as well sue a purpose built device. They're also very cheap.
Even better if Nextel still worked on phones (but without service).
Projects like this one are a step towards fixing that. Personally I choose to keep both street and topographical maps of the entire continent locally on my phone. There are plenty of uses for a computer without a WAN connection.
And if nothing else, you can always rupture the battery and start a fire :-)
On the cruise I'd need to seek the written permission of the vessel's master's to operate :) (and ideally cruise company permission to even bring the transmitter on board)
Unlicenced passengers could probably plead ignorance and sneak UHF DMR radios.
Or get a business allocation and use P25 radios and once again plead ignorance :)
https://old.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1qd2z97/mestast...
I doubt that BLE can propagate well over a cruise ship.
There was no signal in the remote Irish hostel so it was the perfect way to send messages covertly in the dormitory.
Fun night!
- You want to check in with people around you about what to do - You want to check on the health of your family, from whom you were separated
Would that actually happen? No, but it's an interesting thought experiment
Like I said definitely not practical for messaging but I think something along these lines is how airtags work?
Text based messaging ala IRC? Just how quickly and how much do you type? A few hundred KiB exchanged between nodes only every 10 seconds or so ought to be able to accommodate thousands of simultaneous users in most scenarios. The impact on battery life should be far less than using a bluetooth headset.
A messaging system that often takes hours or days to get messages to the receiver is fairly useless and people will continue to prefer centralised systems, so there's a severe chicken-and-egg problem to solve there before anything like this can work
When I enable WiFi calling on my phone that doesn't preclude it connecting to a cell tower.
The real obstacles here are political, not technical, as evidenced by the complete absence of any built-in solution that could be so useful in both everyday life (messaging a family member on the same plane when sitting separately, national park trips etc.) and emergencies.
We literally got smartphone-to-satellite comms now, but we're lacking the most barebones peer-to-peer functionality.
Apparently it's an optional part of Bluetooth 5, so not necessarily supported. However I just checked my phone (Pixel 8) and it is supported. You can check in the nRF Connect app.
https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/pos...
I also have recently got into caving, which usually results in 5-50 people camping over weekends in rural Kentucky. No signal most of the time.
You should be able to write a message and not rely on the recipient being available when you press send. You should also be able to run nodes to cache messages for longer, and opt in to holding messages for a greater time period. This would among other things allow couriers between disjoint groups of users.
this is prob the 100th time ive read about bitchat here, and the comments are largely the same (use briarchat, none of these really work that well, i dont like jack dorsey, etc) every time.
but this is interesting. and i agree strongly with this: "While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage."
i suppose events like iran are really making me wonder if this stuff is possible it feels like anyone who's under the chokehold of regimes has completely run out of options, but even in America I'm getting the sweats wondering if there's going to be a time where such techs are needed. from what i gather none of these decentralized p2p messengers work well at all, but I also haven't truly tried. I can think of some moments that would've been viable test grounds though. Was at Outsidelands festival in San Fran and cell service was pretty much DOA due to the volume of people trying to hit the same tower(s). Even airtags which everyone in the group had on their beltloop weren't working.
If I understand correctly, this would still be true if the recipient is connected.
why wouldn't encryption be a part of recipe here rendering government acquisition of such a cache moot?
>At its core, BitChat leverages the Noise Protocol Framework (specifically, the XX pattern) to establish mutually authenticated, end-to-end encrypted sessions between peers.
If you want to protect older messages you can have the user enter a passphrase when they are in a physically safe situation. But that is only really practical for media like email. Good for organizing the protest but perhaps not so great at the protest.
Just take what's there and include the obvious next steps:
- Meshtastic and Meshcore ability to use relay nodes for long range BLE networks (Briar doesn't allow)
- Store and hold encrypted messages, as noted above.
- Ability to route through the internet, prioritize routing methods, disable internet routing, etc.
- Ability to self-host server for online relays (similar to Matrix)
I do like the store and forward idea, though a thought on that is that while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short. It makes good sense for forum like content though. I think so far Bitchat has treated this as a bit out of scope, at least at this stage of development, and it is a reason that indeed, Briar is still quite relevant.
Bitchat only just recently even added ad hoc wifi support, so it's still very early days.
Neither are real time once you introduce delayed communication. Not sure I see the distinction.
Actually, I'd argue that unreliable transport breaks the real-time assumption even without introducing delayed communication. Is there immediate feedback if your message can't reach it's destination?
All of this is solved with the store-and-forward model that you highlight.
A Lora dongle seems to be better than BT, though potentially incriminating.
Store-and-forward, hierarchical organization, scheduled transmissions, working over dial-up and radio links, everything is there.
There is nothing new to invent, and it was far more reliable than the 10m real-world range of BT5 (not the 1km claimed for lab devices, which aren't commercial phones).
A BT5 mesh only works under well-defined conditions, which usually coincide with the cases where you don't actually need it.
However, I apply the concepts of FidoNet almost every day. I often design offline-first devices, where store-and-forward logic is a necessity, not an option. Many are deployed in remote areas where signals are never optimal, there a High-Gain Antenna is the only solution.
I also prioritize binary protocols over structured JSON; you have a much higher probability of delivering a few hundred bytes of binary data than a bloated text object when the link budget is tight. Finally, I never expect Wi-Fi to work beyond 5-10m when the router is placed inside the metal structure (that's why my skepticism about BT on cruise ship).
If so, then: Wouldn't it fall down completely when operating in the ever-shifting and inherently disorganized environment that a sea of pocket supercomputers represents?
In a 'sea of supercomputers,' a real-time mesh (like Bluetooth) fails because it requires an end-to-end path right now. Store-and-Forward allows a node to hold a message until it 'sees' any valid peer, turning every 'meat-bot' into a mobile post office.
My main concern with this entire discussion is the reliance on Bluetooth to achieve the result.
If we truly want to build a free and open intercommunications system, we must put all ideas on the table, establish clear targets (a doomsday system or inviting a friend for a drink), and evaluate what is truly available versus what is not.
Only from that foundation can we begin to define a project that survives the real world.
Here's one scenario:
Node A has a message to send to node H, but A is disconnected (no peers). Node A stores this message for eventual delivery.
Eventually, node K (ie "any valid peer") appears. Node A gives them the message that is intended for node H and rinses its hands of it.
Does node K's possession of this message actually improve the odds of node H ever receiving the message?
Tbf, if my government would be out to kill me for protesting, I'd use something that at least was security audited. Not to shit on bitchat, I haven't audited the code personally.
Do we have evidence of this? The only concrete claim made in that post is that Briar 'hit 252 points on Hacker News," which is orthogonal to if it's actually being used.
[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
* I see LocalSend and LANDrop frequently suggested on HN but in my experience they rely on having a central Wifi router. No good.
* Android's QuickShare comes included by default, but it's buggy. Just yesterday it failed on me (I'm on an uncommunicated boat): it was defaulting to Bluetooth, so I had to reboot both phones to finally make it work over Wifi Direct. Not to speak about the "oh damn, you have an iPhone" scenario. Not ideal.
Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)
Even without something fancy (e.g WiFi Direct, iptables on a rooted phone) you could have phones alternating between offering a network and promiscuously connecting to offered networks, then routing between these.
It's simple enough that I'd be surprised if nobody has done it, maybe because it's slow and power-hungry? I haven't tested setting up hotspots and switching networks from inside app logic, but afaik it's fine as long as you don't do both at the same time.
edit: Having thought about it for a minute, a DTN over WiFi Direct is probably the way to go. Establishing identity for signing||encryption might be tricky, but if you can arrange that in advance or just yolo it in plain text then should be straightforward. Can't find any prior art though. I'll let Codex have a go and report back.
And natural disasters like in Jamaica https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becom...
seems like the second article is written by AI
A bit unfortunate naming, indeed.
Like, he quit BlueSky because he wanted it to be completely unmoderated which is, frankly, asinine. His view of what “censorship” means exists in a world along with spherical cows and no bad actors.
We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled.
So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them.
If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose.
We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.
The story of using Bluetooth in a cruise ship to chat with family sounds like it’s pushing the limits of physics; communication in those conditions is highly unreliable. Most of our phones have onboard a class 2 device (the lower range, 10-20m), the real world has walls to reduce the range, and a cruise ship's metal structure creates a Faraday cage effect.
In case of protests, a jammer will silence all devices.
Anyway, I was thinking that in extreme cases we could modify our devices for communication at a community level—for example, creating a Wi-Fi mesh network with routers, or some other long-range protocol (e.g., LoRa).
If you want kilometers of range in wide open air, give anything lora based a try.
Jack makes cool stuff, but I fell off BlueSky and I have little desire to engage with the "community" on there. It's very echo-chambery like every social media and I feel it's mostly identical to X or Truth just a different echo chamber. It seemed like BlueSky was being sold as a solution to what happened with Twitter and I feel like it didn't make true on it's promise.
Find My and air tags was already a huge success because of the ubiquitous nature of iPhones.
Apple could add this to iPhone, sell it as privacy focussed. Let you message anyone in your iMessage contacts with a new bubble colour. Propagate over Bluetooth when you don't have internet.
I can see a snazzy Apple reveal for this showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium, and then for the meme factor, 2 astronauts on a space walk. It writes itself.
If there is a decentralised system that doesn’t require infrastructure , what is left to monetise?
Low latency, high bandwidth
At least in my case, I’m just using messages on the road. Obviously it’s not going to be a solution for sparsely populated areas.
Google BT Chat. Android B Chat. Google Relay.
And Microsoft can get on board, too. With Microsoft Teams Decentralised For School and Work.
> Showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium
Stadiums will still max out the pipe out of the local area, so I suspect it wouldn't help much. Festivals and cruise ships, where you want to reach people who are nearby (and at a festival, you might even have a good idea via gps which peers are better) are in desperate need of this and idk why apple didnt solve it years ago.
Hard to imagine things like this getting much beyond the "cute" stage.
I'll tell you a story.
Usain Bolt, the world 100/200m recordman, is not faster than cheeta. He needs a motorbike or a car to be beat a cheeta. But even with a car or motorbike is unlikely is going to overtak a cheeta on the ground of savannah.
This to tell you are thinking about optimizations of a system while you need to choose the right system for the environment.
A 433 MHz based link and a strong modulation is much suitable solution than a BT class 2 device included in the phone.
And here the real hack, most of phones has an integrated FM receiver, higher sensibility than BT, a simple FM transmitter (88-108 MHz) and problem solved.
Regarding the 'protocol for the waves,' you'll need to play with modulation. That’s the fun part. In technical literature, there are many well-defined modulations (like AFSK or FSK) with clear suggested applications for low-SNR environments.
As for Android support, I have no idea. I understand that in this thread, 'free' sounds like 'freedom,' but freedom has a cost. The freedom of communication requires investment: in hardware, software, and the time to learn the physics of the environment.
because the fun thing is cool, but people want some usable...
If the requirement is to communicate where consumer standards like Bluetooth fail, like in a ship, you have to choose the system for the environment. I evaluate these choices like an architect building a robust system, rather than just using what is available at the nearby shop.
how do you know when the messaging app is broken, and how do you know when bluetooth is just exercising its ability to hate mankind?
This is not meant to be an efficient, every day messaging platform.
It's for people who are afraid of the government turning off the internet/cell network (kinda justified if you live in Iran or Uganda), or those networks going offline due to natural disasters (see Jamaica)
Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate.
Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)
IMHO MT has a fundamental algorithmic flaw when it comes to dealing with very unreliable and lossy links.
Anyway how would either network fare in the Iranian situation where the authorities are actively trying to shutdown communications? Sure the authorities could simply flood the network with traffic.
RF attenuation is proportional to frequency and at 2.4 GHz, it is very high. Also, the distance over which one could communicate depends on antenna height, so if both parties are at ground level, it is not feasible over a few hundred meters unless both are in wide open space.
Source: ham operator who has played with long distance device to device communication without using a repeater.
Through building materials, foliage etc, but not in free space/line-of-sight.
> Also, the distance over which one could communicate depends on antenna height, so if both parties are at ground level, it is not feasible over a few hundred meters unless both are in wide open space.
Isn't it just the opposite? Antenna height is only the limiting factor with line-of-sight, otherwise NLOS considerations like attenuation by building materials, multipath propagation etc. start to matter much more. Modern radio standards are extremely good at that.
Of course line-of-sight usually remains the ceiling, since there usually isn't much in the sky to helpfully reflect signals back down, at least with mobile transmitter compatible transmission levels (i.e. excluding shortwave).
Yeah. Even in free space. For example, attenuation at 1 km for 144 MHz (ham VHF band) is about -76 dB while for 2.4 GHz, it is about -100 dB. That 24 dB drop could mean, the signal is below the noise floor of your receiver unless you increase the RF power output which means more battery drain.
For example, BT audio gets cut just moving to the next room despite the RF power of BT transmitters being ~ 5mW( 7 dBm ) and at 10m, the attenuation is -60 dB(just free space loss which is ideal condition), so 53 dBm (7-60) at the receiver is usually sufficient, yet they struggle.
> For example, attenuation at 1 km for 144 MHz (ham VHF band) is about -76 dB while for 2.4 GHz, it is about -100 dB.
This is a common misunderstanding of the free-space path loss formula, which is expressed in terms of the idealized isotropic radiator, the length of which is frequency-dependent. In other words, this calculation is assuming a proportionally (much) smaller antenna for the 2.4 GHz case.
With the same antenna size, the path loss is exactly the same. After all, where else should the radiated energy go?
What do you mean? The size of the dipole or monopole antenna is dependent on the wavelength, so obviously the 2.4 GHz is just a few centimeters and not the same size as a VHF antenna.
> After all, where else should the radiated energy go?
Well, most of RF energy is wasted. There are software that can plot the radiation pattern, but even without knowing the exact pattern, very little RF energy is received at the target.
Sure, if you want to stay omnidirectional, but you don't have to. You can use one of several antennas based on feedback, beamforming etc.
There are tons of cool things society could enjoy if it wasn't for a small handful of shameless actors.
In a true emergency, who can stop you from modifying that architecture? Once you treat the device as an independent radio node (using its DSP power to run custom modems) you can establish a mesh network with a range of several kilometers.
We have a '4x4 car in our pockets; we’ve just been conditioned to treat it like a toy.
Note that cellular radios are highly specialized and the filtering circuits are tuned to specific bands. It’s not exactly like having a software defined radio in your pocket.
Next, at the modem level, you’ll need to implement and then sideload custom firmware. Finally, you’ll need to expose the right APDUs to the kernel to manage the whole thing.
TBH it sounds like a fun side project, but my point is you need to repurpose a lot of different parts of the stack to accomplish what you want.
You’re absolutely right that the 5G/LTE baseband is a black-box nightmare to repurpose. But I’m not looking to hack the cellular modem; I’m looking for the dormant '4x4 car' already available.
For instance, many chipsets have an integrated FM receiver that is essentially a high-sensitivity VHF radio. By taking the raw audio output and applying a Software Modem (AFSK/FSK) in the user-space, you bypass the kernel/firmware complexity entirely. You don’t need to sideload a modem driver if you treat the audio jack or the internal FM bus as your physical layer.
The 'complexity' is real if you try to fight the manufacturer's fences, but it vanishes if you understand the full stack. A pair of wired headphones becomes your dipole antenna, and the phone's CPU becomes your DSP engine. It’s not about rebuilding the Ferrari; it’s about realizing there’s a VHF engine hidden in the chassis that doesn't need 'permission' to receive bits. You just need a software demodulator the catch them, but for sending you'll need an external transmitter (an USB SDR or jack-to-FM).
This is fascinating. Happy to do the research myself, but do you have any recommended reading/sources to learn more about this?
For the practical 'how-to,' I recommend studying GNU Radio and SDR++; they show how to process IQ data or raw audio streams directly, and for sure there are other libraries. On the 'ancestor' side, look at the AX.25 Packet Radio protocol and AFSK (Audio Frequency Shift Keying). These are the same 'softmodem' principles used in FidoNet nodes decades ago.
GSM Arena can help you find phones with integrated FM receivers. You'll notice that many features are market-dependent, meaning: the receiver is often physically present but simply disabled by software.
> For instance, many chipsets have an integrated FM receiver that is essentially a high-sensitivity VHF radio.
Until some clever cookie can figure out some way to utilize string theory’s extra dimensions for sending signals and then every body can have their own dimension to mess with, collective regulation on broadcasters is the only feasible way.
Nothing is stopping you from getting an HT for communication during power outages, natural disasters, etc. You just have to get a license to make sure you don’t actively harm everyone who is sharing the same spectrum with you especially during said natural disaster.
The situation would be very different if it were commercially legal to sell devices that are designed to let you broadcast to anyone without FCC certification on the device or enforcement from a governing body. A billion startups would be selling “communicate with your family across town for free” devices that can easily render emergency services radios useless in a city.
Not true. Bluetooth, lora, and zigbee all coexist in the same unlicensed spectrum just fine. There’s no reason phones couldn’t speak these, or that a similar low-power protocol couldn’t be standardized.
> One bad actor can render the entire RF spectrum in their area unusable.
Ok, and? That’s already true for cellular, gps, and wifi today.
> Nothing is stopping you from getting an HT for communication during power outages, natural disasters, etc.
You’re missing the point. People already carry radios everywhere which are more than capable of longer range p2p communications.
The real question is why no such standard exists, despite its obvious utility.
Telling people to just carry an HT is smug and irrelevant. Average people carry phones.
They already do. Most phones have Bluetooth. All those examples run on the 2.4GHz spectrum and all have the same RF range limitations and challenges. What’s your point?
> Ok, and? That’s already true for cellular, gps, and wifi today.
Hence the enforcement of cellular bands and gps through regulation. Again I’m confused as to what you are trying to say? Anyone can cause an RF jam. It’s illegal. Depending on how much it impact others, you might get a visit from the FCC, a fine or jail.
> You’re missing the point. People already carry radios everywhere which are more than capable of longer range p2p communications.
No they are not. You can’t get more than very short line of sight communication on the UHF band. You need to drop to at least the VHF band for any reasonable non-assisted communication and even still most people communicating in the VHF bands are using repeaters.
> The real question is why no such standard exists, despite its obvious utility.
You just listed 3 standards. Their utility is extremely limited and very unreliable as the distance, foliage, concrete increases between the parties. Telling anyone to rely on UHF transceiver in an emergency is misleading and dangerous. Telling anyone who is worried about communication in an actual emergency situation to have an HT is not smug. It’s the tool you need for the job. Average people carry phones because they are not frequently in such emergency situations. Those who are (emergency services, hardcore hikers, snow skiers, wild adventure types carry radios or satellite phones for this reason.
Plus with the recent low orbit satellite constellations making it possible to fit compatible transceiver in small phones (as opposed to needing a huge antenna for it) it’s even more of a moot point for emergency situations now.
You’re not gonna change antenna theory because you feel it’s smug.
The point is exactly that everybody is carrying a phone, but almost nobody is carrying a walkie-talkie. And why should I carry one more thing? My smartphone has already replaced my music player, camera...
Both European PMR446 and the US FRS are limited to 0.5 W; GSM uses four times that. There are walkie-talkies with very small antennas too. The limiting factor is line-of-sight, in any case.
If you're fine with less than real-time audio, you can get much, much smaller and low power.
2) 5G cells are small and very dense, this means less power consumption.
3) LTE and 5G are based on CDMA, a technology that is way more efficient in term of bandwidth efficiency than the FM modulation used by a walkie talkie
Not necessarily. In rural areas and using low frequencies, I believe they can even be larger than GSM.
> LTE and 5G are based on CDMA
No, the last CDMA based cell standards were 3G/UMTS and the Qualcomm equivalent (CDMA2000 or what it was). From then on, it’s all been OFDM.
It also helps a lot to have one side of the transmission up on a tower with a giant high gain antenna :)
Is this even true?
I still have two Gotennas from before they pivoted to military use cases, and they were legal to use both in the US and in Europe (on different bands auto-configured via GPS, as far as I remember).
REI also currently stocks at least one set of walkie talkies [1] that can relay short messages from smartphones via Bluetooth.
[1] https://www.rei.com/product/240874/motorola-talkabout-t803-2...
These days, I'm not sure anyone would seriously rely on a system that sent only unencrypted point-to-point data, so for that use case your original point stands.
I guess anything that's useful to regular hikers is potentially also useful to the armed, abroad type of hiker, and these are usually better funded, so I can see why startups like these would pivot.
Though in their defense, I'm not sure GoTenna was ever "popular." Probably not enough to pay the bills, given their pivot.
You aren't going to get longer ranges with phone, the power and antenna are too limited. Walkie-walkie have bigger antennas (the stubby FRS sort of suck) and more power. Also, walkie-talkie don't have much bandwidth so the data rates would suck.
Also, the walkie talkies certainly can legally do data transmission.
You would need root to do this, and implement your own protocol on top of it with forward error correcting codes.
Node to node mesh communication is cool and it works surprisingly well at small scale, but the moment we brought high powered repeaters online the difference was night and day. Coverage, reliability, and usability all jumped instantly.
It makes the tradeoff really obvious. Mesh is great for bootstrapping and local traffic, but once you care about real data propagation at scale, centralized infrastructure wins almost every time. Airtime is scarce, coordination matters, and having a small number of well placed high sites beats thousands of mediocre relays.
I still think there’s room for novelty P2P protocols, but mostly as an optimization layer on top of infrastructure, not as the foundation. Every time you push on this problem hard enough, you end up rediscovering the client router model for a reason.
a) Wireless local networking was invented and popularized earlier b) We had transitioned earlier to IPV6 or some other protocol with an address space as huge, thus making NAT not as pervasive as it became. b) We didn't have hordes of VCs financing walled gardens and social networks.
Wifi obviously has higher bandwidth, but I guess it isn't viable as a mesh, or is there any trick with turning on/off hotspots on phones dynamically that'd make it viable? (Afaik older phones made you pick between being a hotspot or being a regular wifi client, but at least some newer ones seem to allow both simultaneously.)
I'm definitely hoping for a future with wider support for C2PA (content credentials on images) on phone cameras to make these photos power citizen journalism. So far Samsung S25 and Pixel 10 support C2PA in the camera hardware: need other phone makers (especially Apple) to get on board already... if you're an iPhone user, please help yell at Apple support etc!
Aside: I registered a domain and plan to build a citizen journalism news feed for such photos (and uncut videos). I see it as the antidote to Instagram et al's feeds that're full of AI slop (and plenty of fakery even before AI-generated imagery got big). And it's essential to truth, democracy and ultimately (maybe I'm too idealistic here) peace. Aside to the aside: wish some of us techies banded together to build "peace tech" as a new sector in tech, DM if interested in brainstorming or working together.
AFAIK, Brair relays messages through Bluetooth but also through Tor if possible.
Anything that does not involve having govs and the middle man, will never be allowed, legally.
Long frequency radios, phone-to-phone communication, decentralized payment systems, anything. If the gov cannot track you or cannot make you pay tax for it, it will never become popular for obvious reasons.
It is legal in 2026 for Sony and others to delete digital content you bought and paid tax for because it doesn't belong to you, yet, it is illegal to download such content via torrent. That tells you a lot.