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Activists are Designing Mesh Networks to Deploy During Civil Unrest (www.vice.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@midwest.social
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[–] 1 point 1 year ago

I recently started using Meshtastic because of similar concerns. There are many advantages to mesh networks where there is no central infrastructure.

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    [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Relevant but that article is from 2021.

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    [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Reticulum network.

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    28 comments in c/technology@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 34 points 1 year ago (18 children)

    Sadly from October 2021, their site seems to be offline

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  • [–] 47 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    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/

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I LOVE Meshtastic!

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Are you familiar with Briar?

    Works over internet, TOR, local wifi, bluetooth, even "sneakernet".

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    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.

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    • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Reticulum network

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    • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    To be fair, given what lengths the police will go to messing with protesters, would anybody trust some random mesh network?

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  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It could go either way. The benefit of faking an activist mesh network is tracking and surveillance for later retaliation.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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”.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    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.

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