One missing feature: deferred message propagation. As far as I understand, while messages will be rebroadcast until a TTL is exhausted, there is no mechanism to retain in-transit messages and retransmit them to future peers. While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage.
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.
I’ve read all the posts and, as the 'old man of the village', I would suggest taking a look at FidoNet. It was running 40 years ago, for more than a decade, before the internet was available to the average person.
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.
FidoNet has a lot of it solved, for sure. But doesn't it rely upon pre-configured paths between nodes in order to handle message routing?
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?
I don’t take concepts as a 'full package'. I evaluate what is worth taking based on the requirements. The brilliant part of FidoNet is the asynchronous persistence.
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.
Thanks for posting - this is really interesting. An idea perhaps whose time may have come. Out of interest (no criticism implied) but do/have you use this tech? and if so what was your experience?
I never actually used Fidonet. I started on BBS systems just as the internet was becoming affordable, and I made the switch early.
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).
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.
It's funny how 3 or 4 similar BLE systems each are slightly different, and yet no one wants to just merge all the features for an obviously superior product. Everyone seems fine squabbling about which incomplete app/system is better.
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)
Bitchat does work with Meshtastic as of the most recent release. It also lets you self host a relay, because it uses Nostr relays. I'm not so sure about white/black listing so yours DOES get used, but you can absolutely host one. Routing through the Internet is something both Bitchat and Briar support, Briar through tor, Bitchat through Nostr (optionally also through tor). Disabling Internet routing at this time may require turning off Internet for Bitchat -- haven't dug on that one.
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.
> 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.
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?
Lack of retention can actually be a feature in these types of situations. It should be opt-in. The government would actually need to infiltrate the network in order to read the conversations, instead of just retrieving the messages from the cache on a confiscated phone
I'd consider end-to-end encryption to also be table-stakes, at least opportunistically after the first message in each direction. With encryption cached messages are far less harmful (though still leaking very useful metadata), without encryption it seems almost trivial to spy on any communications
E2E encryption probably isn’t enough to protect activists trying to organize. Without doing onion routing where you pre-compute some nodes it in the network that it MUST transit prior to delivery and having them decrypt it until it arrives to the recipient (like Tor) you still leak who’s talking to who.
Neither E2EE or Tor are enough to protect someone being targeted by state level actors. They're helpful, but if you're a high enough value target, they only slow down your adversary. If you're relying on algorithms on your computer to protect you, you should be prepared to meet the hacking wrench. [1]
If the political environment gets bad enough, you may expect to die anyway, and the TTL difference that obfuscation provides means the difference between making a small improvement before the inevitable, or not.
If the user can get immediate access to older messages then normally those messages will be available on a confiscated phone. That's why things like Signal have you set a retention period. A retention period of zero (message is gone when it scrolls off the screen) is safest.
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.
>At its core, BitChat leverages the Noise Protocol Framework (specifically, the XX pattern) to establish mutually authenticated, end-to-end encrypted sessions between peers.
I actually wrote a Noise implementation and someone wanted to make a Bitchat implementation with it, but my impl only supports BLAKE2B (and I got the impression this person really didn't know what they wanted to do in the first place). It's kinda sad more haven't moved to BLAKE2B (or BLAKE3, which I almost never hear anyone talking about).
Not just deferred message propagation, but also a way to setup medium to high powered rebroadcasting stations. For political unrest scenarios, you don't always need 2-way communication, but you do need to distribute critical info. A listen-only mode makes it very difficult to track individual users (no RF transmissions), and would cover a large percentage of a critical use case.
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.
iOS definitely made a name for itself to the ire of many for this many moons ago, but it's a fairly ubiquitous default behavior for mobile phone operating systems now (because battery life) even on android
It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission. This is a choice our governments have made, not something inherent to the technology.
I’ve been tangentially involved in experimenting with Meshtastic and trying to scale it for large events like Burning Man, on the order of 2000–3000 nodes on a single frequency.
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.
On the other hand a "high powered repeater" for Meshtastic is just the same board with a bigger more optimised antenna.
You can get solar powered ones for under 100€ and slap them wherever you want pretty easily. (But please don't unless you know what you're doing, adding useless router nodes makes the network worse, not better)
Of course there's no reason to use a mesh when infrastructure is available. That's not why a mesh would be useful. But it doesn't even need to be a mesh to be a useful feature. Walkie talkies aren't a mesh and they remain useful.
A small USB pluggable module that supports LoRa plus an app using Codec2 or similar low rate codec for voice encoding could fill the gap, although having it bundled with the phone would make it a lot less cumbersome to use. For non phone portable solutions, the LilyGo T-Deck Plus/Pro come to mind, but they're not phones so that would imply a 2nd device to carry around.
But needs towers, which in some disaster situations could be not working, or in others simply not trustworthy. If 5G phones radio modules were modified to allow point to point communication, the usable range would still be a small fraction of what is attainable with towers and their high gain antenna arrays.
The issue with this is that the entire architecture trades energy consumption on the eNodeB side for the handset side. One could make a cell phone where one handset was the eNB and one the handset (and, contrary to the parent post’s claim, there would be no issue getting this approved in an ISM band), but the one operating in eNB mode would have atrocious battery life.
It also helps a lot to have one side of the transmission up on a tower with a giant high gain antenna :)
> Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission.
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.
Wow, you're right, data is technically allowed on FRS frequencies. I didn't realize that. It's not unrestricted though. There are a lot of regulations that constrain how FRS radios can work, much more than for 2.4 Ghz.
You might have conflated the prohibition on encrypted/coded communication with a blanket ban on data vs. voice. Those frequencies are supposed to be used for public communication, which has been interpreted as a requirement that anyone can listen in (as opposed to any member of the public privately communicating with any other member). See 47 CFR Part 95, plain language voice communication.
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.
There's also a slice of ISM spectrum available around 900-930 MHz in the US, and Europe has an equivalent one around 860 MHz, which is where the (unfortunately discontinued) Gotenna consumer device used to operate.
Happened to my Iridium satellite messenger (for peace of mind when hiking) too... Fortunately, there are several consumer/civilian alternatives to these.
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.
It's unfortunate, GoTenna was (still is) pretty cool. Beartooth is similar and you can just buy them, but they unfortunately still have military-level pricing for what is pretty simple hardware.
Though in their defense, I'm not sure GoTenna was ever "popular." Probably not enough to pay the bills, given their pivot.
It isn't a law thing, but I'm disappointed that LTE Direct didn't go anywhere. That let's cell phone talk to each other over range up a km. The problem is that there LTE Direct requires implementation in the radio firmware, and the companies only did it for government phones. There is also 5G Device-to-Device and I haven't found out if that is supported more widely. There would also need to be frequency allocation, something CBRS (3.5GHz) would work but would be nice to get something with longer range.
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.
It's a business model thing, which seems to supplant law these days. Can't meter P2P. Intermediation to prevent usurpation of network effects is the name of the game in the modern day. No one will say that, but it's the quiet part left explicitly unsaid. The negative space of the incentive structure, if you will.
Will the walkie talkies work if there are hundreds in a small area all transmitting data with each other? Besides, there's just not that much bandwidth there.
The smartphone is just an advanced walkie-talkie, currently limited only by the mobile operator, the law, the radio chipset, and the OS.
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.
Not disagreeing with you, but you’re papering over a lot of complexity.
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.
I was pushing on the walkie-talkie case to gain the maximum results from existing phones, that's a true emergency case.
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).
> 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.
This is fascinating. Happy to do the research myself, but do you have any recommended reading/sources to learn more about this?
I'm glad you find it interesting. I developed the theory at university, studying how ASK and FSK modems work. To build this, you’ll need to understand the Shannon-Hartley theorem, band-pass filtering, Fourier transforms, and convolution.
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.
The smartphone is talking to a highly sensitive receiver fed by a large sensitive antenna listening carefully in the direction of the smartphone. The base station is transmitting back a carefully directed beam with orders of magnitude more power than a smartphone. The system is highly asymmetrical. Ohh and maybe there is not one but many base stations talking concurrently to the smartphone so that if one looses some data the flow is maintained.
Walkie talkies as licensed today wouldn't because they are required by law to use exclusively stone-age radio technology. But modern unlicensed radio technology is incredibly good at sharing scarce 2.4 Ghz spectrum. Sometimes devices do interfere with each other, but they remain useful and they are far better at sharing than any expert would have predicted years ago. Let the radio engineers try.
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.
> RF attenuation is proportional to frequency and at 2.4 GHz, it is very high.
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).
> Through building materials, foliage etc, but not in free space/line-of-sight.
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.
No, attenuation in vacuum is exactly the same, and the difference between humid air, dry air, and vacuum doesn't really matter at frequencies below a few GHz.
> 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?
> With the same antenna size, the path loss is exactly the same.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is great on paper until some jackass wants to access their home NAS over the public frequency range so they can watch anime all day at their desk, which only works when they use multiple channels at once.
There are tons of cool things society could enjoy if it wasn't for a small handful of shameless actors.
Or even better, where is the tech that can do this disregarding the law? Let's not act that something being illegal never stopped it from achieving mass adoption.
Well obviously cell phones have very powerful tx/rx so my question would be "what is stopping us from using this for p2p", I assume the answer is we don't have software access to the radio, and I assume that's for regulatory reasons but idk
That's not actually true: cell phone rx/tx power is quite low. We can get away with that because all they need to do is get to the nearest tower, which has a ton of power, sensitive antennas, and is very tall. Amateur radios have far more power available to them, but any "p2p" (i.e. simplex in amateur radio) runs into normal RF issues, like obstacles and interference. If you used the existing radios in cell phones to communicate directly with other cell phones, you wouldn't get very far. Even amateur radios, with all their power, use repeaters to the same effect as cell towers.
Many WiFi chips can be put into monitor mode (process all the data packets it can detect over the air) and inject packets for transmissions themselves. This pathway is typically unoptimized and would offer poor bandwidth but it is enough for text and audio.
You would need root to do this, and implement your own protocol on top of it with forward error correcting codes.
Personally, the additional complexity and overheads required for a P2P phone network is not worth while and I'm not sure it would fix that many problems that haven't already been fixed with walkie talkies.
It’s not “too hard”. It’s physically impossible without regulation. There is but one limited RF spectrum that we all share. One bad actor (intentional or misconfigured) can render the entire RF spectrum in their area unusable. The radius of their impact only depends on how much kWHs they have access to and it doesn’t take much to cripple radio communication in a large metropolitan area.
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.
Theoretically people could cripple RF comms on accident, in reality that almost never happens despite many people possessing devices able to do so. My mikrotik router will let me broadcast all sorts of illegal signals with a few clicks inside their GUI, and yet I never heard about problems with people crippling city blocks with bad router settings. Or from their weird microwave setups. Or trying to run and operate some dilapidated 60 year old radios.
That’s because almost any legal to sell consumer device gets an FCC certification. It can still cause interference, but within limited parameters that significantly limit the blast radius. Most of the interference people experience will be very limited and almost exclusively due to misconfigured or defective devices. Ham operators run into this occasionally and if memory serves correctly, there was a chapter in the ham license exam about how to identify potential bad RF source and how to handle it (the FCC usually recommend politely letting the person with a bad transmitter know that their TV antenna or generator or whatever is causing RF interference before you involve the authorities as most people who encounter this are simply unaware)
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.
> 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.
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.
If you’re saying “phones can’t replace VHF radios or repeaters for reliable long-range comms”, agreed. Nobody disputes antenna theory, and nobody is arguing for unregulated or high-power transmitters.
But if you’re saying “because of those limits, phone-native p2p shouldn’t exist at all”, that conclusion does not follow. Limited range and imperfect reliability still permit real, local, best-effort use cases, several of which have already been raised in this thread.
The point is precisely to fill the gaps, so phones aren’t completely useless when you can’t reach a cell tower and don’t have an HT handy. Most people will never carry radio gear, but will have a phone on them when something goes wrong.
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...
They _can_, they're just not allowed to. It's a tradeoff, they can use higher transmission frequencies than regular folk, but also have to do it in the open.
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.
1) LTE frequencies are in the frequency intervals 600—900Mhz, or over the Ghz. Higher frequency means smaller antennas.
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
> In rural areas and using low frequencies, I believe they can even be larger than GSM.
In Europe GSM is going to be dismantled. And techniques like beamforming and radio resource management reduce the power consumption for 5G base station and phones.
> 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.
Even if 5G is using more advanced modulations like OFDMA or NONA, the concept is the same if you compare the with FM used by walkie talkie: those are modulations way more effective in term of energy and information effiency than a traditional FM transmission
> Its soaring popularity highlights how decentralised technology can offer a vital communication lifeline during natural disasters. Its soaring popularity demonstrates how decentralised tools can provide a critical communication lifeline when natural disasters knock out traditional infrastructure.
This feels like something Apple should do with iPhones.
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.
Unfortunately iPhones aren't ubiquitous outside their home market. It would have to be on Android to be really useful in the places this would be really useful, i.e. places where regimes turn off the internet when things go badly for them (current situation in the US notwithstanding).
That's not to say iPhones shouldn't have it, I'm all for that.
Sure, that is still millions of devices. What about other countries?
Home market would imply one country, but given there are billions of iOS/Apple devices throughout the world, this is not really a valid argument to make.
I mean yeah technically you can buy them pretty much everywhere, but outside of the US there are very few countries where they're above 50% of market share. They're below 30% in the vast majority of countries actually
Idk that there's much of a privacy sell vs. messages being encrypted. In the end users are just trusting Apple to actually be securing messages; they aren't going to love that they are trusting dozens of strangers instead of telecoms. Plus, police etc. already snoop on phones by spoofing cell tower relays anyway.
> 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.
The US, and likely Chinese, government(s) have too much potential leverage over Apple. I wouldn't trust that Apple would do this securely, or that the government would allow them to release it.
Sure. But if you have a semi reliable way of getting messages to loved ones either through the distributed net completely or using a satellite hop somewhere, then you have captured a big chunk of what people really want. When you are at home you can just use your WiFi.
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.
I doubt the equities analysts would appreciate this as much as a tech nerd would. It'd be seen as a step backwards and evidence of having no clue which way the world is heading.
Indeed, it's immature to disclose an opinion without being forthcoming and add some objective rationale behind a bold conclusion as disliking an entire person. It may be something they said, or did, getting specific would help, ideally something that is relevant to the original thread. It's not entirely helpful and potentially a negative impact to just imply you don't like someone. Do what you want obviously, that's my 2 cents.
It is a disease of modern (social) media and personal branding. People also now broadly think that an ad-hominem (attacking the person behind an argument, not the argument) is good argumentative style. I don't know about Jack Dorsey other then he founded twitter, and I don't care much about him. If there is a product, I will evaluate that product by my catalogue, not whether I like or dislike a person.
You are making assumptions about a future that hasn't happened yet. It is open-source, so whatever move the person might do in the future, you can fork it anytime.
I suppose the community around a product is also a reason to bring up an influential character's character. You can't fork the community, only fragment it. "I don't want to join a club with that guy in it" is a time when an ad hominem becomes a valid argument.
It is a self-fullfilling prophecy. If the community would adopt the style of not juding the person but only the product, that community would not care for that person. So the "I don't want to join a club with purpose X because of guy Y" leads to the problem that you are describing. If everybody would just "I join the club because of its purpose X achieved by means Z", that community split won't happen.
You can fork, but will you want to fork and spend time and effort, potentially in huge amounts, on that fork?
There are reasons to be wary. Choosing an alternative, where that particular reason for forking might not exist, is a valid choice to make.
Thinking that good reputation in a law translates to a good lawyer is just as mature as thinking that a bad reputation translates to a bad lawyer, just two sides of the same coin. Credibility can be so cruel, it can make a brilliant mathematician like Terry Tao preemptively decline to read your mathematical arguments basically forever.
In both cases I think these may be characteristics of healthy judgment.
Obviously because he was one of the architects of the censorship regime of the late 2010s and early 2020s that nearly changed the internet into a three-letter-agency controlled space. If that isn't a risk for a censorship-resistant app, I don't know what is.
I personally don't care if its bitchat or briar, I care about the most effective proven implementation in the end. Such a technology is needed now, not later, and if if bitchat started out as dorseys vibe coded side project last year and has now grown into something greater, then so be it.
That's probably because AFAIK Apple doesn't allow process forking, making any Tor-based messenger almost impossible to run as Tor would have to run as part of the main thread.
>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.
Similar? Very different. The HKmap.live app was build and marketed directly for the protests. It tracked social media and geolocated where the police and protests were happening, etc. This is a big distinction.
I agree, enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. The mere presence of a potentially-cancellable person poisons the entire tech stach, regardless of any other merits. If I were to use such technology I would risk becoming morally tainted by JD's potential-objectionableness, a social risk I am entirely unwilling to take. I simply cannot endorse such technology that is not fully sanctioned by the High Table of Moral Certification & Transactional Stamp Duty. I must therefore distance myself from any such endorsements and withdraw my support regardless of whatever so-called "technological" merits such technology may claim.
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.
Could someone please explain in what situation do you use a BlueTooth messaging app? Like, even BT5 range won't exceed 400 meters. What good is this? You're not going to send images to journalists from protests with it (you'd do wisely to keep it in airplane mode until you get home and then you'd upload them to their securedrop or whatever), and you don't need off-band security to let the kids know it's dinner time.
Bluetooth 5 introduced "coded PHY", which allows ranges of over 1 km in ideal conditions. As I understand it, adding support for this wouldn't even require new hardware for most recent phones.
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.
Huh I didn't know about that. Seems like it uses 8 symbols per bit to increase the range (but I would very seriously doubt you ever get close to 1km except in super ideal "both in a field in the middle of nowhere" scenarios that never actually happen.
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.
Regular Bluetooth already has 100 m of range, at least for class 1 devices like most Apple devices. (Many older/non-Apple devices are class 2, which only does roughly 10 m. Very noticeable difference in an office environment using headphones.)
One of these bluetooth messaging app was made by a developer who was on a cruise ship with family, and the Internet over satellite costs an arm and leg. So he wrote an app to communicate with his families over bluetooth.
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.
Yeah I can imagine a jam-packed cruise ship might be useful provided the signal propagates from deck to another (unlikely), but it's quite a niché use case.
>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.
If your message goes though my infrastructure I can shut it down when I feel like it but even if I really don't want to do that I still might be forced by other parties commercial, private and state owned.
You shouldn't need any kind of permission to send a picture to your mum sitting next to you on the sofa.
I remember a different app thats was used on e.g. festivals where the local broadcast cells where overwhelmed when a quite rural area suddenly had to server 50000 to 100000 additional people and 3g and 4G basically stopped working. I think it was called Firechat or something.
Went down that rabbit hole a while ago. iOS works fine, but think they may have discontinued ad-hoc, or at least on macOS. Android has a bit issue with ad-hoc hot spot at that time. [1] But theoretically it should be able to do that.
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
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.
I once wrote an article detailing as many prepper uses for an offline phone as I could think of. Dozens of offline apps useful for a survival situation. My favorite might be ATAK, which is from the US military and allows a team to communicate encrypted over Wi-Fi or radios, completely offline. Share GPS coords, camera feeds, messages, map markers, all kinds of goodness.
And if nothing else, you can always rupture the battery and start a fire :-)
The fact the even simple encryption with walkie-talkies is basically illegal might be problem (though I have no idea how/if that applies to at-sea ships).
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 :)
> Just get off your ass and go and give them the message...
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?
Any situation when mobile internet cannot be used. That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings, i.e. street concerts, or places where mobile coverage is poor in general.
That depends on where your live (and when), but: Protest is the cornerstone of democracy and in general you shouldn't need permission to organize a demonstration.
I prefer voting. I find protests annoying. They're a good way for people to let off steam, hang out with friends, get photos for the international press etc. but they're not the right mechanism for finding out what the people want.
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.
Protests can serve as an implied threat if the government is gaming the election process. They're certainly preferable to a riot or a coup attempt in that scenario.
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.
Everyone prefers voting.. But to be able to vote, a vote must be happening. Protests are sometimes the only way to make a vote happen in the first place.
They are also a good communication tool for the world to see what the people are struggling with.
Name three currently existing democracies. USA is out (protests illegal), Europe is out (protests require registration which is denied for anything that has a risk of effecting change), the Middle East and Asia are out for obvious reasons. Maybe there's a democracy somewhere in Africa?
but the internet is for talking to people across the globe. and the app presents itself as an alternative for internet based apps. the reality is however that in any place where i can't use the internet, this app does not really solve that problem. it is only useful in situations where in most cases the alternative is talking face to face. it's not any situation where the internet can't be used, but just some of them. there certainly are good use cases for local communication, cases where face to face is just out of reach and many of these use cases are currently served with internet based apps too. but it's not an alternative to internet based apps per se.
The Internet is _not_ for talking to people across the globe. The Internet allows that, but not only that - one can have a Whatsapp chat with someone in the same bus, this is both legal and technically possible.
The bitchat app serves the niche where talking face to face is not an option and talking across the globe is not needed. And the app explicitly states "infrastructure independence" as one of its design goals: "the network remains functional during internet outages", which cannot be served by internet-based apps by design.
The Internet is _not_ for talking to people across the globe. The Internet allows that, but not only that - one can have a Whatsapp chat with someone in the same bus, this is both legal and technically possible.
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.
I believe bitchat can also use the wider internet to exchange messages. So it is an app that can use either the internet or various other more local options. That seems like a desirable improvement to me.
Hey if anyone wants know exactly what Iranian state TV spews every day on national TV, look no further. Very faithful to the source material. Totally trustworthy.
Ah yes, of course it's entirely America's fault Iran's citizens are revolting against the despotic theocratic regime currently in power. Because surely nobody would organically want regime change when the ayatollah is such a nice guy. Better cut off internet access to the entire country, can't have our citizens reading that terrorist propaganda. They can get all their information from reliable sources instead, like our state-sponsored TV stations.
For the audience: I had never heard of Brian Berletic previously. In an attempt to understand what this person's undisclosed conflicts of interest were, I found numerous reports of him painting the Myanmar Junta in a positive light:
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.
Consider if you live in Gaza. Israel has destroyed all the telecoms equipment across the Gaza strip (and everything else). You were ordered to leave your home by Israeli soldiers, but now the school you're sheltering in is being bombed. You may need to leave, but you believe there may be sniper drones outside.
- 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
In theory if as many people use bitchat as used whatsapp somewhere like central london, everyone actually could communicate in a fully decentralised manner - you're frequently in bluetooth range of other people's phones just walking around or even sat in your house.
Would that actually happen? No, but it's an interesting thought experiment
So other users are broadcasting messages of third parties onwards? How many devices does it take to saturate the channel? What does this do for phone battery?
Yes, but messages can be encrypted so relaying parties can't read them. And yes, it would have an effect on battery and have very limited bandwidth compared to whatsapp (no sharing videos etc).
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.
Sorry I should be clearer: I think it actually might be feasible in a high population density area and if everyone uses it, but because of the limited range of bluetooth you really do need a high density of active nodes for it to work reliably.
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
There's no reason a mesh network can't use an internet connection as a transport when it's available. Moreover a P2P capable mesh can even make use of a centralized server in such scenarios. At the end of the day it's "just" a message routing and delivery problem.
When I enable WiFi calling on my phone that doesn't preclude it connecting to a cell tower.
The use cases stem from groups needing coordination in roughly the same area, with no internet. Disaster recovery efforts fit this exactly:
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.
There are yes for Meshtastic. This map seems to have the highest coverage of people sharing their nodes, but in reality in my area there are significantly more which are not shown on the map.
Absolutely, from Amsterdam I can sometimes hop all the way into Germany, The Hague, Haarlem. That doesn't mean my messages will always travel that far. Far from it, but it does mean that an identification message _has_ made it from there. On average there's around 80-100 nodes that I can connect to.
I remember reading that men and women in Saudi Arabia are forbidden from interacting directly in a bar setting. So instead they were using Bluetooth to covertly connect and communicate.
I sometimes wonder if we couldn't have completely different public internet topologies if
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.
It's simpler than that. The only thing that would need to change is spectrum allocation. We need unlicensed spectrum with higher power limits in longer range radio bands. It's a miracle what radio engineers have done with a tiny slice of unlicensed spectrum near 2.4 Ghz. Imagine what they could do with a few unlicensed lower frequency VHF/UHF channels.
I think "wired" (really bundles of optical fiber) will win out anyway due to the vast capacities it can provide. There will always be gaps between populations and to have a reliable link, you will need these dedicated mainlines, which will also help scale datacenters. Perhaps we would have more p2p tools, but the public internet would have a similar topology too if it were to have a similar capacity.
This has released tags since back to July 2025. Does anyone know if it's being actively used to exfiltrate news from Iran right now? (if someone's been living under a rock: [1][2])
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.
Meshtastic + budget kit ($10-$35) is way better. BlueTooth alone is kind of useless. It's max ~100 meters/yards vs 2-20 km (12 miles). And the community is great.
Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations).
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)
Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4
The nearest Meshtastic and Meshcore nodes to me are 20 km away over hilly granite terrain.
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.
What are good file transfer apps that can be used in similar scenarios? (to be clear about the usage model: communications on a plane)
* 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)
Unfortunately most P2P wireless solutions are likely to be somewhat buggy, at least in my experience. WiFi and Bluetooth chipsets are often "quirky". I will often lose the ability to ssh into my laptop across WiFi until I go to the laptop and poke the network from it. KDEConnect often temporarily loses sight of my phone, yet it still reports being connected to WiFi. Stuff like that.
My fantasy is a P2P network that people can use from their everyday devices. The internet is becoming far too controlled, we need an alternative that is harder to monitor and censor.
Depends what your requirements are. For example, if you don't mind latency and can stay within 100m of the nearest node you can use wifi hosted on phones.
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.
I don't think Meshtatic, or any Lora-based solutions operating in regulated spectrum, works in practice for chat while also abiding by the rules. In Europe (868MHz) and the US (915MHz) the transmissions allowed are so restricted that while you may send alerts you can't really "chat" and even less so in a group chat.
We did an evaluation on Bitchat as we had also built our own and needed to choose whether to continue with it or look at Bitchat instead. In the end, after the evaluation we chose Bitchat. See more here https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messag...
My verdict is negative: BT has too limited a range. Can you communicate in a crowd? Yes, sure, the density of BT hosts can be very high, but can you imagine a crowd in the street communicating via messages instead of face-to-face? Can it handle communications for an entire city of a few million people with useful overhead? I strongly doubt it.
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 regime in Iran has so much to hide it's unlikely that they will enable unsupervised international communication ever again. Other countries don't seem ready to do anything about it.
choosing to build an application on top of bluetooth is like saying, "we've constructed a highway over the most stable terrain known to man: volcanic marshes prone to seasonal flooding."
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)
It's a neat concept, but in critical scenarios where you are trying to distribute information because traditional wireless methods are down, methods like this can make it easy for users to be targeted via RF transmissions.
Hard to imagine things like this getting much beyond the "cute" stage.
The project is interesting, the concept too, the idea of indipendent communication tools also.
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.
but for that to work, you need to attach an antenna, no? and where do i get such an FM transmitter? AND android does not support it in the software level, and there's no protocol for the waves?
To have an FM receiver work on a phone, you do need an antenna, the wired headphones serve that purpose perfectly. An FM transmitter is easy to find; you can use the simple 'Jack-to-FM' adapters designed for car radios, or much better, a USB SDR (which can range from a few kHz to GHz).
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.
It depends on which step of the staircase, from pure hardware to pure software, you want to position yourself. Some projects require staying closer to the metal, while others can be purely software. I move up and down this staircase depending on the specific requirements.
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.
Reading some comments, people do not understand.....
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.
Jack Dorsey is definitely a smart guy, I believe there is a big reason behind it. I wish he will surprise us to make it capable global communication. But my question is how long it will take to work it for a long distance?
I think he’s just a guy who got a lot of money who can pay people to implement his sometimes weird, sometimes useful, often ill-conceived obsession with decentralization and a very lame version of “freedom”.
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.
Why are these apps on bluetooth? I'm surprised no one has come up with a way to transmit data over local ad hoc wifi networks, it must surely be more simple if you could make some sort of transient hot spot
Bluetooth works most reliably across all devices (within its limited range), but all these p2p apps are indeed moving towards multi-transport support to diversify and widen the connectivity grid: https://hackmd.io/@grjte/bitchat-wifi-aware
The problem with the App Store model is that the app could just be switched off by the powers that be. It would be better if something like this could be built into the OS. If one decentralised use case took off, then there could be other applications, like hosting the internet archive, wikipedia or LLMs, or digital cash. Might need waystations to get into rural areas but it sounds like the best long term way to secure the free internet.
I work at a hospital. I think this could be a really interesting emergency fallback system in the event that there is catastrophic failure of mobile, bleep and WiFi
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.
There are a lot of old and new mobile applications doing this. If there is anyone doing some research in this space, maybe take a look at our "DisruptaBLE" implementation for delay tolerant networking on embedded devices: https://openreview.net/forum?id=xy3Y6cLOV2
Let's all install this and form a fail-safe (if you are in a populated area) and unregulated mesh. I would love to see how far into the Amazonas or Greenland it works.
I'd consider this app a proof of concept, with limited practical applications.
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).
is there an actual real good comparison of bitchat vs. briar from all sides? protocols, cryptography, supplychain, which software stack, usability and so on?
I've heard about technology like this for over a decade. Have never encountered a use case (even no coverage at music festivals) where it once became viable.
Love it. Wonder if it's viable for citizen journalism in warzones and areas of civil unrest, with the larger size of photos (and short videos), given the inherently slow transfer rates and battery life implications of going thru multiple hops before Internet-exiting the area that's otherwise Internet-offline. What's the back-of-the-envelope math here on viable bandwidth?
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.
Seeing Jack committing to this repo is kinda wild to me. I also wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
> wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
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 $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
In Taiwan you can be on NHI within 6 months of arrival on certain visas. Once you get permanent residency, you're always eligible so long as you keep making monthly payments, which cap out at around 45$usd/month. NHI makes an MRI cost less than 100$ usd. If you don't have NHI you can pay iirc 300$ for an MRI, 100$ for an emergency room visit with blood draw and IV, maybe ~30$/month for buproprion over the counter.
For Portugal the "free" healthcare is extremely generous to anyone staying there, regardless if citizens or not. It does lose money, but then again Germany always pays the bill.
Salaries are low and equipment/infrastructure is top notch so the overall deficit per year is about a billion EUR, which is the extra they deduct from our taxes and Germoney. Quality and efficiency of "bang per buck" is decent albeit citizens always complain.
Portuguese did run half the world for a couple of centuries, the most spoken language by natives on the southern part of this planet but quite tiresome to deal with all that, now is more like Italy and prefers quality of life.
My health insurance (self employed, high CoL area USA, healthy/not old) is 6k$/yr. Kind of blows up that $18k/yr idea. I don't think it gets that much better if you live in a low CoL area.
> One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive
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.
I thought fuck-you money also included the ability to explore whatever you want in a way that included e.g. hiring a team to explore projects for you as startups?
Also everyone I know with fuck you money already lives in Asia for cost of living reasons, but spends half the year jet setting to various raves and rich people shenanigans in random places like Croatia.
American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.
> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings
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.
One missing feature: deferred message propagation. As far as I understand, while messages will be rebroadcast until a TTL is exhausted, there is no mechanism to retain in-transit messages and retransmit them to future peers. While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage.
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.
I’ve read all the posts and, as the 'old man of the village', I would suggest taking a look at FidoNet. It was running 40 years ago, for more than a decade, before the internet was available to the average person.
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.
FidoNet has a lot of it solved, for sure. But doesn't it rely upon pre-configured paths between nodes in order to handle message routing?
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?
I don’t take concepts as a 'full package'. I evaluate what is worth taking based on the requirements. The brilliant part of FidoNet is the asynchronous persistence.
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.
Yes. There's a lot of things to work out.
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?
In theory, yes. There are now two nodes with the message for H.
In practice? A and H might live in the town and K might be just visiting for business, they might never come back.
It looks like Secure Scuttlebutt may also be relevant here, as it was designed with unreliable networks in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
Thanks for posting - this is really interesting. An idea perhaps whose time may have come. Out of interest (no criticism implied) but do/have you use this tech? and if so what was your experience?
I never actually used Fidonet. I started on BBS systems just as the internet was becoming affordable, and I made the switch early.
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).
that is a super good callout.
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.
It's funny how 3 or 4 similar BLE systems each are slightly different, and yet no one wants to just merge all the features for an obviously superior product. Everyone seems fine squabbling about which incomplete app/system is better.
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)
Bitchat does work with Meshtastic as of the most recent release. It also lets you self host a relay, because it uses Nostr relays. I'm not so sure about white/black listing so yours DOES get used, but you can absolutely host one. Routing through the Internet is something both Bitchat and Briar support, Briar through tor, Bitchat through Nostr (optionally also through tor). Disabling Internet routing at this time may require turning off Internet for Bitchat -- haven't dug on that one.
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.
> 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.
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?
Standards: https://xkcd.com/927/
Lack of retention can actually be a feature in these types of situations. It should be opt-in. The government would actually need to infiltrate the network in order to read the conversations, instead of just retrieving the messages from the cache on a confiscated phone
I'd consider end-to-end encryption to also be table-stakes, at least opportunistically after the first message in each direction. With encryption cached messages are far less harmful (though still leaking very useful metadata), without encryption it seems almost trivial to spy on any communications
E2E encryption probably isn’t enough to protect activists trying to organize. Without doing onion routing where you pre-compute some nodes it in the network that it MUST transit prior to delivery and having them decrypt it until it arrives to the recipient (like Tor) you still leak who’s talking to who.
Neither E2EE or Tor are enough to protect someone being targeted by state level actors. They're helpful, but if you're a high enough value target, they only slow down your adversary. If you're relying on algorithms on your computer to protect you, you should be prepared to meet the hacking wrench. [1]
[1] https://xkcd.com/538/
If the political environment gets bad enough, you may expect to die anyway, and the TTL difference that obfuscation provides means the difference between making a small improvement before the inevitable, or not.
> instead of just retrieving the messages from the cache on a confiscated phone
why wouldn't encryption be a part of recipe here rendering government acquisition of such a cache moot?
If the user can get immediate access to older messages then normally those messages will be available on a confiscated phone. That's why things like Signal have you set a retention period. A retention period of zero (message is gone when it scrolls off the screen) is safest.
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.
From white paper:
>At its core, BitChat leverages the Noise Protocol Framework (specifically, the XX pattern) to establish mutually authenticated, end-to-end encrypted sessions between peers.
I actually wrote a Noise implementation and someone wanted to make a Bitchat implementation with it, but my impl only supports BLAKE2B (and I got the impression this person really didn't know what they wanted to do in the first place). It's kinda sad more haven't moved to BLAKE2B (or BLAKE3, which I almost never hear anyone talking about).
Wasn't BLAKE2s recommended on the Noise mailing list, being faster for low volume messages, even on 64-bit?
> The government would actually need to infiltrate the network in order to read the conversations
If I understand correctly, this would still be true if the recipient is connected.
Not just deferred message propagation, but also a way to setup medium to high powered rebroadcasting stations. For political unrest scenarios, you don't always need 2-way communication, but you do need to distribute critical info. A listen-only mode makes it very difficult to track individual users (no RF transmissions), and would cover a large percentage of a critical use case.
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.
What you are talking about is called “store and forward” [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_and_forward
Is the issue with this that mobile OSs - iOS in particular are rather aggressive about shutting down apps in the background after a while?
iOS definitely made a name for itself to the ire of many for this many moons ago, but it's a fairly ubiquitous default behavior for mobile phone operating systems now (because battery life) even on android
It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission. This is a choice our governments have made, not something inherent to the technology.
I’ve been tangentially involved in experimenting with Meshtastic and trying to scale it for large events like Burning Man, on the order of 2000–3000 nodes on a single frequency.
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.
On the other hand a "high powered repeater" for Meshtastic is just the same board with a bigger more optimised antenna.
You can get solar powered ones for under 100€ and slap them wherever you want pretty easily. (But please don't unless you know what you're doing, adding useless router nodes makes the network worse, not better)
Of course there's no reason to use a mesh when infrastructure is available. That's not why a mesh would be useful. But it doesn't even need to be a mesh to be a useful feature. Walkie talkies aren't a mesh and they remain useful.
A small USB pluggable module that supports LoRa plus an app using Codec2 or similar low rate codec for voice encoding could fill the gap, although having it bundled with the phone would make it a lot less cumbersome to use. For non phone portable solutions, the LilyGo T-Deck Plus/Pro come to mind, but they're not phones so that would imply a 2nd device to carry around.
Yet compared to the 5G radio that can do gigabit speed and 20+ kilometers of range....
But needs towers, which in some disaster situations could be not working, or in others simply not trustworthy. If 5G phones radio modules were modified to allow point to point communication, the usable range would still be a small fraction of what is attainable with towers and their high gain antenna arrays.
The issue with this is that the entire architecture trades energy consumption on the eNodeB side for the handset side. One could make a cell phone where one handset was the eNB and one the handset (and, contrary to the parent post’s claim, there would be no issue getting this approved in an ISM band), but the one operating in eNB mode would have atrocious battery life.
It also helps a lot to have one side of the transmission up on a tower with a giant high gain antenna :)
why does everyone keep suggesting lora for stuff like this? It could support one gsm connection. Not one per person, but one
> Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission.
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...
Wow, you're right, data is technically allowed on FRS frequencies. I didn't realize that. It's not unrestricted though. There are a lot of regulations that constrain how FRS radios can work, much more than for 2.4 Ghz.
You might have conflated the prohibition on encrypted/coded communication with a blanket ban on data vs. voice. Those frequencies are supposed to be used for public communication, which has been interpreted as a requirement that anyone can listen in (as opposed to any member of the public privately communicating with any other member). See 47 CFR Part 95, plain language voice communication.
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.
There's also a slice of ISM spectrum available around 900-930 MHz in the US, and Europe has an equivalent one around 860 MHz, which is where the (unfortunately discontinued) Gotenna consumer device used to operate.
Get bought out by military control grid --> Instantly kill popular consumer devices.
Happened to my Iridium satellite messenger (for peace of mind when hiking) too... Fortunately, there are several consumer/civilian alternatives to these.
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.
It's unfortunate, GoTenna was (still is) pretty cool. Beartooth is similar and you can just buy them, but they unfortunately still have military-level pricing for what is pretty simple hardware.
Though in their defense, I'm not sure GoTenna was ever "popular." Probably not enough to pay the bills, given their pivot.
It isn't a law thing, but I'm disappointed that LTE Direct didn't go anywhere. That let's cell phone talk to each other over range up a km. The problem is that there LTE Direct requires implementation in the radio firmware, and the companies only did it for government phones. There is also 5G Device-to-Device and I haven't found out if that is supported more widely. There would also need to be frequency allocation, something CBRS (3.5GHz) would work but would be nice to get something with longer range.
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.
It's a business model thing, which seems to supplant law these days. Can't meter P2P. Intermediation to prevent usurpation of network effects is the name of the game in the modern day. No one will say that, but it's the quiet part left explicitly unsaid. The negative space of the incentive structure, if you will.
Will the walkie talkies work if there are hundreds in a small area all transmitting data with each other? Besides, there's just not that much bandwidth there.
The smartphone is just an advanced walkie-talkie, currently limited only by the mobile operator, the law, the radio chipset, and the OS.
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.
Not disagreeing with you, but you’re papering over a lot of complexity.
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.
I was pushing on the walkie-talkie case to gain the maximum results from existing phones, that's a true emergency case.
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).
> 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.
This is fascinating. Happy to do the research myself, but do you have any recommended reading/sources to learn more about this?
I'm glad you find it interesting. I developed the theory at university, studying how ASK and FSK modems work. To build this, you’ll need to understand the Shannon-Hartley theorem, band-pass filtering, Fourier transforms, and convolution.
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.
The smartphone is talking to a highly sensitive receiver fed by a large sensitive antenna listening carefully in the direction of the smartphone. The base station is transmitting back a carefully directed beam with orders of magnitude more power than a smartphone. The system is highly asymmetrical. Ohh and maybe there is not one but many base stations talking concurrently to the smartphone so that if one looses some data the flow is maintained.
Since I’m not able to edit my original comment: rm30 is actually referring to something much more interesting than jailbreaking the LTE/NR stack.
> For instance, many chipsets have an integrated FM receiver that is essentially a high-sensitivity VHF radio.
Walkie talkies as licensed today wouldn't because they are required by law to use exclusively stone-age radio technology. But modern unlicensed radio technology is incredibly good at sharing scarce 2.4 Ghz spectrum. Sometimes devices do interfere with each other, but they remain useful and they are far better at sharing than any expert would have predicted years ago. Let the radio engineers try.
It is not as easy as you think.
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.
> RF attenuation is proportional to frequency and at 2.4 GHz, it is very high.
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).
> Through building materials, foliage etc, but not in free space/line-of-sight.
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.
No, attenuation in vacuum is exactly the same, and the difference between humid air, dry air, and vacuum doesn't really matter at frequencies below a few GHz.
> 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?
> With the same antenna size, the path loss is exactly the same.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is great on paper until some jackass wants to access their home NAS over the public frequency range so they can watch anime all day at their desk, which only works when they use multiple channels at once.
There are tons of cool things society could enjoy if it wasn't for a small handful of shameless actors.
Please site the relevant sections of this supposed law you claim exists.
Or even better, where is the tech that can do this disregarding the law? Let's not act that something being illegal never stopped it from achieving mass adoption.
Well obviously cell phones have very powerful tx/rx so my question would be "what is stopping us from using this for p2p", I assume the answer is we don't have software access to the radio, and I assume that's for regulatory reasons but idk
That's not actually true: cell phone rx/tx power is quite low. We can get away with that because all they need to do is get to the nearest tower, which has a ton of power, sensitive antennas, and is very tall. Amateur radios have far more power available to them, but any "p2p" (i.e. simplex in amateur radio) runs into normal RF issues, like obstacles and interference. If you used the existing radios in cell phones to communicate directly with other cell phones, you wouldn't get very far. Even amateur radios, with all their power, use repeaters to the same effect as cell towers.
Sorry by power I meant in terms of capability not like, wattage
Many WiFi chips can be put into monitor mode (process all the data packets it can detect over the air) and inject packets for transmissions themselves. This pathway is typically unoptimized and would offer poor bandwidth but it is enough for text and audio.
You would need root to do this, and implement your own protocol on top of it with forward error correcting codes.
Personally, the additional complexity and overheads required for a P2P phone network is not worth while and I'm not sure it would fix that many problems that haven't already been fixed with walkie talkies.
Not worthwhile? “It’s too hard” isn’t a great argument for why our phones should just become useless during power outages, natural disasters, ..
It’s not “too hard”. It’s physically impossible without regulation. There is but one limited RF spectrum that we all share. One bad actor (intentional or misconfigured) can render the entire RF spectrum in their area unusable. The radius of their impact only depends on how much kWHs they have access to and it doesn’t take much to cripple radio communication in a large metropolitan area.
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.
Theoretically people could cripple RF comms on accident, in reality that almost never happens despite many people possessing devices able to do so. My mikrotik router will let me broadcast all sorts of illegal signals with a few clicks inside their GUI, and yet I never heard about problems with people crippling city blocks with bad router settings. Or from their weird microwave setups. Or trying to run and operate some dilapidated 60 year old radios.
That’s because almost any legal to sell consumer device gets an FCC certification. It can still cause interference, but within limited parameters that significantly limit the blast radius. Most of the interference people experience will be very limited and almost exclusively due to misconfigured or defective devices. Ham operators run into this occasionally and if memory serves correctly, there was a chapter in the ham license exam about how to identify potential bad RF source and how to handle it (the FCC usually recommend politely letting the person with a bad transmitter know that their TV antenna or generator or whatever is causing RF interference before you involve the authorities as most people who encounter this are simply unaware)
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.
> It’s physically impossible without regulation.
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.
> 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.
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.
Then let’s be precise about the claim.
If you’re saying “phones can’t replace VHF radios or repeaters for reliable long-range comms”, agreed. Nobody disputes antenna theory, and nobody is arguing for unregulated or high-power transmitters.
But if you’re saying “because of those limits, phone-native p2p shouldn’t exist at all”, that conclusion does not follow. Limited range and imperfect reliability still permit real, local, best-effort use cases, several of which have already been raised in this thread.
The point is precisely to fill the gaps, so phones aren’t completely useless when you can’t reach a cell tower and don’t have an HT handy. Most people will never carry radio gear, but will have a phone on them when something goes wrong.
Not worthwhile to who?
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...
It’s one less thing to have to buy and carry and charge and configure and remember and get others to do the same.
A alternative example of this is how Apple doesn't have a way to browse your iPhone's gallery without syncing to their super slow iCloud first.
There is nothing stopping a phone manufacturer from putting a 900 MHz ISM radio in their hardware.
Also, the walkie talkies certainly can legally do data transmission.
HAM radios can transmit data I think. They just can't do encrypted transmissions. (I'm open to correction on this.)
They _can_, they're just not allowed to. It's a tradeoff, they can use higher transmission frequencies than regular folk, but also have to do it in the open.
A walkie-talkie requires a big antenna and consume a lot more power than a cellphone.
Both not true.
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.
1) LTE frequencies are in the frequency intervals 600—900Mhz, or over the Ghz. Higher frequency means smaller antennas.
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
> 5G cells are small and very dense
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.
> In rural areas and using low frequencies, I believe they can even be larger than GSM.
In Europe GSM is going to be dismantled. And techniques like beamforming and radio resource management reduce the power consumption for 5G base station and phones.
> 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.
Even if 5G is using more advanced modulations like OFDMA or NONA, the concept is the same if you compare the with FM used by walkie talkie: those are modulations way more effective in term of energy and information effiency than a traditional FM transmission
Check your sources. The law you claim exists… which one is it?
Ham frequencies would work even better?
File this under "lies that someone said on the interwebs."
It's getting movement in tough political environments like Uganda: https://www.archyde.com/bitchat-surges-to-1-in-uganda-amid-p...
And natural disasters like in Jamaica https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becom...
> Its soaring popularity highlights how decentralised technology can offer a vital communication lifeline during natural disasters. Its soaring popularity demonstrates how decentralised tools can provide a critical communication lifeline when natural disasters knock out traditional infrastructure.
seems like the second article is written by AI
This feels like something Apple should do with iPhones.
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.
Unfortunately iPhones aren't ubiquitous outside their home market. It would have to be on Android to be really useful in the places this would be really useful, i.e. places where regimes turn off the internet when things go badly for them (current situation in the US notwithstanding). That's not to say iPhones shouldn't have it, I'm all for that.
Home market for iPhones is the whole world.
In India IOS has 4% of the market share of mobile devices whereas Android has 96%.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/india
Sure, that is still millions of devices. What about other countries?
Home market would imply one country, but given there are billions of iOS/Apple devices throughout the world, this is not really a valid argument to make.
I mean yeah technically you can buy them pretty much everywhere, but outside of the US there are very few countries where they're above 50% of market share. They're below 30% in the vast majority of countries actually
Idk that there's much of a privacy sell vs. messages being encrypted. In the end users are just trusting Apple to actually be securing messages; they aren't going to love that they are trusting dozens of strangers instead of telecoms. Plus, police etc. already snoop on phones by spoofing cell tower relays anyway.
> 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.
The US, and likely Chinese, government(s) have too much potential leverage over Apple. I wouldn't trust that Apple would do this securely, or that the government would allow them to release it.
Apple just gonna disable it for China like any other privacy feature.
Wouldn’t that bring the wrath of mobile carriers around the world on their back?
If there is a decentralised system that doesn’t require infrastructure , what is left to monetise?
> what is left to monetise?
Low latency, high bandwidth
Apple/Google have the financial brawn to push a disrupting technology into more common use. And this is not encumbered by any restrictive licenses.
It really isnt a disrupting technoology. It doesnt work as soon as you are far away from any other humans with phones.
Range? Bandwidth? A solution like that would work only in limited circumstances. It’d be neat but no replacement for cellular.
Sure. But if you have a semi reliable way of getting messages to loved ones either through the distributed net completely or using a satellite hop somewhere, then you have captured a big chunk of what people really want. When you are at home you can just use your WiFi.
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.
Seems extremely niche for a keynote but a lot of the Apple Watch Ultra features seem niche too. Who knows, I guess it could happen.
This has absolutely nothing to do with privacy.
I doubt the equities analysts would appreciate this as much as a tech nerd would. It'd be seen as a step backwards and evidence of having no clue which way the world is heading.
Then Google can copy it with a series of a dozen product launches and closures over the next decade.
Google BT Chat. Android B Chat. Google Relay.
And Microsoft can get on board, too. With Microsoft Teams Decentralised For School and Work.
I don't know. I do not like Jack Dorey's involvement. Not a big fan of his.
I'd rather use Briar (https://briarproject.org/)
If you don't like a thing and share that dislike, care to elaborate your reasoning so others can profit from it?
Indeed, it's immature to disclose an opinion without being forthcoming and add some objective rationale behind a bold conclusion as disliking an entire person. It may be something they said, or did, getting specific would help, ideally something that is relevant to the original thread. It's not entirely helpful and potentially a negative impact to just imply you don't like someone. Do what you want obviously, that's my 2 cents.
It is a disease of modern (social) media and personal branding. People also now broadly think that an ad-hominem (attacking the person behind an argument, not the argument) is good argumentative style. I don't know about Jack Dorsey other then he founded twitter, and I don't care much about him. If there is a product, I will evaluate that product by my catalogue, not whether I like or dislike a person.
But the person controls the product, and the product will continue to develop, so the person's character is relevant to the quality of the product.
You are making assumptions about a future that hasn't happened yet. It is open-source, so whatever move the person might do in the future, you can fork it anytime.
I suppose the community around a product is also a reason to bring up an influential character's character. You can't fork the community, only fragment it. "I don't want to join a club with that guy in it" is a time when an ad hominem becomes a valid argument.
It is a self-fullfilling prophecy. If the community would adopt the style of not juding the person but only the product, that community would not care for that person. So the "I don't want to join a club with purpose X because of guy Y" leads to the problem that you are describing. If everybody would just "I join the club because of its purpose X achieved by means Z", that community split won't happen.
Yes, if the community would not be influenced by the guy, he wouldn't be influential.
You can fork, but will you want to fork and spend time and effort, potentially in huge amounts, on that fork? There are reasons to be wary. Choosing an alternative, where that particular reason for forking might not exist, is a valid choice to make.
No they don't, it's permissionless technology. Read the web site.
Thinking that good reputation in a law translates to a good lawyer is just as mature as thinking that a bad reputation translates to a bad lawyer, just two sides of the same coin. Credibility can be so cruel, it can make a brilliant mathematician like Terry Tao preemptively decline to read your mathematical arguments basically forever.
In both cases I think these may be characteristics of healthy judgment.
Obviously because he was one of the architects of the censorship regime of the late 2010s and early 2020s that nearly changed the internet into a three-letter-agency controlled space. If that isn't a risk for a censorship-resistant app, I don't know what is.
Is this true? My understanding was that Twitter was not really moderated, because of Dorsey?
I personally don't care if its bitchat or briar, I care about the most effective proven implementation in the end. Such a technology is needed now, not later, and if if bitchat started out as dorseys vibe coded side project last year and has now grown into something greater, then so be it.
There’s no app for Apple platforms making it a lot less useful.
That's probably because AFAIK Apple doesn't allow process forking, making any Tor-based messenger almost impossible to run as Tor would have to run as part of the main thread.
It's because iOS needs push notifications to resume background apps, and there's no secure way to do the push notifications
https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#will-t...
but having the bluetooth part working on iOS should not be an issue right?
This is entirely false, Apple allows the use of threads in their applications.
Oh I found a better explanation
>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-...
True but I assume Apple users understand they exclude themselves by demanding a "benevolent dictator" insuring they are "safe".
Apple pulled similar apps from the App Store: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/768841864/after-china-objects...
Similar? Very different. The HKmap.live app was build and marketed directly for the protests. It tracked social media and geolocated where the police and protests were happening, etc. This is a big distinction.
Briar has the advantage of being usable with bluetooth and internet so it makes it much more useful.
Bitchat also has internet based chat, in addition to bluetooth mesh.
How about Berty?
https://berty.tech/features
"Warning: the Android app (including apk) is currently unavailable for download and use due to an ongoing essential security update."
fair point, especially in the west. But looking at the market share, Android is probably the platform to build for, especially if you have an additional phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
Buy a cheap shit android phone for under $100 and never associate it with a SIM
Also why reinventing the wheel? There is already Briar.
There's also Berty https://berty.tech/features/
[dead]
I agree, enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. The mere presence of a potentially-cancellable person poisons the entire tech stach, regardless of any other merits. If I were to use such technology I would risk becoming morally tainted by JD's potential-objectionableness, a social risk I am entirely unwilling to take. I simply cannot endorse such technology that is not fully sanctioned by the High Table of Moral Certification & Transactional Stamp Duty. I must therefore distance myself from any such endorsements and withdraw my support regardless of whatever so-called "technological" merits such technology may claim.
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.
Could someone please explain in what situation do you use a BlueTooth messaging app? Like, even BT5 range won't exceed 400 meters. What good is this? You're not going to send images to journalists from protests with it (you'd do wisely to keep it in airplane mode until you get home and then you'd upload them to their securedrop or whatever), and you don't need off-band security to let the kids know it's dinner time.
Bluetooth 5 introduced "coded PHY", which allows ranges of over 1 km in ideal conditions. As I understand it, adding support for this wouldn't even require new hardware for most recent phones.
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.
Huh I didn't know about that. Seems like it uses 8 symbols per bit to increase the range (but I would very seriously doubt you ever get close to 1km except in super ideal "both in a field in the middle of nowhere" scenarios that never actually happen.
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.
It falls quite close to the "super ideal scenarios" you described, but Nordic did a real world test and got a range of 1300 m using coded phy.
https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/pos...
Interesting, so it roughly doubles the range. So we might be looking at like 50-100 m in the real world I guess.
Regular Bluetooth already has 100 m of range, at least for class 1 devices like most Apple devices. (Many older/non-Apple devices are class 2, which only does roughly 10 m. Very noticeable difference in an office environment using headphones.)
One of these bluetooth messaging app was made by a developer who was on a cruise ship with family, and the Internet over satellite costs an arm and leg. So he wrote an app to communicate with his families over bluetooth.
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.
On a similar situation, someone try Meshtastic and it works great
https://old.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1qd2z97/mestast...
I doubt that BLE can propagate well over a cruise ship.
Yeah I can imagine a jam-packed cruise ship might be useful provided the signal propagates from deck to another (unlikely), but it's quite a niché use case.
>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.
> Why would that matter?
Reliability? Why should we want to centralize things unnecessarily? It's nice as a fallback but then so too is P2P.
If your message goes though my infrastructure I can shut it down when I feel like it but even if I really don't want to do that I still might be forced by other parties commercial, private and state owned.
You shouldn't need any kind of permission to send a picture to your mum sitting next to you on the sofa.
I remember a different app thats was used on e.g. festivals where the local broadcast cells where overwhelmed when a quite rural area suddenly had to server 50000 to 100000 additional people and 3g and 4G basically stopped working. I think it was called Firechat or something.
Still, wouldn't a wifi meshnet be a better choice for these scenario's?
Went down that rabbit hole a while ago. iOS works fine, but think they may have discontinued ad-hoc, or at least on macOS. Android has a bit issue with ad-hoc hot spot at that time. [1] But theoretically it should be able to do that.
https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/28551/why-cant-a...
Can that be setup on a phone?
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.
On a cruise ship, isn't the cheap walkie talkies still a thing? Or did those die with cell phones?
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).
> For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless
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.
I once wrote an article detailing as many prepper uses for an offline phone as I could think of. Dozens of offline apps useful for a survival situation. My favorite might be ATAK, which is from the US military and allows a team to communicate encrypted over Wi-Fi or radios, completely offline. Share GPS coords, camera feeds, messages, map markers, all kinds of goodness.
And if nothing else, you can always rupture the battery and start a fire :-)
And of course you can now run local LLMs on your phone as well.
Prepper J.A.R.V.I.S. :-)
The fact the even simple encryption with walkie-talkies is basically illegal might be problem (though I have no idea how/if that applies to at-sea ships).
Well, it's not illegal per se.
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 :)
The boat could do a captive portal and provide it's own LAN?
The boat could do a lot of things, but providing tech for free is not high on the list.
This is definitely a thing (though sometimes comes with a fee): https://www.cruisecritic.com/articles/texting-on-a-cruise-7-...
It's a cruiseship. Your family are at the nearest bar. Just get off your ass and go and give them the message.
> Just get off your ass and go and give them the message...
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?
This seems a bit reductive. You could use this argument for any small town
It was how things were for a long time, and in a lot of ways it was better.
I've checked, they're not there. Now what?
Tell them to install bitchat. How to deliver the message to them is left as an exercise to the reader.
I just realised the name works very well if you choose the appropriate word splitting position.
Any situation when mobile internet cannot be used. That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings, i.e. street concerts, or places where mobile coverage is poor in general.
> That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings[...]
Oops! You (unintentionally?) make it sound like protests are illegal.
It depends on the country you're in, obviously. I've been to countries where protests are illegal (even 1-man protests with a blank sheet of paper).
In many of the countries where this would be the most useful, protests are illegal.
They are.
That depends on where your live (and when), but: Protest is the cornerstone of democracy and in general you shouldn't need permission to organize a demonstration.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-democracy-exist-witho...
I prefer voting. I find protests annoying. They're a good way for people to let off steam, hang out with friends, get photos for the international press etc. but they're not the right mechanism for finding out what the people want.
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.
Protests can serve as an implied threat if the government is gaming the election process. They're certainly preferable to a riot or a coup attempt in that scenario.
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.
Which is why they're illegal. Governments don't like being threatened.
Just out of curiosity, where is that? Protests are legal in most of the world I think.
Protests are designed to be annoying.n They are supposed to draw attention to issues that lack the needed attention according to protestors.
Voting does not allow to express that a certain issue is politically important to you.
Everyone prefers voting.. But to be able to vote, a vote must be happening. Protests are sometimes the only way to make a vote happen in the first place.
They are also a good communication tool for the world to see what the people are struggling with.
Name three currently existing democracies. USA is out (protests illegal), Europe is out (protests require registration which is denied for anything that has a risk of effecting change), the Middle East and Asia are out for obvious reasons. Maybe there's a democracy somewhere in Africa?
Things like this would make a good hamburger index of freedom.
Or planes.
but i use mobile internet because of the distance. how does bluetooth help with that?
What is your implication? This app is not for talking across the globe with people.
but the internet is for talking to people across the globe. and the app presents itself as an alternative for internet based apps. the reality is however that in any place where i can't use the internet, this app does not really solve that problem. it is only useful in situations where in most cases the alternative is talking face to face. it's not any situation where the internet can't be used, but just some of them. there certainly are good use cases for local communication, cases where face to face is just out of reach and many of these use cases are currently served with internet based apps too. but it's not an alternative to internet based apps per se.
The Internet is _not_ for talking to people across the globe. The Internet allows that, but not only that - one can have a Whatsapp chat with someone in the same bus, this is both legal and technically possible. The bitchat app serves the niche where talking face to face is not an option and talking across the globe is not needed. And the app explicitly states "infrastructure independence" as one of its design goals: "the network remains functional during internet outages", which cannot be served by internet-based apps by design.
The Internet is _not_ for talking to people across the globe. The Internet allows that, but not only that - one can have a Whatsapp chat with someone in the same bus, this is both legal and technically possible.
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.
I believe bitchat can also use the wider internet to exchange messages. So it is an app that can use either the internet or various other more local options. That seems like a desirable improvement to me.
Back in the 2010s I used the 'Notes' applications to send messages via Bluetooth on my Sony Ericsson to chat with a girl in the next bunk.
There was no signal in the remote Irish hostel so it was the perfect way to send messages covertly in the dormitory.
Fun night!
Don't keep us guessing, what did you guys talk about :)
Let's just say that in the end it wasn't just words being exchanged.
In Iran right now... Internet shut down while the regime keeps slaughtering people at the order of 4x9/11.
Internet is exploited by US as a tool for regime change [1] in coordination with sponsored on the ground terrorism. [1]
[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
Hey if anyone wants know exactly what Iranian state TV spews every day on national TV, look no further. Very faithful to the source material. Totally trustworthy.
Ah yes, of course it's entirely America's fault Iran's citizens are revolting against the despotic theocratic regime currently in power. Because surely nobody would organically want regime change when the ayatollah is such a nice guy. Better cut off internet access to the entire country, can't have our citizens reading that terrorist propaganda. They can get all their information from reliable sources instead, like our state-sponsored TV stations.
For the audience: I had never heard of Brian Berletic previously. In an attempt to understand what this person's undisclosed conflicts of interest were, I found numerous reports of him painting the Myanmar Junta in a positive light:
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.
No, the internet is shut down by the islamic regime, not the US!
I think you need to try to get MUCH more video and photo footage out. I heard thousands have been killed.
Consider if you live in Gaza. Israel has destroyed all the telecoms equipment across the Gaza strip (and everything else). You were ordered to leave your home by Israeli soldiers, but now the school you're sheltering in is being bombed. You may need to leave, but you believe there may be sniper drones outside.
- 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
This particular one supports mesh, so the range could be way way higher.
In theory if as many people use bitchat as used whatsapp somewhere like central london, everyone actually could communicate in a fully decentralised manner - you're frequently in bluetooth range of other people's phones just walking around or even sat in your house.
Would that actually happen? No, but it's an interesting thought experiment
So other users are broadcasting messages of third parties onwards? How many devices does it take to saturate the channel? What does this do for phone battery?
Yes, but messages can be encrypted so relaying parties can't read them. And yes, it would have an effect on battery and have very limited bandwidth compared to whatsapp (no sharing videos etc).
Like I said definitely not practical for messaging but I think something along these lines is how airtags work?
> definitely not practical for messaging
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.
Sorry I should be clearer: I think it actually might be feasible in a high population density area and if everyone uses it, but because of the limited range of bluetooth you really do need a high density of active nodes for it to work reliably.
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
There's no reason a mesh network can't use an internet connection as a transport when it's available. Moreover a P2P capable mesh can even make use of a centralized server in such scenarios. At the end of the day it's "just" a message routing and delivery problem.
When I enable WiFi calling on my phone that doesn't preclude it connecting to a cell tower.
True, maybe a hybrid approach could work. That's an interesting idea
I see two use cases: * Communication between protestors * Illegal activities, but here I can imagine that bluetooth range is too small
The use cases stem from groups needing coordination in roughly the same area, with no internet. Disaster recovery efforts fit this exactly:
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.
Is this LoRa BT network thing something that actually exists? Is there a coverage map?
There are yes for Meshtastic. This map seems to have the highest coverage of people sharing their nodes, but in reality in my area there are significantly more which are not shown on the map.
https://meshtastic.liamcottle.net/
Whoa, at the same time it's negligible but also a LOT more than I expected. Thanks!
Absolutely, from Amsterdam I can sometimes hop all the way into Germany, The Hague, Haarlem. That doesn't mean my messages will always travel that far. Far from it, but it does mean that an identification message _has_ made it from there. On average there's around 80-100 nodes that I can connect to.
I remember reading that men and women in Saudi Arabia are forbidden from interacting directly in a bar setting. So instead they were using Bluetooth to covertly connect and communicate.
> Communication between protestors > Illegal activities
Often one and the same since the first thing those in power try to do is make various activities by protestors illegal
This is simply an app that allows to communicate through bluetooth locally. Why are you saying its only two use cases are protesting and criminals?
Im not saying that those are the only use cases, but I really see that there multiple other apps that make the "normal" communication much easier.
I remember when Telegram had a "Nearby" feature. I remember seeing many not-so-legal activities around me, even in the range of 1 km.
Asking "what good is this?" in a dismissive tone should be against the rules in a space like Hacker News.
When your Ayatollah decides to shut down internet and you are near people you don't really know in an urban environment?
I've wanted something like this numerous times for long flights.
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.
I was at a music festival last summer, and the phone network was completely down. I could use BitChat to find my mates.
I have seen a test of bitchat using radio communication over a distance of more than 5 km. There were also other methods to extend BT range.
Now that Wi-Fi Aware is supported on iOS, I think supporting it should significantly expand the transmission range.
I sometimes wonder if we couldn't have completely different public internet topologies if
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.
It's simpler than that. The only thing that would need to change is spectrum allocation. We need unlicensed spectrum with higher power limits in longer range radio bands. It's a miracle what radio engineers have done with a tiny slice of unlicensed spectrum near 2.4 Ghz. Imagine what they could do with a few unlicensed lower frequency VHF/UHF channels.
I think "wired" (really bundles of optical fiber) will win out anyway due to the vast capacities it can provide. There will always be gaps between populations and to have a reliable link, you will need these dedicated mainlines, which will also help scale datacenters. Perhaps we would have more p2p tools, but the public internet would have a similar topology too if it were to have a similar capacity.
Hopefully, the browser Bluetooth API will receive more support (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...). Web-based PWAs are more suitable because apps are subject to app store censorship.
Can PWAs run (and interact with Bluetooth) in the background? Edit: no they can't, so PWA would be not very useful at this.
Could still work in some cases where a certain amount of users are in and out of the website and in proximity e.g. protests
Doesn't help if internet is down.
web apps can work offline
This has released tags since back to July 2025. Does anyone know if it's being actively used to exfiltrate news from Iran right now? (if someone's been living under a rock: [1][2])
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667491
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384
Not sure about bitchat, but Briar is being used in Iran right now. https://byteiota.com/briar-offline-mesh-when-internet-shutdo...
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.
> Briar is being used in Iran right now
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.
Good call, I'd also like to know if this is actually true
Living under the rock of meaningless political theater is not great [1]
[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
Pronouncing this out loud I wonder whether the name has been chosen on purpose for the marketing effect: "Where's my bitchat"
Meshtastic + budget kit ($10-$35) is way better. BlueTooth alone is kind of useless. It's max ~100 meters/yards vs 2-20 km (12 miles). And the community is great.
Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations).
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)
Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4
We are not seeing a correlation between channel saturation and/or alien non-related stations.
IMHO MT has a fundamental algorithmic flaw when it comes to dealing with very unreliable and lossy links.
Sounds good. But there are ~10x fewer nodes in my area :(
The nearest Meshtastic and Meshcore nodes to me are 20 km away over hilly granite terrain.
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.
What are good file transfer apps that can be used in similar scenarios? (to be clear about the usage model: communications on a plane)
* 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)
Unfortunately most P2P wireless solutions are likely to be somewhat buggy, at least in my experience. WiFi and Bluetooth chipsets are often "quirky". I will often lose the ability to ssh into my laptop across WiFi until I go to the laptop and poke the network from it. KDEConnect often temporarily loses sight of my phone, yet it still reports being connected to WiFi. Stuff like that.
This is an interesting enhancement using Meshtastic to expand the range of bitchat https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/discussions/7542
My fantasy is a P2P network that people can use from their everyday devices. The internet is becoming far too controlled, we need an alternative that is harder to monitor and censor.
Depends what your requirements are. For example, if you don't mind latency and can stay within 100m of the nearest node you can use wifi hosted on phones.
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.
I don't think Meshtatic, or any Lora-based solutions operating in regulated spectrum, works in practice for chat while also abiding by the rules. In Europe (868MHz) and the US (915MHz) the transmissions allowed are so restricted that while you may send alerts you can't really "chat" and even less so in a group chat.
Lora has 2.4GHz options.
Does not work without Google Play services. No-go.
We did an evaluation on Bitchat as we had also built our own and needed to choose whether to continue with it or look at Bitchat instead. In the end, after the evaluation we chose Bitchat. See more here https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messag...
Here are original posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485342
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929358
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364146
Finally...a dedicated app to bitch at people.
Now I cannot unsee it...
A bit unfortunate naming, indeed.
A bit like expert sex change.
OMG you're right. I cannot unsee..
Headline made me think of FidoNet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
My verdict is negative: BT has too limited a range. Can you communicate in a crowd? Yes, sure, the density of BT hosts can be very high, but can you imagine a crowd in the street communicating via messages instead of face-to-face? Can it handle communications for an entire city of a few million people with useful overhead? I strongly doubt it.
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.
This would've been useful during the Iran shutdowns last week. Bluetooth mesh is one of the few things that keeps working when carriers go dark.
The regime in Iran has so much to hide it's unlikely that they will enable unsupervised international communication ever again. Other countries don't seem ready to do anything about it.
What happened to that fire chat app that did the same thing back in 2014 or something?
I remember distinctly that the developers said they were working on a next generation version of it and it just never happened.
I think they just ran out of funding and died with a whimper.
choosing to build an application on top of bluetooth is like saying, "we've constructed a highway over the most stable terrain known to man: volcanic marshes prone to seasonal flooding."
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?
What else would they use? This is for when your government has turned off all sensible networks.
Funny, but I think you're missing the point here.
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)
It's a neat concept, but in critical scenarios where you are trying to distribute information because traditional wireless methods are down, methods like this can make it easy for users to be targeted via RF transmissions.
Hard to imagine things like this getting much beyond the "cute" stage.
I open bitchat once a week. Someday I’ll find someone nearby and we’ll be best friends.
The project is interesting, the concept too, the idea of indipendent communication tools also.
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.
but for that to work, you need to attach an antenna, no? and where do i get such an FM transmitter? AND android does not support it in the software level, and there's no protocol for the waves?
To have an FM receiver work on a phone, you do need an antenna, the wired headphones serve that purpose perfectly. An FM transmitter is easy to find; you can use the simple 'Jack-to-FM' adapters designed for car radios, or much better, a USB SDR (which can range from a few kHz to GHz).
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.
hm, than i think it's better to use the LORA stuff, no? if i need an external device with my device anyway, i can use one of them.
because the fun thing is cool, but people want some usable...
It depends on which step of the staircase, from pure hardware to pure software, you want to position yourself. Some projects require staying closer to the metal, while others can be purely software. I move up and down this staircase depending on the specific requirements.
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.
Reading some comments, people do not understand.....
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.
Jack Dorsey is definitely a smart guy, I believe there is a big reason behind it. I wish he will surprise us to make it capable global communication. But my question is how long it will take to work it for a long distance?
I think he’s just a guy who got a lot of money who can pay people to implement his sometimes weird, sometimes useful, often ill-conceived obsession with decentralization and a very lame version of “freedom”.
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.
Why are these apps on bluetooth? I'm surprised no one has come up with a way to transmit data over local ad hoc wifi networks, it must surely be more simple if you could make some sort of transient hot spot
Bluetooth works most reliably across all devices (within its limited range), but all these p2p apps are indeed moving towards multi-transport support to diversify and widen the connectivity grid: https://hackmd.io/@grjte/bitchat-wifi-aware
The problem with the App Store model is that the app could just be switched off by the powers that be. It would be better if something like this could be built into the OS. If one decentralised use case took off, then there could be other applications, like hosting the internet archive, wikipedia or LLMs, or digital cash. Might need waystations to get into rural areas but it sounds like the best long term way to secure the free internet.
I work at a hospital. I think this could be a really interesting emergency fallback system in the event that there is catastrophic failure of mobile, bleep and WiFi
I am using Briar and Session right now for this.
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.
Clever name that changes depending on where you put the space
There are a lot of old and new mobile applications doing this. If there is anyone doing some research in this space, maybe take a look at our "DisruptaBLE" implementation for delay tolerant networking on embedded devices: https://openreview.net/forum?id=xy3Y6cLOV2
Cap your html bodies to 75ch width for comfortable reading. Minimalism doesn't conflict with nice layout and it's 1 line of css.
It doesn't matter how hard I try to see: bit-chat, my brain defaults to: bitch-at, and if I scan it: bitch-hat.
All comments analyzed by LLM: https://hn-discussions.top/bitchat-bluetooth-p2p-messaging/
Every time I've logged into Bitchat, nobody appears to be online - across the entire United States.
Same in Iceland, but even when traveling across the world, I never see anyone when trying it.
Whatever happened to VolkFi? A YC company that was making a decentralized phone, discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437963
Has Signal ever considered implementing any sort of peer to peer message propagation?
Considering that my Bluetooth headset disconnects when I even think about looking at my microwave, I can't trust Bluetooth any further than 10 feet...
If you want kilometers of range in wide open air, give anything lora based a try.
Thought this could have been used in Iran but I guess it was a bit immature still.
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Let's all install this and form a fail-safe (if you are in a populated area) and unregulated mesh. I would love to see how far into the Amazonas or Greenland it works.
Bring back Cybiko's, we can message there instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko
Oh man, I remember these. A modern version would be pretty cool.
I'd consider this app a proof of concept, with limited practical applications.
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).
is there an actual real good comparison of bitchat vs. briar from all sides? protocols, cryptography, supplychain, which software stack, usability and so on?
I've heard about technology like this for over a decade. Have never encountered a use case (even no coverage at music festivals) where it once became viable.
Someone build a commercial wrapper around this, and sell it at (huge) music festivals as alternative message tools???
What about a desktop web app? Using web standards, you can access bluetooth now (to some degree).
Isn’t this similar to Brair?
AFAIK, Brair relays messages through Bluetooth but also through Tor if possible.
Without store and forward you will rarely be able to get messages out of the local area.
Love it. Wonder if it's viable for citizen journalism in warzones and areas of civil unrest, with the larger size of photos (and short videos), given the inherently slow transfer rates and battery life implications of going thru multiple hops before Internet-exiting the area that's otherwise Internet-offline. What's the back-of-the-envelope math here on viable bandwidth?
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.
Bluetooth range would seem to make this unreliable or useless in many areas?
Finally I see some people around. Was pretty lonely, as it launched.
Seeing Jack committing to this repo is kinda wild to me. I also wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
> wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
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 $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
[1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/
Coll idea. One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive.
For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.
In Taiwan you can be on NHI within 6 months of arrival on certain visas. Once you get permanent residency, you're always eligible so long as you keep making monthly payments, which cap out at around 45$usd/month. NHI makes an MRI cost less than 100$ usd. If you don't have NHI you can pay iirc 300$ for an MRI, 100$ for an emergency room visit with blood draw and IV, maybe ~30$/month for buproprion over the counter.
For Portugal the "free" healthcare is extremely generous to anyone staying there, regardless if citizens or not. It does lose money, but then again Germany always pays the bill.
> Germany always pays the bill
I dont think many people realise just how much European infrastructure Germany actually bankrolls. It is a lot.
Back of the envelop calculation: Portugal gets about 33 “Kampfpanzer Leopard 2” worth of money from Germany via the EU.
If this truly finances universal healthcare in Portugal for everyone, the Portuguese should run the world.
Salaries are low and equipment/infrastructure is top notch so the overall deficit per year is about a billion EUR, which is the extra they deduct from our taxes and Germoney. Quality and efficiency of "bang per buck" is decent albeit citizens always complain.
Portuguese did run half the world for a couple of centuries, the most spoken language by natives on the southern part of this planet but quite tiresome to deal with all that, now is more like Italy and prefers quality of life.
My health insurance (self employed, high CoL area USA, healthy/not old) is 6k$/yr. Kind of blows up that $18k/yr idea. I don't think it gets that much better if you live in a low CoL area.
> One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive
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.
I thought fuck-you money also included the ability to explore whatever you want in a way that included e.g. hiring a team to explore projects for you as startups?
Also everyone I know with fuck you money already lives in Asia for cost of living reasons, but spends half the year jet setting to various raves and rich people shenanigans in random places like Croatia.
I've never seriously considered this, but that's a sobering realisation that most of these numbers are more achievable than most think.
Thanks for the inspiration, I should run my numbers as well.
American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.
> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings
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.
> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings
If you dont inherently know this fact then you should be grateful for a very lucky and priviliged life.
I don't live in America.
It applies to the entire world.
WV is probably heavily underrated. Such a beautiful part of the US.
I love Briar for this use-case.
bithcat is out for like.. a long time. Why is hyping now?
honey-pot app
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Bitchat is out for a while now, why is hyoping now?