Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest
https://www.vice.com/en/article/activists-are-designing-mesh-networks-to-deploy-during-civil-unrest/Open linkView original on lemmy.mlSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.mlhttps://www.vice.com/en/article/activists-are-designing-mesh-networks-to-deploy-during-civil-unrest/Open linkView original on lemmy.ml
29 replies
Sadly from October 2021, their site seems to be offline
The project it looks based on is Meshtastic, the nodes are pretty cheap, you can even find them on Amazon if your truly desperate.
https://meshtastic.org/
I LOVE Meshtastic!
There's also MeshCore, and now the networks are split between these 2.
Well... Shit. Time to check out meshcore!
Edit: Nah, company driven.
I'll keep the fully open GPL 3 meshtastic my preferred
If someone is interested in getting involved with meshtastic but doesn’t have soldering or any electronics background you can purchase ready made devices from many vendors.
https://muzi.works/products/refurbished-r1-with-external-antenna
https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck-plus-meshtastic?variant=45315795845301
It's a fun project!
My truly desperate what?
Thanks dad.
There are lots of competing LoRa mesh networks right now.
Are you familiar with Briar?
Works over internet, TOR, local wifi, bluetooth, even "sneakernet".
No I’m not. Looking foward to reading this
I've never used it, but I've heard of "Jami" that is supposed to operate in a similar fashion.
My only complaints with it are that there's no iOS app, which cut down the userbase significantly, and that there's no easy way to migrate / export a profile and and existing contacts between devices.
And I wish I could set a Briar mailbox node (without the encryption key, so that if compromised you can't read anything meaningful) on a VPS to receive messages when my app is offline. Right now the only way to accomplish this is with another Android device.
I've found Jami from another comment a few hours ago, but I haven't downloaded it yet. But I think it expects an existing internet/network connection, where Briar seems to be focused on getting messages across through any means available.
Is that still in development? The desktop client at least looks like it hasn't been updated in quite some time.
AFAIK, yes. Latest release is from March of this year, and they have commits as of a month ago.
Maybe https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/ as an alternative
Oops. Didn't check the date; saw it on https://mastodon.social/explore/links.
Yeah I’ve fall for it me too and foward it to my friend, cool projet nonetheless sadly it seems to be nowhere to be found 😢
To be fair, given what lengths the police will go to messing with protesters, would anybody trust some random mesh network?
Mesh networks can be built on zero trust principles and have everything E2EE. Kind of like Tor.
But the more realistic scenario is the police will just deploy jammers to completely disable all wireless communication.
It could go either way. The benefit of faking an activist mesh network is tracking and surveillance for later retaliation.
It's another thing they have to do. They're not all RF/SW engineers so they'd have to adapt to it the same way they'd adapt to anything else. By building networks that aren't corporate controlled, however, activists can engineer them around anonymity instead of serving the police.
No, but if Musk and Zuckerberg has taught us anything, there are plenty of engineers who are willing to sell out humanity for fascism. No one is safe, and we should not trust random networks just because it’s “activist controlled”.
It comes down to how the network is designed, Meshtastic is open source, you can go look at how the encryption works right now. There are issues with Meshtastic from a privacy standpoint but you could somewhat trivially design a derivative that is much more zero trust.
As with all things, layer your defenses. Not using the network that's known to be surveiling you and instead using one that you have some confidence is leaking less info on top of the usual precautions is a solid improvement.
I mean, well, some would.
Reticulum network
This! Is the most resilient. It can run on anything, not just LoRa! So, it can work on underlying infra (assuming there's power, e.g. renewables)