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.

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 :)

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

LoRa locally is often installed/managed by municipal governments.

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.

Mesh networks like meshtastic have shown that they can be run on very low power meaning they can continue to route messages with the power from small solar panels. This makes them more useful in disaster or wide scale power outage scenarios than only as an anti-authority measaure.

Governmental blockout is one thing but…

Even without climate / natural disasters we need to have fallback infrastructures in general.

Just yesterday Verizon was down.

You raise a good point, and I think USians should do all of it: generally encrypt communication, try to conceal as much metadata as they can AND put up mesh networks. It is not the right threat model until it is.

That said, I never said that my comment was about the US.

> Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown.

They also do so to prevent political violence from spreading, as social media does fan the flame of further violence. This is (in my opinion) a legitimate response to prevent hatred and mob violence from growing.

> Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown. Thats' why it's happening in Iran. They want to disrupt the co-ordination of a coup

You are, possibly innocently, carrying propaganda water for a repressive autocratic regime that has killed thousands of its own citizens in the past week alone.

IRI desposts, starting fro Ali Khamenei down to the rest of their ideological "brothers and sisters" in the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (note no "Iran" in that name ..) are scared shitless that a Mussolini style future awaits them and their parasitical clans.

IRI has cut off internet and phone networks for days now because they know that before they can yet again reach "a deal" with the despicable Western elite who were instrumental in their rise to power (and staying there for all these years) need Media Cover from the audiances in the rest of the civilized world who would be exposed to numerous images and videos of bodies piled in streets and morgues, ARAB ISIS Style goons on pickup trucks with machine guns, and scenes of Iranian men and women of all shapes and ages loudly expressing their utter hatred of this EVIL REGIME from all corners of Iran, and they would not be able to "make a deal".

I strongly suggest, specially if you in anyway believe in any sort of Cosmic Judgment (Karmic or Abrahamic), to not stick your ignorant nose into the Iranian Revolution.

The people of Iran want to remove the yoke of this EVIL REGIME masqurading as God's Government on Earth. Let that outlandish and ludicrous pretention sink in before you get up to be a useful idiot for the Islamic Republic occupying Iran, ok?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When did CF do this?

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.

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.

> 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

> 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

> 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?

[dead]

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.

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.

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.

a great many countries ban satellite phones too.

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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?

> Any source for this?

Ever heard about Chat Control and CSAM?

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

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

The one you just summarized perfectly.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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 -_(--)_-

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.

Who am i scoring a cheap shot on? ICE?