[HN Gopher] Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
___________________________________________________________________
Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 514 points
Date : 2025-06-16 07:38 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bowshock.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (bowshock.nl)
| feiss wrote:
| This is fantastic. However, I only see the use case of messaging
| through the Meshtastic clients. Is there any other thing one can
| do over this setup, like Gopher or IRC?
| grimblee wrote:
| I had seen a documentary about how people in cuba used lora
| devices to play multiplayer games, basically they made their
| own local internet.
| aamederen wrote:
| For a more baby-steps approach to resiliency, one might start
| running software on less-virtualized computers, creating a small
| home-lab, running software on bare-metal hardware that you
| actually own.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Or even just install local software. Get a computer that lasts
| (have at least one non laptop). Have maybe some maps and
| Wikipedia locally.
|
| Maybe walkie talkies too? Pretty simple to use!
| fer wrote:
| Fun fact: At least one ham radio store ran out of walkie
| talkies during the power outage in Spain, also there was
| plenty of chatter on 446 when it's normally quite quiet.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Many people already do that (e.g. I use Linux on a Laptop- I
| consider this bare-metal).
|
| The way I read this, it's more about what is needed to get
| services back up after a large scale loss of critical
| infrastructure: communication to other
| network/internet/infrastructure professionals.
| avhception wrote:
| I host many services from a small rack in my home using FreeBSD
| jails.
| greybox wrote:
| I spent the weekend moving all my personal projects away from
| github & AWS to to dedicated hardware in the EU, still not in
| my own home, but I'm toying with the idea of purchasing some
| hardware to run gitlab etc from my home network.
|
| Renting dedicated hardware is expensive though. I'm taking a
| financial hit for my paranoia.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Also related though maybe not resiliency-focused: It's quite
| easy now to download all of Wikipedia and all of Project
| Gutenberg to a hard drive, so that whatever problems you have
| in the post-apocalyptic hellscape, boredom won't be one of
| them.
|
| Kiwix is the best software I have found for this and they make
| an extensive library of materials available for download
| themselves, which includes the aforementioned but also many
| other resources that would be helpful in a disaster scenario:
| https://library.kiwix.org/
| nunobrito wrote:
| OK but kind of outdated and incomplete. Meshcore is largely
| competing with Meshtastic nowadays: https://meshcore.co.uk/
|
| To remember: LoRa only permits small text messages. Don't even
| think about images, voice nor binary files (I mean it).
|
| Another option is APRS using satellite connections through a
| cheap chinese walkie-talkie (Quangsheng UV-K5) for 20 euros to
| send text messages.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Huh. Hadn't heard of Meshcore before. Thanks for that. It
| sounds more organized than Meshtastic. Seems more polished, but
| also a bit more opaque (from my cursory examination). That may
| just be, because it's not had as much time to get established.
| It has all the open credentials.
|
| From her article:
|
| _> Their answer was both depressing and freeing: "You can't.
| All you can do is be prepared with tools and a plan for when
| the crisis arrives. That's when the organization will listen."_
|
| That is so sad, but also, so true.
|
| I was fortunate to have worked for a company that is over 100
| years old, and that had weathered a couple of wars, depression,
| recession, market disruption, etc.
|
| They were about as open to disaster planning as anyone, but
| they could also be head-in-the-sand knuckleheads. The biggest
| thing was the company had a fiscal and cultural conservative
| bent; quite unusual in the tech industry, these days.
|
| Anyone that has managed a DR system, knows how difficult it is
| to get support. Disaster Recovery is expensive, resource-
| intensive, and difficult to test. It is also stuff people don't
| want to think about. Sort of like insurance.
| nunobrito wrote:
| My suggestion as someone preparing for this kind of stuff
| since quite a while:
|
| + Quangsheng UV-K5 + Android phone with 3.5 mm audio jack +
| APRSdroid installed
|
| Forget about LoRa, that is basically a toy. It is far more
| useful to have a functioning walkie talkie capable of talking
| with satellites and other stations at 50 kilometers of range.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The issue with satellite stuff, is that it's pretty
| sensitive to active attack. It will be available for things
| like natural disasters, but not necessarily for war.
|
| In either case, jamming is a possibility.
| nunobrito wrote:
| That is inaccurate. You will NOT be able to jam a
| satellite outside local areas, the amount of power to do
| is monstrous and likely to cause cancer for anyone
| around.
|
| In a real scenario these things work. Please don't fall
| into "what if's" which are exotic and confused as things
| bigger than what they are.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, from the comments, here, this sounds like a
| passionate topic, for folks.
|
| I've always been interested in helping folks that help
| folks.
|
| I started looking at Meshtastic, some years ago, but
| found the ecosystem to be a bit overly-complex, as is
| often the case, with "Swiss Army Knife" approaches.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Yeah, indeed. If you are in the mood, dive a bit into
| APRS.
|
| Best thing is the android app combo with the walkie-
| talkie. Tends to give a usable setup that works for voice
| and data.
| elevation wrote:
| > You will NOT be able to jam a satellite outside local
| areas
|
| It is true that you will not be able to jam the
| _downlink_ frequency outside local areas.
|
| But due to the FM capture effect, anyone else in the same
| hemisphere with a basic 100w transmitter (and appropriate
| antenna) on the _uplink_ frequency will be able to deny
| the satellite service to all the 5W Baofeng radios that
| preppers are stockpiling.
| nunobrito wrote:
| That level of argument is already at Reddit level where
| every little detail is a reason to be "right". This is
| tiresome.
|
| Look: if someone is jamming something with a 100 watt
| transmitter which causes impact on the adversary, that
| location is quickly bombed because it is now a giant
| beacon that advertises its position.
|
| I'll even throw a cheap appeal to authority and mention
| that I've done this stuff professionally in the military
| for a decade. I'll still trust more on the usability of
| my cheap walkie-talkie capable of +50km range and
| satellite texts than an exotic LoRa used on the ground by
| few internet warriors.
| lambdaone wrote:
| I think the Internet warriors are trying to build their
| own entirely self-sufficient network independent of the
| state or commercial worlds, which is, as you say, tricky
| to do only with resources legally available to the
| general public. Armed forces have had these things nailed
| down pretty much since the invention of radio.
| MaKey wrote:
| You need a ham radio license to send data on APRS
| frequencies.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Except under emergency situations, which are the cases we
| are talking here.
| detaro wrote:
| Things like this really benefit from experience and
| practice though. If an emergency is the first time you
| try to really use your radio, it's probably not going all
| that well.
| nunobrito wrote:
| That is indeed true. Practicing is important. To
| remember: APRS is available on other frequencies and
| methods, one does not need a radio license to receive
| text messages.
|
| APRS is friendly enough to permit sending messages using
| normal internet and receiving messages from friends while
| on the outdoors. However, all of this requires practice
| and know-how.
| detaro wrote:
| Depends. Various parts of Europe have bands that can be
| used licenseless and allow data, e.g. in Germany there
| was somewhat of a community doing APRS-over-CB (past
| tense because I haven't kept up if thats still a thing).
| dahrkael wrote:
| i always wondered if in case of natural disaster/war the
| state does really have the time and resources to chase
| unlicensed use of radio frequencies
| detaro wrote:
| it doesn't, but if you only start learning and using your
| equipment once disaster has hit you are a bit late (and
| possibly getting in the way of others trying to use
| radios properly).
| nunobrito wrote:
| Yes, that is the case. By the time you learn and get more
| equipment, you might as well get a proper radio license
| too. If you are interested on the topic, it is worth
| doing (in my opinion)
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| > Forget about LoRa, that is basically a toy. It is far
| more useful to have a functioning walkie talkie capable of
| talking with satellites and other stations at 50 kilometers
| of range.
|
| You're not going to reliably get that without terrestrial
| infrastructure, unless both you and your correspondent are
| conveniently standing on mountaintops.
|
| 5km in the suburbs, maybe. Closer to 500m at street level
| in an urban environment.
| MaKey wrote:
| AFAIK Meshcore was started by a disgruntled Meshtastic
| developer. It has got a smaller community and is messaging
| only, no sensor data transfer.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Then maybe time to know more rather than just throwing such
| claims.
|
| The network itself does far more than what other projects
| were doing and is being fast adopted across Europe.
| MaKey wrote:
| > Then maybe time to know more rather than just throwing
| such claims.
|
| Then please educate me, I'm listening.
| nunobrito wrote:
| I'm not your teacher, nor interested in that role. On
| Youtube you find complete comparison videos like:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T56GTiHvZuE
| tiagod wrote:
| Isn't this video by the Meshcore developer?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| To be fair, he actually says that he isn't able to do
| comparison vids, yet (because the UK is fairly flooded
| with Meshcore, so I guess it's a good reason).
|
| The video is a promotion for Meshcore.
|
| But I'm not sure that's necessarily a negative. Meshcore
| does seem to be a good thing.
|
| The one issue, from my limited understanding, is that
| Meshocore doesn't seem to have integrated positional
| data, which would be very important for things like
| emergency response efforts.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| The problem with lora (and APRS over satellite... well, even
| ground APRS) is, that the bandwidth is very limited and usually
| only for "one person at a time", so while meshtastic/meshcore
| might be fine for tens of stations and a few users chatting,
| once those numbers get higher, the routing/signalization uses
| up most of the bandwidth, and many people sending messages at
| the same time makes the whole system very unreliable.
|
| APRS is a bit better, because it requires ham licences and
| (usually) a bit more expensive equipment, but with
| "SmartBeaconing" and just a few hams, you get collisions
| (multiple people transmitting at the same time, effectively
| jamming eachother).
|
| Reddit is usually full of preppers and other idiots buying
| these cheap chinese radios, usually without any knowledge and
| licences (that are needed to use them), and in turn they know
| nothing about actual use of those devices.... simplex range in
| urban environment is measured in hundreds of meters or maybe
| one or two large buildings between radioss, and repeaters will
| be in use by actual emergency servics and not really usable for
| any kind of "private use".
|
| tldr: get a few books, a pack of cards, wait it out, not so
| long ago being unreachable away from home was the norm, and we
| managed.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Please stop with the FUD.
|
| Portugal was for 24 hours without electricity. LoRa networks
| were jammed and non-operational because the bandwidth is
| limited. APRS kept working.
|
| It is far better to have a walkie-talkie that you can use as
| PMR on the 446 range and use for satellite text messages than
| an expensive toy that very few use.
|
| And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license when
| operating under emergency situations, which is the context on
| this case.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > And as you also know: You do NOT require a radio license
| when operating under emergency situations, which is the
| context on this case.
|
| In portugal? Yes, you need one. Probably in every other EU
| country too
|
| In USA too.
|
| I have no idea where people got the myth of not needing a
| licence in emergencies, probably due to not reading the
| actual rules.
|
| Also, you cannot use the same device for PMR and ham radio
| bands, the PMR device needs to be certified for PMR use,
| that means that it can only transmit on pmr frequencies and
| nowhere else. Other devices (eg. ham radio) cannot be used
| on PMR frequencies.
|
| It's not FUD, it's regulation which exists for good reason,
| because in cases of actual emergencies, trained ham
| operators can assist actual emergency services with
| communication, and that's impossible if every idiot with a
| baofeng jams the channels.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Again with FUD.
|
| In Portugal you are legally permitted to use channel 9
| (27.065 MHz) in addition to the PMR channels. The hard
| line has always been on public safety bands. From a long
| time cooperation with the authorities (especially around
| the Azores) there was always an informal permission for
| that kind of usage across boats and islands because
| communication is difficult there.
|
| Last but not least: taking the radio license exam is NOT
| a drama. Anyone can apply and get the radio license when
| they are serious into this topic.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| What fud?
|
| Channel 9 is a CB channel, and neither quanshengs nor
| baofengs work on those frequencies at all, but you need a
| certified/type-accepted CB radio to use on that
| frequency.
|
| Same with PMR, you need a PMR radio to use on pmr
| frequencies.
|
| It's not FUD, it's just hardware limits and regulation.
|
| Yes, 12yo kids can get an amateur radio licence, it's
| easy, but you still need a licence to transmit on ham
| bands, and you still cannot legally use a baofeng (except
| the few pmr models) or a quansheng on PMR frequencies,
| those radios don't transmit on cb freqencies at all, and
| there are no legal "you don't need a licence in an
| emergency" exceptions.
| harvey9 wrote:
| I have a ham radio and still not got around to getting my
| license. I never transmit on it now but in a proper
| crisis I am not going to worry about being prosecuted by
| the radio authority.
| misteriji2 wrote:
| Your neighbor has access to a car, but still hasn't got
| around to get his drivers licence. In a proper crisis,
| he'll google "how to drive a car?" and "what does the
| third pedal do in a car?", and won't worry about being
| prosecuted by the driving authority.
|
| You will in turn have to share the road with him in the
| same way as other radio amateurs (and possibly rescue
| services) will have to share the spectrum with you. You
| transmitting on a repeaters input frequency without a
| subtone set will in turn jam the repeater (PLL is before
| the TSQL) will make communications impossible in the same
| way as your neigbor stuck in the middle of the road with
| a burnt clutch will make driving impossible for others.
|
| But hey, stay lazy, don't get a licence, i'm sure you'll
| be able to figure it all out fast when you're knee deep
| in flood waters.
| nunobrito wrote:
| You don't need a radio license to receive radio messages,
| that is valid also for satellite messages received on
| walkie-talkies.
|
| This fact alone is incredibly important to at the very
| minimum known what the heck is going on. Suddenly you
| have a cheap device in your hands that can receive
| updates relevant to survivors and victims.
|
| In Portugal exist the 3-3-3 plans for anyone to practice
| using a radio. These are regular-weekly sessions with a
| lot of people joining.
| misteriji2 wrote:
| But who will send messages to you? Including satellite
| messages?
|
| In most countries emergency services have moved over to
| tetra or dmr, with encryption, and all the public related
| info is broadcasted on "normal" broadcast fm, where you
| need a normal fm radio, not a ham transciever.
| nunobrito wrote:
| That is a question you can answer yourself when trying it
| out.
|
| In Portugal +90% of tetra stopped working. DMR only
| locally.
|
| Satellite APRS continued working. Who will listen? Well,
| those from north to south on the country were listening.
| More important, they were listening who was still active
| because those were the stations running with their own
| energy because even FM stations started to go down
| quickly as the generators ran out of fuel.
|
| Had the blackdown lasted a week, those with a 20 euros
| walkie-talkies would very likely be the only ones still
| capable of +50 km distance communications and +1700 km
| reach using satellite APRS text messages.
|
| Try to see from it from that perspective. You really
| won't have electricity nor cellphone coverage and not
| even FM in such scenario.. It's all gone.
| elevation wrote:
| > i'm sure you'll be able to figure it all out fast
|
| Even if you do, a radio by itself is useless unless you
| can trust the people on the other end.
|
| Perhaps your generator won't start. A voice on the radio
| sounds like a mechanic and claims you need a new spark
| plug. He can offer you one if you can meet him in a
| neighborhood 3 minutes from your house. Is this a
| benevolent actor with small engine expertise and a garage
| full of spare parts? A well meaning elderly man with
| dementia? An opportunist luring you into a robbery?
|
| You lose a tremendous tactical advantage in this
| situation if you've never met any local radio operators,
| gotten a sense of where they live and what they do for a
| living. Some are skilled experts. Some are blowhards who
| confidently give bad advice. Some live near you. Some are
| 100 miles away. You can figure it out, but it takes time
| that you don't have in the middle of a disaster.
|
| Get your license. Join your local Amateur Radio Club. Use
| your radio to chat with someone at least once a week. If
| you have signal quality issues, experiment with upgrading
| your equipment. Then the radio in your bug out bag will
| be of some value to you.
| nunobrito wrote:
| That is one of the best comments here and reasons for any
| prepper to consider a radio license.
|
| Human networks can be stronger than radio waves, join
| your local radio club.
| nunobrito wrote:
| And you shouldn't worry about such thing under those
| situations. Wouldn't make any sense except for
| bureaucrats.
|
| You should worry about knowing the procedures, the
| channels, how to engage in communication with the
| hardware available to you.
| misteriji2 wrote:
| The same applies to driving... you have to know the road
| rules, how the car behaves in what situations, how to
| drive in bad weather, heavy traffic, etc.
|
| Now the best way is to get licenced and drive (=use a
| radio) in "normal" cirumstances to get experienced before
| an emergency. Somehow 12yo kids manage to get licenced,
| but preppers can't.
| elevation wrote:
| > I have no idea where people got the myth of not needing
| a licence in emergencies, probably due to not reading the
| actual rules.
|
| Parent is referring to the "Safety of life and protection
| of property" rule [0].
|
| [O]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subc
| hapter-D...
| misteriji2 wrote:
| > No provision of these rules prevents the use by an
| amateur station of any means of radiocommunication at its
| disposal to provide essential communication needs in
| connection with the immediate safety of human life and
| immediate protection of property when normal
| communication systems are not available.
|
| This rules applies to:
|
| > the use by an amateur station
|
| Not every billy and bobby with a baofeng are an amateur
| station.
|
| Luckily, at the beginning of part 97 there are
| definitions of such words (you have to open the full
| document, not just this article)
|
| > Amateur station. A station in an amateur radio service
| consisting of the apparatus necessary for carrying on
| radiocommunications.
|
| So, for something to be an "amateur station", you need an
| "apparatus" (some kind of radio transmitter) and it has
| to be a part of "amateur radio service". That too is
| defined in the same document:
|
| > Amateur radio services. The amateur service, the
| amateur-satellite service and the radio amateur civil
| emergency service.
|
| It's not RACES (that's defined below), not satellite, so
| let's see what "amateur service is", again, definition in
| the same document
|
| > Amateur service. A radiocommunication service for the
| purpose of self-training, intercommunication and
| technical investigations carried out by amateurs, that
| is, duly authorized persons interested in radio technique
| solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary
| interest.
|
| So, for that rule to apply, you need a device (an
| apparatus), that has to be used for self-training etc
| (read above), for noncommercial, personal aim by a
| licenced ("duly authorized") person. Only then can you
| break other rules (eg power limits) in situations
| described in rule 403 you linked above.
|
| Without a licence, a radio is just a radio, eg. a
| business band radio (like many motorolas are), and
| nothing in the part 97 (regulating amateur radio) applies
| to the user of that radio. Only when a licenced ham uses
| that (or any other radio, or even a homemade
| transmitter), in a specific way (described above) that
| "just-a-radio" becomes an amateur station.
| akvadrako wrote:
| On the other hand, getting a license is pretty easy. If you
| have a US address you can take 2 ten minute exams online for
| $10 to get General class; that's usable when traveling
| globally. It's a fixed pool of about 300 questions, so a half
| day of studying should be enough.
|
| With the license, there are ham repeaters for FM and DMR. My
| cheap Chinese radio can reach the repeater 15km away.
|
| It also supports APRS, but only for sending beacons. I can't
| really test it as there aren't repeaters around.
| tecleandor wrote:
| What I don't get about Meshcore is... What's their goal. They
| seem a commercial venture, their contact email is
| customers@..... I don't know they're license... I rather use
| meshtastic.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I think their basic idea is to have a more advanced (and
| therefore scaleable mesh) where you can have more control
| over the path your packets take. I dont get the impression
| they are very commercial. Seems to been started by people
| first approaching meshtastic with proposed changes to the
| algo and getting rejected and therefore "forking" (forking in
| quotes because I dont think they share any code)
| MaKey wrote:
| Their iOS / Android apps are closed source, which is a
| turnoff for me.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Yeah, that is crappy indeed. The core itself is open source
| and someone could write a different android app but I doubt
| it would show up there as option.
|
| In either case, they are a good competitor.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| If I go to https://meshcore.co.uk/about.html, the fact that
| there is two youtube videos there and not a button that says
| "Download Docs PDF" shows me exactly how serious they are about
| "[We] connect people and things, without using the internet"
| lambdaone wrote:
| You could just about squeeze voice down LoRa with a really low-
| bandwidth codec, as really aggressive codecs can manage < 0.5
| kbps. If you want to sacrifice voice quality but use standard
| codecs, the military MELPe codec has 600 bits/s as one of its
| standard modes.
| nunobrito wrote:
| And yet such implementation never was seen outdoors.
|
| Because it would likely violate the restrictions setup for
| the LoRa frequency. Using a normal walkie-talkie has none of
| those limitations while being cheaper and more versatile.
| kcaseg wrote:
| saveitforparts has multiple videos on meshstatic, if you want to
| see it in action, it is super interesting, but not without flaws
| apparently
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WRNTkbRuCI
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdHB_5Z_CFE
| specproc wrote:
| I read the title and the first few sentences as resilience _to_
| rather than resilience _for_ the internet.
| charcircuit wrote:
| No mention of starlink? Even if the internet is entirely down
| locally your packets could be routed to the other side of Earth
| before making it to the internet.
|
| Starlink is much simpler for the average consumer to setup than
| what this article suggests.
| kcaseg wrote:
| I guess being dependent on the daily mood of some random guy in
| Texas isn't really resilience.
| powgpu wrote:
| Well IMHO it is more about if the infrastructure is
| centralized or decentralized. In a centralized infrastructure
| we are all at the whim of someone like Musk/Gates fill in the
| ______
|
| A mesh network and federated services will not rely on one
| actor or server. And if you are in middle of no where and
| only a random guy from Texas is hosting, then maybe start
| your own node if he is unreliable.
| bananapub wrote:
| a pretty important part of everyone's strategic planning in
| 2025 needs to be resilience to random rich American cunts
| deciding to inflict harm on you or your country.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| The article is talking about the war in Ukraine specifically,
| and not only has the US repeatedly threatened to disable their
| starlink access if they don't agree to a treaty, Musk himself
| admitted to disabling starlink during a Ukrainian raid a couple
| of years back.
|
| Resiliency isn't found by relying on corporations who are
| subject to interference by foreign nations.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Sure, as a backup to your regular internet it could work, and
| can be shared with your community. However, the objective is to
| be independent from _any_ infrastructure. The US has boycotted
| the ICC in the Netherlands already, if the ICC were to arrest
| American or Israeli war criminals they may choose to expand
| that boycot to the whole country, which includes Starlink
| access.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Can't rely on Elon in cases of an emergency.
| hashstring wrote:
| nor during business as usual, which I think covers the total
| reliability of said person.
| qwertox wrote:
| I've been thinking about an idea, that maybe it would be
| worthwhile for a city to create a wireless network where it uses
| rooftops for a mesh.
|
| This WiFi offers a low-data-rate (<5-10 mbit/s) service to
| seniors for free or a very low fee (~3EUR/month), without service
| guarantees, but honest best-effort.
|
| In the case when an internet problem arises, which affects the
| city's it-infrastructure, the city can switch to this WiFi to
| have their city-wide services still interconnected, while the
| seniors get kicked off of the network during this time.
| MaKey wrote:
| freifunk.net is building these mesh networks but based on
| volunteers without a fee. Big communities have thousands of
| nodes.
| yannickdoteu wrote:
| any people around Leuven, Belgium that want to start a club?
| lljk_kennedy wrote:
| > One of my nightmares is waking up one morning and discovering
| that the power is out, the internet is down, my cell phone
| doesn't work
|
| I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic
| ndr wrote:
| I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard
| enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal
| during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.
| camillomiller wrote:
| It also wasn't so incredibly nasty, though. There were
| disruptions and some arrests, but the large majority of
| people were in the streets socializing, dancing, doing
| impromptu things they wouldn't be doing on a work day.
| dewey wrote:
| That's because they kinda expected everything to be back to
| normal in a few hours. If there would be some more
| catastrophic distributed outage there would probably be
| less dancing.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| But wait either it was "pretty" or it wasn't. We've gone
| from "it wasn't pretty" to "Ok, it was pretty, but only
| because they expected a resolution."
| lucianbr wrote:
| > Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe
| will have more frequent and more severe internet
| disruptions in the very near future. Governments and
| businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of
| communications.
|
| I think the subject of the thread is pretty clearly how
| to deal with interruptions that won't resolve themselves
| in a short time. It's on you that you choose to ignore
| that and focus on "was it pretty for a milisecond?"
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Come on, what?
|
| Now we've gotten to "Ok the claim was admittedly not true
| but it's your fault for pointing it out instead of going
| along with the groupthink" Is this the post-truth society
| we hear about?
|
| The sub-thread was very clearly started by the idea that
| loss of connectivity might not be as bad as assumed,
| there was space to have some debate about what positives
| could be taken and how we could actually prepare to live
| with outages alongside preparing to negate them.
|
| I didn't think much of it honestly, the original point of
| it not being so bad, but your comment has left me with
| the feeling that the internet can't fall soon enough.
| closewith wrote:
| Pretty for young and unencumbered, less so for the COPD
| patient with an oxygen concentrator, or the parent of an
| infant running out of sterile bottles, etc.
| djrj477dhsnv wrote:
| Sterile bottles? Millions of babies around the world are
| doing just fine every day without that.
| closewith wrote:
| With breastfeeding, which millions can't, for whatever
| reason (even if only prior preference, you can't turn it
| on at will). Bottle feeding young babies without the
| ability to semi-sterilise formula and sterilise bottles
| will lead to higher infant mortality.
| tonyoconnell wrote:
| Some parents of infants would be able to find a way to
| feed their children safely.
| closewith wrote:
| Obviously, but not all. I can't believe I have to say
| this, but prolonged blackouts (with all the downstream
| ramifications they bring to hygiene, temperature control,
| food safety, food availability, etc) would cause infant
| mortality to exponentially rise as days pass without
| power.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Without the power grid we are right back to the dark ages
| in a matter of a few days. Except at least in the dark
| ages people sort of knew how to survive. Now, only a
| minority of people really know how to survive without
| modern conveniences.
| collingreen wrote:
| Hopefully it isn't controversial to acknowledge that a
| few extra dead babies is actually a terrible thing not
| something you brush aside, right?
| goda90 wrote:
| To sterilize a bottle you simply need boiling water
| without a significant amount of toxic materials in it. To
| get boiling water you need water, a container for the
| water, a combustible fuel, an ignition source, and a
| means of transferring heat from the burning fuel to the
| water. Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do
| stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool
| rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc
| container filled with water to get to a boil.
| closewith wrote:
| > Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff
| like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks
| inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container
| filled with water to get to a boil.
|
| That can get you sterile water, although it's extremely
| difficult to do and involves many more rocks than you'd
| imagine easily 5x the mass of rock to water to get a
| rolling boil for a full minute, but it doesn't get you
| clean water. Now you have sterile water with a lot of
| potentially very unpleasant dissolved solids. Certainly
| not something you'll be using to feed an infant.
| prmoustache wrote:
| it takes 5 minutes to build a simple but effective
| alcohol stove out of a soda can.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on
| electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for
| more than a day
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I'm looking at extending my
| solar system to add a battery and islanding, so I can
| have a regular resupply of some amount of
| power/electricity for the necessities in case of extended
| outages.
|
| I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I
| don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a
| generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab
| (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online /
| protected through outages.
|
| Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc
| amateur WiFi setup which connects over several
| kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but,
| ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant
| I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had
| just never gotten back to the top of my priority list:
| https://air-stream.org/
|
| Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.
| axelthegerman wrote:
| Solar and battery for refrigeration seems a waste.
|
| If you own a house I'd look into very old school options
| like digging a deep hole to store your food in a
| dark&cool place - forgot the name for it but it'll work
| for weeks or months without a single milliwatt
| card_zero wrote:
| A "cellar"? :)
|
| Or if you want to get technical I guess "root cellar".
| wat10000 wrote:
| That sounds really inconvenient (am I going to keep my
| food down there all the time, or is the plan to carry the
| entire contents of my refrigerator down there in an
| outage?) not terribly effective (RIP all the frozen
| stuff) and probably not any cheaper. Plus the hole can't
| be used for other things like charging my phone.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Convert a chest freezer into refrigerator and you don't
| need batteries.
|
| https://www.notechmagazine.com/category/refrigeration
| card_zero wrote:
| That's very smart and might end my quest for a truly
| quiet bedroom fridge, if it really only runs two minutes
| in an hour. (Light fridges marketed as "quiet" just
| produce near-constant annoying fan noise, quietly.)
| 20after4 wrote:
| It really works, and if you fill half the space with
| water then it'll only need to run once or twice a week
| (assuming you don't open the lid often)
| michaelt wrote:
| Have you looked at hotel minibar fridges? They're
| generally pretty quiet.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It'll work just great to keep half the things in my
| fridge safe and none of the things in my freezer safe.
|
| Refrigeration is top priority and I would happily buy
| solar panels just to keep it working (plus leeching a few
| watts for my phone).
| ta1243 wrote:
| Solar+battery is great for a few weeks locally with no
| power, or a couple of days nationally.
|
| It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a
| target.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a
| target.
|
| A target for what? People to come charge their phone at
| your house?
|
| Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have
| solar setups?
| ryandrake wrote:
| If society actually suffers a sustained "collapse,"
| access to electricity won't even be among your top-20
| problems. You're going to be more worried about how
| you're going to obtain water, food, and protect yourself
| from the roving looters and/or warlords that will
| immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.
| 20after4 wrote:
| For folks with a private well, electricity is the key to
| fresh water. At least for a while.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > protect yourself from the roving looters and/or
| warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence
| of law and order.
|
| This is a hollywood meme.
|
| The reality is that aggressive looters/warlords will be
| very quickly disposed of and the remaining ones will fall
| in line and become semi-official protective militia
| forces, who will labor alongside farmers in small
| communities if they don't want to starve.
|
| Food scarcity will be a much bigger issue that some
| nutcase trying to loot my solar panels.
| apitman wrote:
| What makes you so confident it would pan out that way
| rather than the meme way? Especially if potential
| warlords only have the memes for inspiration.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is exactly it. The other part is not just water
| pumping but operating the sewer systems - if the lift
| stations are down the whole thing fills up in about a
| week and the basic plumbing in your house - and thus
| pretty much entire city, stops working.
|
| Cities are not setup to support their current populations
| without those services and once you run out of buffer
| things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and
| immediate disease hazard.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Did you check with hospitals, prisons and daycares how
| things went?
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Only because it didn't last overnight and wasn't at the
| peak of summer.
|
| Otherwise you're throwing out all fresh food, supermarkets
| couldn't process payments nor most restaurants either, etc.
| tmountain wrote:
| I guess it depends on your perspective. Here in Portugal,
| lots of people ended up sitting on their patios, chatting
| with friends, cooking on the grill, playing cards, sipping
| wine, and generally having a pretty good time. There was a
| collective groan around the small village where I live when
| the power came back on, and quite a few people commented that
| they were disappointed that they'd have to work in the
| morning.
| Aachen wrote:
| Right, it's fun to sip wine and chew bubblegum for a day,
| but that's not the scenario people are worried about
| Fnoord wrote:
| > and quite a few people commented that they were
| disappointed that they'd have to work in the morning
|
| Hangover from the port.
|
| Instead of doing drugs or chatting, I'd read a book on my
| Kobo.
|
| The thing with the stuff you mentioned. I already drank
| enough alcohol jn my life to not bother with it anymore.
| Same with card games. And random chitchat.
| maplant wrote:
| You've had enough random chitchat to last a lifetime?
| Fnoord wrote:
| With my neighbors? For sure. Friends? Don't live near me
| anymore. How am I going to chat with my friends if
| they're hundreds of kilometers away? By way of a
| (smart)phone, which requires power.
|
| We actually saw the effect of downtime during covid. In
| the beginning, a massive appreciation for health
| services. We all know how long that lasted. In the
| beginning, it was us against the virus. Eventually, we
| were fighting with each other, even over details. Rest
| assured, offensive propaganda services from secret
| agencies learned a lot from that (one may guess which one
| primarily).
|
| If it was so awesome that wine drinking and chit-chat,
| why aren't we doing it? A pretty simple explanation is:
| because it ain't awesome. Yes, a change of pace can be
| regarded as a fun challenge or change of pace. Heck, it
| may even open up people to changing their life. But look
| how much we remote work post covid. Policies were
| reverted.
| maplant wrote:
| People absolutely drink wine and chit-chat with each
| other. They can't during the day usually because they
| have work.
|
| It seems to me that these modern anti-social tendencies
| are actively driving a wedge between most people and
| their surroundings, making people further isolated from
| each other. Young people tend to spend time in doors
| alone because they don't know _how_ to interact with
| strangers. But they should because being alone is
| literally damaging to your health.
|
| Being far away from friends is bad for you[1]. Being
| socially isolated is bad for you. Promoting a lifestyle
| in which you don't have friends and don't talk to
| strangers is akin to promoting a lifestyle in which you
| don't exercise.
|
| It's not "awesome", it's a necessary component of living
| healthily as a human being.
|
| [1] https://www.cdc.gov/social-connectedness/risk-
| factors/index.... - I found this source from the CDC but
| there are numerous others
| al_borland wrote:
| The power grid went down in a large area of the US about 20
| years ago. The biggest issue I saw was the gas pumps didn't
| work. Cars were lined up, many abandoned, just waiting for
| the power to come on some they could get gas. I was in
| college at the time, but home for a few days. I heard rumors
| that the power was on west of us (where my school was), so I
| just started driving west, hoping I found where the power was
| on before I ran out of gas. Thankfully, that worked out.
|
| But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere.
| It won't take long before we start running out of food and
| other utilities start to fail.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| It's absurd that we don't require gas stations to have
| generators on-site. They have all the fuel they need to
| power them right there!!!
|
| Now nobody else can get more fuel for their generators when
| the gas stations don't have power either.
|
| This was a big issue during the power shutoffs during LA
| fires this year.
| geraldhh wrote:
| absurdities not withstanding, this might actually be a
| good idea.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Gas stations are private businesses, and they typically
| make almost nothing on gas, most of their margin is in
| the c-store.
|
| Requiring every single one of them to invest in a 5-6
| figure power backup solution with hundreds or thousands
| in yearly maintenance costs, so they can sell their
| lowest margin product to accommodate those who can't plan
| ahead during a disaster that happens maybe once in a
| decade event is pretty absurd.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| I guess a government/population that cared about
| resilience would require them to add a few pennies/gallon
| onto the price to pay for backup generators. Maybe also
| bigger storage tanks.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Maybe they would just design a more reliable grid, or
| have an emergency management organization that can
| flexibly solve many problems instead of dictating huge
| costs to private business owners in order to cover for
| extremely rare events.
| al_borland wrote:
| How does one plan ahead for a multi-day regional power
| failure, that may only happen once in their lifetime?
| Should everyone have several hundred gallons of gasoline
| stored in their garage just incase? Or maybe we all
| invest in personal solar generation at our homes, with
| enough battery capacity to power an electric car and the
| home through those short winter days? This would cost
| tens of thousands of dollars for every household in the
| country. What about renters? Are they out of luck?
| Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally
| absurd, does it not?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| > How does one plan ahead for a multi-day regional power
| failure, that may only happen once in their lifetime?
|
| Ready.gov has instructions.
|
| > Should everyone have several hundred gallons of
| gasoline stored in their garage just incase?
|
| oh, c'mon.
|
| Do you or any one person you know use several hundred
| gallons of gas over the course of a few days on critical
| things? If that is the case, then yes, by all means you
| should have a private gasoline backup supply since you
| are running some sort of industrial scale operation.
|
| If you are worried about it, just make sure you have a
| several day supply of gasoline on hand. For most people
| that use about a tank of gas per week that means filling
| up when you are at half tank. For those of us, like me,
| who live in a place where a generator is occasionally
| useful, a couple of jerry cans full of gas are typically
| already on hand. Hundreds of gallons could keep me
| powered up for weeks at a minimum unless I was really
| trying to use a lot of power.
|
| For most people, gasoline is used exclusively for their
| car, which has a multi-day gas supply storage mechanism
| built in.
|
| Lets say we require all gas stations to have the ability
| to pump gas during a blackout. Then what? It doesn't
| solve any of your hypotheticals. Without a beefy
| generator and a professional crossover switch, you aren't
| powering your home with gasoline. What is a working gas
| station going to do for a renter, or apartment dweller?
|
| In any case. If things get actually desperate, it isn't
| that hard for a handy person to wire a generator up on
| the spot, and get gas pumping, although at that point,
| what are the chances that the payment network is online.
| At that point you can just run the pump by hand if it's
| truly desperate.
|
| > Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally
| absurd, does it not?
|
| Not absurd at all. Experts and the government actually
| suggest that people do some of their own preparations for
| disasters. They suggest that you have enough on hand to
| survive for 48 hours without outside help. There are
| entire government initiatives, campaigns and
| organizations based on this exact premise. Check out
| Ready.gov for the USA federal version. You can probably
| find state and local level initiatives where you are too,
| if in the US. Almost every large, multi-day, regional
| blackout in living memory is weather related, which also
| means it is predictable.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Gasoline has a very short shelf life.
| tcoff91 wrote:
| I had to get gas every day for my generator during the
| outages. Only one gas station in down was in an area that
| still had power. If you don't live in so cal and have to
| deal with public safety power shutoffs, quit talking out
| of your ass. Our power grid is so unreliable here that
| they really need to make the gas infrastructure more
| resilient.
|
| When shit goes down, people need to be able to get fuel.
| The populace at large is never going to be prepared
| enough to deal with every gas station in the area going
| down. Raise the cost of gas by 10 cents to cover the
| costs. If every station is mandated to do so then they
| won't have any issues with the margins as they will
| simply all raise prices in concert.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I don't live in SoCal. I live in rural Canada where I get
| several power outages per year due to inclement weather
| downing lines.
|
| It sounds like there wasn't really a problem with gas
| availability, in your case. You were able to get enough
| gas to comfortably power a generator with no preparation
| during one of the biggest emergencies the city has ever
| seen. During the LA fires, the power cuts were to small
| enough areas that you could have just driven to a
| different area of the city. That sounds inconvenient, but
| hardly worth the effort of building independent power
| generation sources for the 10k+ gas stations in your
| state.
|
| A far better solution is to do what we do in my part of
| Canada: a competently run power company that doesn't
| arbitrarily shut off power due to failing infrastructure
| setting billions of dollars worth of city on fire. We
| don't have PSPS's despite living in a very fire prone
| place with extreme weather because our infrastructure is
| maintained much better.
|
| Instead of forcing everyone to subsidize individual power
| plants for gas stations to do long tail risk mitigation,
| California should maybe invest in a grid that doesn't
| regularly cause billion dollar fires.
| 20after4 wrote:
| You make a great point. Additionally, I know personally
| of one house fire that was caused by sparks from a power
| line falling on a stray gas can and lighting the whole
| place on fire. If you combine bad infrastructure with
| everyone storing a bunch of extra gas around the house,
| then that might actually increase fire risk
| significantly.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's also not something you really need to plan in
| advance. It's ok if you can't pump gasoline for a day. If
| there's some catastrophic outage that takes down an
| entire region for days, you can hook up generators to the
| pumps at that point. There are plenty of portable
| generators out there. It's not like a hospital where
| people will die if the power is out for more than a
| minute.
| cogogo wrote:
| Think the some of the worst of it was for people stuck in
| elevators. Don't have exact numbers but there were A LOT of
| them. Emergency services were very busy freeing people. My
| wife was stuck on a train and that wasn't so great either.
| Toilets overflowed, ran out of water, eventually evacuated
| and walked to the previous station. They were lucky to be
| only a couple km away.
| nunodonato wrote:
| During peace, yes. If there is any sort of crisis, no
| lljk_kennedy wrote:
| You're right, of course. Notice I edited out the Swan Lake
| reference in my quote -
| https://www.npr.org/2021/08/19/1029437787/in-1991-soviet-
| cit...
| junon wrote:
| When Whatsapp and a bunch of social media went down a few years
| back I took a stroll outside that evening here in Berlin and
| the streets were weirdly buzzing. It was a bit surreal.
|
| Maybe some sort of bias but I also view things this way.
| pino82 wrote:
| I can remember I was at a birthday party and the entire topic
| of the f*cking evening was when it will be online again. With
| everybody checking every 23 seconds.
|
| I left that 'party' quite early.
| talkingtab wrote:
| To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day
| you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people
| would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were
| going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a
| longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant
| consequences.
|
| We do not yet have an awareness of our dependence on
| technologies, nor of how fragile those technologies can be. If
| someone had suggested years ago that perhaps we should prepare
| for a disruption in say, the egg supply, that would have
| provoked laughter. And jokes like, well I really don't like
| eggs. Or what about toilet paper hoarding? Given just those two
| events alone, one might decide that disruptions are at least
| somewhat of a possibility. That our past assumptions of an
| unending supply of goods and services might not hold in the
| future.
|
| It is a funny comment, and there are several dependencies I
| personally would not miss. Until I did.
|
| Personally, the interesting concept is resiliency in general.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| > To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one
| day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many
| people would have a great time, as long as they knew the
| roads were going to be functional later that day. If it
| turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast
| and unpleasant consequences.
|
| To be fair, this is a real scenario for people in snowy/and
| or rural areas. It isn't uncommon for people in my area of
| Canada to get snowed in for a few days.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| On a local level, I feel like we can probably do better than just
| text messaging capabilities. Mesh network covering the village,
| with someone running mirrors of essential services in their
| basement (local email routing, wikipedia, etc)
| nunobrito wrote:
| just remember that even that won't last long. Electricity is an
| expensive resource and you won't get spare parts to keep the
| Wi-Fi running for long.
|
| At most you will only be able to start a few Android-phone
| hotpspots and share files. That is the reality of it.
| Ginden wrote:
| Electricity is not really an expensive resource for
| communications. You need like a single rooftop to provide
| WiFi for the entire village.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Maybe for professional communications. For cases where the
| grid is gone, you will quickly see how quickly you stop
| using electricity for luxuries such as that one.
|
| At most you will be able to charge smartphones and small
| devices with solar panels. Keeping a larger Wi-Fi router
| running only on solar? Very seldom.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| The price of solar panels and batteries keeps falling.
| You can go an Amazon today and get a setup that can power
| a switch/router/AP 24/7 in winter for a few hundred
| dollars.
| nunobrito wrote:
| It isn't about the price.
|
| Try to avoid understanding this difficulty from your own
| shoes, but rather from the shoes of communities very
| limited on what is reachable to them from a technical,
| financial and logistical point of view.
|
| I know you can solve it easily. I can solve it even more
| easily myself.
|
| Now see any disaster area, see any remote area. Setting
| up Wi-Fi is invariably _never_ a priority for those in
| such situations. Even as things settle, it is still more
| practical to share files directly with each other.
|
| When you see from that perspective then you are on the
| domain of realistic solutions rather than keyboard level
| on virtual forum.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| I don't disagree with that, but this point has nothing to
| do with the comment I replied to.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| A mid range router uses about 10W or about a dollar a
| month.
|
| It will not be a problem at all to power it completely on
| a small 100W panel.
| blueflow wrote:
| This article makes more sense if its coming from a city where
| only the large telco's are present.
|
| Here Dresden (Germany), there are several volunteer organisations
| who laid wires through the city or have microwave-antennas (AG
| DSN, Burgernetz, Freifunk), and there is a recently founded
| internet exchange run by volunteers (DD-IX). So as long as we
| have power, we got our own internet.
| bjackman wrote:
| It sounds like the author is envisaging a system that works
| without power (as long as the batteries last).
| lambdaone wrote:
| The ISPs also have a system that runs without power so long
| as _their_ batteries (and gensets) last. Typically 1 or 2
| days without refuelling.
| estsauver wrote:
| * I would consider adding a T-1000 device to the recommended list
| of devices, it's about the size of a credit card and works very
| well to add Meshtastic to phones.
| https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Card-Tracker-T1000-E-fo...
| It's a lot easier (in my opinion) to get people to stash a radio
| and remember how to power it to Bluetooth then to get setup from
| 0 on a new device. I think I paid about 40 euros each when I
| bought a pair.
|
| * I have a Starlink mini--in the event that there is ever a
| broadly disconnecting event I'd be happy to share access to it. I
| keep it pretty much exclusively for emergency use and occasional
| camping/rural holiday house vacations. You might want to consider
| one too? They're ~250 euros new, which for someone who's starting
| a club for anything seems like a plausible expense. I believe
| there's a chinese version in case you don't want to trust the
| whims and emotions of Musk. * https://kiwix.org/en/applications/
| is pretty useful if you'd like to have an archive of technical
| information, wikipedia, stack exchange etc.
|
| * I try and keep whatever feels like the smartest open weight
| LLMs at the time available so if something real bad ever happened
| it'd still be available. I might add that idea to your
| preparedness list too--I'd probably take LM Studio with Gemma 3
| over another random engineer on the Meshtastic channel :)
|
| * Would you share channel config details for your IRC community?
| I'm happy to join.
| MaKey wrote:
| Regarding the T1000-E:
|
| > Note: Currently, LR1110 radios are unable to receive
| Meshtastic packets from the older SX127x radios, it requires a
| breaking change to fix this. Transmitting works and when
| hopping through an SX126x radio, you can still receive packets
| from SX127x radios.
|
| https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/seeed-studio/se...
|
| Its range is also much worse than the T-Echo's.
| estsauver wrote:
| I think that's totally fair if you're primarily working in
| rural/not dense communities. If you're in a major city, in
| practice it just doesn't matter and ease of use is king. In a
| disaster, everyone with a meshtastic radio has it on. Your
| messages will propagate just fine.
| amenghra wrote:
| Starlink mini has a monthly cost, right? So it wouldn't be just
| ~250EUR but more like 250EUR + 50EUR/mo.
| messe wrote:
| I thought so too, but apparently on starlink roam you can
| pause service (by the sounds of it, indefinitely), only
| restarting when you need it:
|
| > You have the ability to pause and unpause service at any
| time, with billing occurring monthly.
|
| Source: https://www.starlink.com/support/article/dd5b43b5-20e
| 1-b29b-...
| 0x445442 wrote:
| If the internet is down how do you unpause the service?
| messe wrote:
| I think you still have access to whatever user-portal
| starlink uses, so you can unpause it that way. But I have
| not confirmed this, and could be mistaken. The
| documentation only mentions that when you are out of data
| you have access to that page, it doesn't mention anything
| about when your plan is paused.
|
| > If you exceed the allotted data on the Roam 50GB plan
| and have not opted-in for additional data, you will be
| unable to use the internet except to access your Starlink
| account, from which you can add additional data or change
| plans.
| fragmede wrote:
| If you're not using it you don't have to pay the monthly
| cost. So buy the dish and just don't activate the service.
| lormayna wrote:
| I am into Meshtastic but the coverage, at least in Italy, is low
| and depends a lot on the position. If you are in a city, you can
| get many neighbors nodes, otherwise you need to be at high
| altitude, relying on other nodes or use a directional antenna.
|
| Anyway, it's a nice hobby to learn a lot about solar powered
| systems and antennas/propagation.
|
| I think that one of the best use cases for Meshtastic is to use
| it during protests, especially in authoritarian countries.
| powgpu wrote:
| yeah it is kinda like starting your own internet
| infrastructure.
|
| For protest there are already bluetooth messenger for that:
|
| https://briarproject.org
|
| but yeah it is only for Android.
| nunobrito wrote:
| That is a crappy project. Please try it yourself to see how
| badly it fails.
|
| At present there simply exist no good BLE messengers any more
| since recent updates to the BLE stack.
| xvilka wrote:
| Another thing is to update mesh stack to more modern language, to
| improve security and resiliency - projects like B.A.T.M.A.N,
| Babel, OSLR, FRRouting, etc would largely benefit from being
| rewritten from pure C to language like Rust.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Being "modern" is a poor excuse. Code in C can be ported to
| anywhere, code in your "modern" language can only be understood
| by a few and is not portable anymore to other languages.
|
| Please don't confuse security with resilience, they might be
| connected in some dots but have fundamentally different
| purposes.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Why? I mean... we had many "modern languages" that are not
| "modern" anymore, but the code in C still works, and when rust
| loses the "language of the week" status, the code in C will
| continue to be developed, and rust will be like go, ruby and
| others.
| xvilka wrote:
| Because of the memory safety, better type system, and better
| infrastructure of testing. There's even no well-maintained
| property-based testing framework for C. Rust provides all of
| this out of the box or with popular crates.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Sure, multiple languages do that and many more will....
| will you rewrite all the software ever written to any new
| language that has something new? The current code works.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| As someone who has done a fair bit of playing with Meshtastic in
| the last few months, it's worth really managing expectations...
| it is in no way a replacement for any sort of internet. It's a
| way of sending very short text messages, with a system that is
| really quite flaky in any kind of built-up urban environment.
| Don't get me wrong, it's great fun, but there's a reason stuff
| like Ham radio is robust.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| but who has the gear, who keeps it charged, who actually shows up
| when the net goes dark. tech's the easy part. the hard part is
| getting 5 neighbors to agree on a channel, a meeting point, and a
| backup plan they'll actually remember.
|
| also, would be interesting to see people test these setups during
| a planned outage. like simulate a real failure for 24 hours and
| see what breaks. most systems look solid until you actually need
| them
| alganet wrote:
| That's why you can't rely on it.
|
| If things go bad, you need to own the tech completely. Be able
| to setup a wifi hotspot with services that can help your
| community (wikipedia, openstreetmaps, low-res movies), or have
| pendrives with critical knowledge ready to be shared, etc.
|
| The low power radio is more of a short term thing, for "what's
| going on" soon after the first moments of a crisis. Building
| long-term resilience is much harder.
|
| IMHO, the loss of access to knowledge is much more detrimental
| than access to a network of people. One can eventually get you
| into the other, but there's only one you can actually own.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I have a WAP on my shed roof and batteries that can power my
| gear for a few hours without the grid. In the absence of other
| WiFi networks the one atop my shed would stand out as a
| rallying point.
|
| (It's not switched on / connected at the moment - I tested it
| out during COVID lockdowns, but no one else connected since we
| didn't have power outages).
| liotier wrote:
| Mesh networks are the foundation - they are essential to disaster
| resilience. Then what services to run over them ?
|
| Real time chat: wild unsecure simplicity proven to run anywhere
| (IRC), bells & whistles with contemporary security (Matrix), some
| mesh native that almost no one knows ? What about post-disaster
| onboarding of actual users ?
|
| Store & forward messaging: SMTP & friends may work nicely, but
| with actually distributed servers - in each local disaster POP.
| Also needs timeout and retry parameters to keeping stuff in
| queues practically forever.
|
| Forums: anything better than ol' NNTP ? Other protocols merely
| adopted intermittent indirect connectivity - NNTP was born in it
| !
|
| Is anything more sophisticated or more interactive realistic for
| actual disaster ?
|
| An onboarding kit with clients for each major OS (a la AOL CDROM
| !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB
| dongles.
| bkummel wrote:
| I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh
| network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's
| idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience
| club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the
| regular internet.
| lambdaone wrote:
| The real "resilience teams" are going to be at the
| telcos/ISPs, and they will have dark fibre between their
| networks and autonomous backup power in their data centres.
| They will be able to do IRC, VoIP telephony, email, etc.
| between their networks over statically routed point-to-point
| IP between their local networks even if BGP and the transit
| networks go down so they can "black start" the Internet.
| (Back in my ISP days, I remember reading about there being a
| private telephone network just for AS operators' NOCs to talk
| to one another quite independenty of the PSTN.)
|
| For anything that takes even those out (eg. a "Big One" quake
| in California), you fall back to radio hams and autonomous
| radio links for the disaster services.
| GTP wrote:
| The article's author mentioned speaking with some telco
| people, which apparently weren't aware of any resiliency
| emergency plan. Maybe there's some difference between EU
| countries and the USA on this.
| myself248 wrote:
| Post-disaster onboarding is complicated by app store lockdowns
| and the difficulty of sideloading. Heck, even establishing
| plain http or self-signed https connections is tricky on phones
| now.
|
| I'm sure someone smarter than me has a toolkit for these
| things, I just don't know where to find it.
|
| Store-and-forward-wise, NNCP is designed for this, but it's not
| widespread yet.
| wpm wrote:
| I was just thinking about this sort of thing the other day.
| Thinking if I need a techno 'bug out' bag, my Macs would be
| the most useless ones to waste the weight on because if
| anything happened I'd never be able to reinstall macOS
| without phoning home to Apple for an activation.
| myself248 wrote:
| It's time to sell your soul to Big Penguin.
| GTP wrote:
| Throw-in a USB key with a Linux distro that works with your
| Mac. You could also flash Ventoy on it, so that you can
| have multiple distros in case you end up needing to boot
| some other machine.
| myself248 wrote:
| Trouble is a Linux-on-a-key that you've never used
| before, is still a long way from being productive without
| a network to install all the packages you actually want
| to use.
|
| It takes me about a month after a reinstall or new
| machine, to feel like I've really spread my wings and
| have everything installed that I initially forgot about.
| So I guess the recommendation would be "daily-drive it
| for a month before refrigerating it". And at that point,
| you might as well just make it your everyday machine.
| cormorant wrote:
| With Apple silicon, I'm not sure there _is_ such a thing
| as a Linux USB boot. The install instructions for Asahi
| begin from macOS.
|
| Even if there were, it may be orthogonal to the anti-
| theft online Activation feature that wpm was talking
| about.
| cormorant wrote:
| > Heck, even establishing plain http ... connections is
| tricky on phones now.
|
| I had no idea. I guess this refers to app-store rules?
| Related to https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifes
| t/applicat... and https://developer.apple.com/documentation/s
| ecurity/preventin... ?
|
| Or is it even hard to browse to http webpages? (No problem on
| iOS that I see.)
| amelius wrote:
| > a flood-forward mesh protocol
|
| Is this scalable?
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| In a word, no.
| lormayna wrote:
| This module from SeedStudio is perfect for a small portable node.
| https://www.seeedstudio.com/Wio-SX1262-with-XIAO-ESP32S3-p-5...
|
| There is also a version with Rak chip instead that ESP32, that is
| a lot less power hungry and it's perfect for a solar powered
| module.
| erremerre wrote:
| Wouldn't having something like this, you automatically became a
| target in case of the case of war?
| dansmith1919 wrote:
| Watch her 10-minute RIPE 90 talk and then listen to the first
| "question" for a short tutorial on how to behave like a prick:
| dude didn't even have a question, just wanted to let everyone
| know how much he knew about a somewhat related subject
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| that is one of my pet peeves: people who try to dominate
| discussions or make them about themselves (you might notice
| they say "I" a lot)
|
| another way you might see it manifest: a simple question is
| asked, and without pausing to hear the answer, the questioner
| then goes on a long speech about their personal experiences and
| why they're asking the question and what the meaning of the
| question is etc etc, rephrasing the question several different
| times along the way
|
| if you're actually interested in learning the answer to your
| question: * _think*_ about the question first; compress it into
| 1 short sentence (5-10 seconds long) ending in a question mark;
| say it; and as soon as you hit the question mark, _immediately_
| be silent so the answerer can actually _answer_ the question
| and get to other questioners
|
| if you're worried they might not understand the question that
| way: do it _anyways_ , and if they don't, wait for a chance to
| ask again (after others have had theirs)
| wao0uuno wrote:
| I tested meshtastic in a major european city with pretty much
| 100% mesh coverage and its real life performance was quite
| underwhelming. Often I would receive messages that I could not
| reply to because of differences in antenna gain and crappy mesh
| performance. Public chat was either completely dead or flooded
| with test messages. Everything was super slow because the mesh
| can't actually scale that well and craps out with more than a 100
| nodes. Even medium fast channel would clog up fast. I would never
| depend on meshtastic during an emergency because it barely works
| even when nobody is using it. I think a public wifi mesh would be
| more worthwhile. Older used wifi routers are pretty much free and
| in unlimited supply. They use very little power. Everyone already
| has a compatible client device on their pocket. Sure the mesh
| would fail during a total blackout but at least it would be
| useful for something when the power is up.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| Yeah, having gone through the blackout in Spain this would be
| really useful (using phones).
|
| Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to
| provide some connectivity.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general
| self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with
| batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it
| electricity, mesh networks and satellite internet to get
| around lazy local ISPs. All we need is a field where robots
| grow food and we're back in the middle ages but with modern
| tech. We've even got tech billionaires to stand in as feudal
| lords and crazy right wing populists instead of inbred kings
| with weird chins.
| bandoti wrote:
| Good premise for a cyberpunk novel. I recommend keeping the
| weird chins though, because plastic surgery makes anything
| possible!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah solarpunk is probably the most neglected out of all
| existing sci-fi punks, probably cause it's actually kinda
| nice and doesn't make a good setting for a gritty
| depressing story?
| edent wrote:
| Where in the world are you? In the UK I get paid to sell my
| excess solar back to the grid.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's usually the case if there's only a few people with
| solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since
| grids typically aren't designed to handle residential
| power generation.
|
| If there's too much solar in your area (which will be the
| eventual end result everywhere) you get net billing,
| where you don't get charged for the energy you use, but
| they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use
| or will even disconnect you if you overproduce so the
| local substation doesn't explode because it wasn't
| specced for any of this shit.
|
| The end result is that you don't get paid for any of your
| daily overproduction and still get billed at night, the
| worst of both worlds. It incentives people to buy
| batteries and store the peaks, with grid power being
| mostly optional.
| Aachen wrote:
| > they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you
| use
|
| In some places. If you're dumping excess energy onto
| their network, in some regions they'll also charge you
| for that
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| > That's usually the case if there's only a few people
| with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt,
| since grids typically aren't designed to handle
| residential power generation.
|
| Australia has the highest density of residential rooftop
| solar in the world, making up about 11% of the grid
| supply. Feed-in tariffs are standard there.
| pyrale wrote:
| > It's interesting how we're generally headed towards
| general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power
| with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it
| electricity
|
| The grid will definitely pay you to sell it electricity if
| you fulfill the industrial standards it expects.
|
| The issue in your assessment is that the quality of service
| provided by someone just setting up solar panels and
| inverters and plugging that on the grid is the equivalent
| of starting a skyscraper building company based on your
| experience building your garden shed. It's not safe, you
| won't understand why, and eventually you or someone else
| will get hurt.
| pmontra wrote:
| I'd agree with you if I'd setup my solar panels. But if
| I'd ever install solar at home I'd hire a company to do
| all the setup. I believe that it would fulfill industry
| standards.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Probably taking the "someone gets hurt" part too
| literally, but inverters do turn off their outputs when
| the grid goes down. It would take a lot of inverters to
| make all the other inverters believe that the local part
| of grid hasn't bee disconnected. I wouldn't be surprised
| if they had special logic to detect even that case. Of
| course, there _is_ the case of simply having too much
| unregulated input to the grid, causing instability. But
| AFAIK that has never happened anywhere, at least not in a
| way bad enough to make the news. It is bound to happen if
| current trends continue, but appropriate actions will be
| taken at that point and have been taken in large solar
| installations.
| cedws wrote:
| I'm surprised that phone manufacturers haven't already
| implemented a mesh network. I guess you could kind of call
| Apple's Find My network one, but if you want to smuggle
| arbitary data the bandwidth is very low. Maybe Apple's new
| mobile Wi-Fi chip is a precursor to an actual Internet mesh
| network.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Battery life is a big deal and anything with decent speed
| would hurt that a lot. People won't want to sacrifice their
| battery to get strangers online.
| econ wrote:
| That is by design to keep you engaged. My current phone has
| 7050 mah and 80w charging. I charge it twice per week or
| so. If you have a slightly chaotic life you have to
| consider charging 30 times per day, hoard cables and charge
| powerbanks only to have it die anyway. Now I have one cable
| that doesn't move and doesn't break.
| wat10000 wrote:
| What is by design? Battery life? Poor battery life? Good
| battery life?
| roguecoder wrote:
| Blackberry had one, but it didn't seem to be a feature
| consumers particularly cared about when they fled to iPhones.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| I don't think they themselves need to implement it. During
| the Hong Kong protests in 2019 they used apps like Bridgefy.
| adrianN wrote:
| Wifi routers use quite a lot of power for the area that they
| can cover. Ten watts or so for a hundred square meters is a lot
| of you want to cover a whole city.
| wao0uuno wrote:
| Almost everyone has one of these running 24/7 already. Second
| one with an external antenna wouldn't make much difference.
| Aachen wrote:
| Everyone currently has electricity on demand
| wao0uuno wrote:
| Ukrainian grid has been targeted by russian drone and
| missile strikes for years and it just keeps coming back.
| Longest downtime (according to a quick google search) was
| approximately 12 hours. Complete long term blackout in a
| big European city is very unlikely these days.
| pmontra wrote:
| Long term as "days", yes. But all of Spain had a blackout
| for at least 12 hours a few weeks ago. Turin, Italy, had
| a 10 hours blackout yesterday.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| Makes me more impressed by the Ukranians honestly! After
| Russia is banished they can teach the rest of Europe what
| resilience looks like in this area.
| apitman wrote:
| Yes but in exchange you get way more bandwidth. No idea
| whether it would be enough to run a city-scale text network
| though.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| With a range of maybe 100 metres line of sight, if you're
| lucky.
| TeamMCS wrote:
| I agree with this assessment. I've been running two nodes for
| about a year, maybe longer, and in that time, I've only had
| perhaps two contacts.
|
| Even with a YAGI or a dedicated pole antenna, both tuned to 868
| MHz, the range in my location is quite poor. The signal seems
| to drop off quickly, even after walking just a kilometer down
| the road. While I understand that height is key (and my
| antennas are fairly high), it appears that 868 MHz attenuates
| very rapidly.
|
| So, to reiterate, I don't believe Meshtastic is a particularly
| effective solution. The principle behind it is sound, but the
| practical execution falls short. I think established methods
| like Hamnet and traditional amateur radio are far superior,
| especially now with SDRs making a simple handheld radio
| incredibly affordable (around EUR20)
| hyperionplays wrote:
| Have you tried the Reticulum network?
| https://reticulum.network
|
| I have been meaning to try it out
|
| https://unsigned.io/rnode/
| TeamMCS wrote:
| I can't say I have. Let me look into it. Thanks for the
| share
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| It's exactly like Mountain View Google WiFi.
| apitman wrote:
| Man that reminds me of Project Loon:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC
| UltraSane wrote:
| Meshtatisc's routing is extremely primitive and inefficient.
|
| https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...
| zikduruqe wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FabFi
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20111119205258/http://fabfi.fabf...
|
| I had worked with this almost 15 years ago. It was a neat
| project.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Meshtastic, like any other network (including mesh wifi) is not
| immune to the requirement for some planning.
|
| My area has a couple of very well-placed mountaintop ROUTERs
| that tend to suppress most of the low level urban flooding
| noise, and so local messaging out to 80km or so tends to be
| pretty reliable. The same would be absolutely impossible with
| wifi.
|
| That's with 80 or so local nodes on LONG_FAST, population of
| around half a million.
|
| Thats said, Meshtastic's routing algorithm is extremely
| inefficient and has huge room for improvement.
| apitman wrote:
| > My area has a couple of very well-placed mountaintop
| ROUTERs that tend to suppress most of the low level urban
| flooding noise
|
| What does this mean exactly and how does it address GP's
| concerns?
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Different nodes can be configured to have different roles,
| which impact in various ways the effectiveness of the
| network. Having used Meshtastic, the previous poster will
| have some familiarity with these.
|
| https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/device/
| Fokamul wrote:
| 1. Meshtastic / LoRa is just bad for communication, it has so
| many problems
|
| 2. In case of conflict, everyone who starts LoRa gets delivery of
| artillery shell/rocket on their position.
|
| Just like in Ukraine, try to go there and start up stock firmware
| DJI drone there and see what happens :)
|
| Same when using radios in UA, no.1 rule is to NOT use encrypted
| radios, I like this example the most, because it goes against
| common sense, why would you want to use unencrypted radios so
| enemies can see your whole communication.
|
| Reason behind this is following, encrypted radio traffic is very
| interesting for enemy, so it means if someone using it, he must
| be someone important -> send shell, badabum.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| If it is that easy to become an artillery target, you can use
| it to your advantage. Randomly place LoRa devices in area near
| the front (by autonomous or fiber optic drone drop to decrease
| risk). Switch and off by some random timer and see the enemy
| deplete its shells and drones.
| XorNot wrote:
| "the market can remain irrational longer then you can remain
| solvent" applies in other circumstances too.
|
| But the wider point is generally that just because something
| is _less_ effective doesn 't make it useless, and just
| because something is effective doesn't make it _dominating_.
|
| If an enemy has an artillery advantage, then shelling obvious
| decoys is still taking decoys off the field, which you now
| need to replace. But worse, their existence is giving away
| the fact you're active in the area, and their placement is
| giving away your operational range - i.e. how far can a
| person move on foot over rough terrain? How far in a vehicle?
| etc. What's the effective range of their normal infantry
| weapons - if you know there's a decoy then the trap has a
| specific radius if it is a trap.
|
| All on the bet that they will in fact run out of shells - or
| in the case of drones, they won't even run out since a drone
| can much more easily be re-targeted.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Well you entering deep level of game theory here. Can you
| distinguish the decoy from the real and what resources you
| need to spend (e.g. LoRa device in a home)? How much is the
| signal that you can deploy decoys worth? Isn't deploying
| decoys below some noise level of frontline drone activity
| and the enemy cannot learn nothing? How many shells do you
| need to destroy a decoy? How certain you are about the
| destruction?
| rubyfan wrote:
| I'm almost to the point of turning the internet off on purpose.
| The noise level is so high it's almost not worth it anymore.
|
| (but I get this is geared towards communication resilience)
| Brendinooo wrote:
| This sort of thing is interesting but I guess I've always found
| it really hard to invest my limited time and money into prepper-
| type stuff.
|
| Are there use cases for this sort of thing that could make it
| worthwhile even if doomsday doesn't arrive?
| Elaris wrote:
| I think we should focus on collaboration, not just individual
| action. Many times, we don't react until a problem occurs. This
| reminds us to be proactive, not reactive.
| lambdaone wrote:
| Mesh radio bandwidth is pretty poor. Firstly, you have to compete
| with many interferers (albeit this might get better if the power
| goes down), including other LoRa radios, but more to the point,
| long-distance connections consume bandwidth and aquire delay and
| delay variation at every intermediate hop. It might be reasonable
| to use it for text messaging, but with _per-hop_ bandwidth
| ranging from 0.3 kbps to 27 kbps, which will get divided down
| further over shared multi-hop links it will be impractical to use
| it for anything else except perhaps very-low-bandwidth telephony
| over short distances or visiting minimalist text-only websites.
|
| It _might_ make more sense if augmented by fixed multi-megabit
| point-to-point microwave radio links to act as a backbone, with
| LoRa only functioning as an access network.
|
| I'd be interested to hear what experiences people have had with
| doing this for real.
| lambdaone wrote:
| I've just realised I've talked my way into the idea of creating
| per-city club-operated backbone networks based on something
| like 100 Mbit point-to-point Ethernet-over-microwave links.
| With tall buildings as hubs, you might actually be able to
| build a decent mesh, with WiFi, LoRa or both acting as access
| networks. You'd definitely want to throttle per-client
| bandwidth to prevent people from abusing your very limited
| long-range mesh bandwidth. None of this would be cheap; decent
| microwave links cost thousands, and you'd need backup solar and
| battery power for every part of the network.
|
| I'd also consider thinking about using the "big ears, small
| mouth" technique to push up bandwidth; if a fixed link using a
| technology such as LoRa could transmit at a legal EIRP level,
| but coupled this with a _really high gain_ parabolic dish (I 'm
| thinking re-purposed satellite dishes) and low-noise amplifier
| at each end on the receive side, you could get substantially
| higher end-to-end Eb/No, and thus much higher bandwidth and
| range than would otherwise be legally possible. At first
| glance, the necessary hardware to do this looks quite doable,
| either by active RF switching between antennae, or the use of a
| hybrid/circulator to do the necessary duplexing. I'd be
| interested to see if anyone has already built, or even
| manufactures, something like this, and what the practical and
| regulatory barriers are to implementation.
| myself248 wrote:
| "Big ears, small mouth" is _exactly_ what the regulations are
| designed to encourage, so I don 't foresee regulatory issues.
|
| You don't even need extra hardware for the duplexing; the
| common SX1276 chip has separate Tx and Rx pins which are
| typically combined on the PCB. All you need is to route a PCB
| that brings 'em out separately, if that's what you want to
| do.
|
| In practice it's tricky to aim two dishes the exact same
| place, so using a single dish with a single antenna at its
| focus is probably quite a bit more practical. The SX1276 also
| has a PA control pin, invert that and you've got your LNA
| control signal. Or don't bother with the LNA, and simply
| mount the transceiver at the focus to minimize RF feedline
| losses. You'd give up a smidgen of performance but gain a lot
| of simplicity. (There would still be coax running down the
| boom, but it would be carrying the wifi/bluetooth signal
| outside the dish's aperture!)
| bkummel wrote:
| I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh
| network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's
| idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience
| club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the
| regular internet.
| eimrine wrote:
| That's true and proprietary modulation makes the situation
| worse.
| xondono wrote:
| Sounds like a reinvented HAM radio club to me
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Just dropping a HAMWAN link for anyone who is interested in
| higher power / longer range links. https://hamwan.org/
| 1706213 wrote:
| I would use Reticulum instead of Meshtastic.
| https://reticulum.network
|
| Pros: - it can actually scale past 20 devices - Forward secrecy
| encryption - Is designed to support multiple underlying transport
| systems such as TCP or LoRa - Announce based routing rather than
| flooding the entire network which is order of magnitudes faster
| Cons: - Not as many nodes as Meshtastic has - Python
| implementation with no C implementation (can be speed up with
| cython however)
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| Is it legal in the USA? I seem to recall that ham operators
| aren't allowed to encrypt their traffic, that's one reason I
| never got around to getting licensed. Maybe LoRs allows for it
| because it's unlicensed?
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| Ignore me, I answered my own question. Encryption is still
| illegal on HAM bands, but legal for things like LoRa that are
| unlicensed (hence WiFi).
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Nice, it took less than a minute to find a PDF of the docs.
| That's already more seriously "offline" than the alternatives.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Why not something like WinLink which works over short and long
| distances using Ham Radio? It even has an email gateway.
|
| Then, there is JS8Call, PSK, SSB, FM, etc
| xpe wrote:
| One thought -- more of a question -- and I'm not the first person
| to ask it -- How can we design a 'smaller' kind of internet? One
| that is less data hungry, less commercial, but still sustainable
| (how?), more of a community vibe, with distributed governance,
| less enshittification. Think of it like a maintainable garden.
| One that still works without a lot of extra effort, such as
| constant browser 'innovations' or bandwidth upgrades. Something
| more like a hardscaped garden instead of a typical American-style
| monoculture grass lawn requiring nonstop interventions to make it
| look pristine. This would have many benefits, including
| resilience, redundancy, and archival. Yes, I realize I'm
| conflating layers and maybe even asking too much. But sometimes
| it feels good to dream. At the very least, it is a genuine
| question I can use to evaluate various proposals and ideas in
| this general area.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| The Gopher and (more recently) Gemini protocols are something
| like this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
| https://geminiprotocol.net/
| nancyminusone wrote:
| >...all you hear is "Swan Lake" on repeat
|
| Have I missed the meme on this one? What does this mean?
| te_chris wrote:
| I assume an allusion to when there was a coup in the 90's in
| Russia the govt put the ballet on tv
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| Its been on HN before but its worth a repeat
| https://reticulum.network/ Its got more optimization for a low
| bandwidth LoRa without the brute force stuff of meshtastic
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| people will try to design a plan to save humanity with Chinese
| radios, but won't sign up for a basic technician license. sigh
|
| so many wrong assumptions on that article.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I've found Meshtastic is simply not ready to be set up in an
| environment without internet, as I discovered when I brought some
| of the boards I bought with me on vacation to a rural area with
| more space to test them, but very limited internet.
|
| The entirety of the meshtastic project is web first.
|
| - To flash your boards, the suggested method is their "Web
| Flasher", and if you download the firmware source, it depends on
| PlatformIO (and the internet) to download and install the
| toolchains and flasher programs you need.
|
| - The clients for meshtastic are available on the app stores, or
| as a web app at https://client.meshtastic.org/ None of these are
| offline. I did later learn the boards themselves host the web
| app, but they still have to be connected to an Wifi AP, you don't
| get it just by plugging the board into your computer.
|
| - The docs are _hosted_ at https://meshtastic.org/docs. "Download
| Docs" or "How to self host this project" are not topics described
| there or anywhere else. A technical person could figure this out,
| but this is seemingly not a primary concern.
|
| I suppose this is the very point of this post, to get people to
| have it all set up beforehand, but not even having the docs as a
| PDF I can read offline? I learned about Meshcore too in this
| thread, but if I go to their site and the "getting started" guide
| is a Youtube video, then you're not ready for an emergency!
| hosh wrote:
| Hearing this is exciting to me, because it is a very concrete
| and actionable target for a true "local-first" ecosystem and
| infrastructure.
|
| I was very disappointed to find that the "local-first"
| manifesto was not the "local-first" as I understood it. In my
| mind, I should be able to connect an app on my phone to another
| phone via bluetooth, and sync without going through a central
| server. However, it makes very little economic sense, if
| someone is building a SAAS product that locks customers into
| dependencies on a central server where services can be metered
| and billed. To my mind, those are "offline-first".
|
| I have thought about what it would take to build a local-first
| software forge and package distribution, and yet, I couldn't
| see a good reason to expend that effort. We have a lot of the
| pieces ... with this example -- if we want to be able to expand
| a meshtastic network _after_ a disaster, then the whole
| tooling, development, etc. needs to be local-first and
| resilient.
| amatecha wrote:
| I only ever flash via CLI or via "drag & drop" method. The web
| flasher is great for first-timers but there are 100%-offline
| methods for all the devices.
|
| The android client .apk can be downloaded directly from github
| at https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-Android/releases
|
| I do agree though, I feel there should be more effort to
| support "long term lack of internet" use case.
| meehow wrote:
| - Compiled firmware is available on GitHub, packed together
| with a script for flashing it.
|
| - You can use Meshtastic CLI.
|
| - Docs are in git repository in .mdx format:
| https://github.com/meshtastic/meshtastic
|
| All "sins" you mentioned are results of trying to be more
| convenient for users used to web browsers. Current state of web
| is pretty far from being decentralized, including web3.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I feel like the better path to resiliency is not persistent radio
| connections between hobbyists on other sides of the state but
| rather intermittent ones between people on opposite sides of the
| bus and an application layer that arranges for people who are
| heading that way anyhow to carry "internet" traffic on a
| filesystem in their pocket.
|
| You just get a different type of threat landscape when each hop
| is also an opportunity to shake somebody's hand and attest that
| the holder of their private key is a real human. It creates a
| minimal trust layer you can then build on. You don't get that
| with a hardware address found drifting on the wind.
|
| Both modes have some potential to attract harmful attention to
| network operators based on the behavior of their users, but to a
| very different degree. So far as I know nobody is kicking down
| meshtastic operators' doors looking to follow a transmission to
| its source, but I think that would change if the other modes of
| long range skulduggery were to fail.
|
| The most resilient infrastructure would be one with no high value
| targets: one where each user is equally an operator.
| goda90 wrote:
| This idea sounds a lot like Secure Scuttlebutt[0]. I'm not sure
| the state of it. The client they link to on their website
| ceased development awhile ago.
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think that secure scuttlebutt (SSB) is a very good start,
| but eventually we'll need something besides an append-only
| log. Something that removes data that is no longer
| interesting. Something that, when it runs up against its
| storage quota, prunes data based on whether it is more/less
| trusted or likely to be interesting to a peer. Something that
| knows which peers I'm likely to be near in the future, knows
| which topics they're subscribed to, and which tries to be an
| efficient mailman based on that understanding.
|
| But yeah, my vision is pretty much just SSB all grown up.
| hashstring wrote:
| > to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket.
| What do you mean?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Well "internet" gets quotes because if the source and the
| destination are disconnected when the message arrives then
| they're not on the internet.
|
| It might look something like this: As you stand in line at
| the grocery store your device notices that a nearby device
| (the guy behind you) belongs to somebody who is trusted by
| one of your peers in the "gardening" topic. You're not a
| gardener, but your room mate is. So your device pulls a
| gardening related update from their device. Then as you head
| home with groceries your device is not connected to anything,
| it's just sitting in your pocket with a filesystem full of
| data. And then when you get home your roommate's device gets
| a notification about a reply to their question on a gardening
| related message board. That data came to them on your device.
| It traveled a few feet wirelessly at the grocery store, and a
| few feet wirelessly at home, but the majority of the transit
| was handled the slow way, by hitching a ride on a human who
| was traveling that way anyhow.
|
| It would only work for small bits of latency tolerant data,
| and work best for information of broad interest (not so great
| for an encrypted email to a single party, pretty good for map
| tiles, open/closed hours, restaurant menus, etc). The
| simplest app to build on such a platform would be a sort of
| of distributed BBS. VoIP would be nearly impossible. But I
| think that small snippets of high latency text can get you
| pretty far.
| hashstring wrote:
| Interesting idea, thanks now I understand!
| bmn__ wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| nncp [1, 2] is probably the best Sneakernet tool I've found.
| It's very UNIX-y which makes it pretty hard to operate if
| you're not technical but would also make it pretty easy to wrap
| around with a UI. You have to explicitly add a list of
| "neighbors" to your configuration and you can send "packets"
| either by spooling to file or using a TCP/Noise connection. You
| can also send data hop-by-hop and is e2e encrypted.
|
| [1]: http://www.nncpgo.org/
|
| [2]: https://www.complete.org/nncp/
| cbsmith wrote:
| ...and it's close relative NNTP. There was a whole
| distribution structure built out of intermittent data
| transmission. We've had the tools for this stuff for a long
| time, we've just switched to centralized, always available
| services because that's easier to build a company around.
| roguecoder wrote:
| America is sprawling, unfortunately. That kind of approach
| would work in cities, but would be much less effective where
| people aren't taking the bus or even being around other people
| on a daily basis.
|
| The advantage of something that can reach 6 miles is that it
| could cover suburbia and rural areas with ~20-40 acre plots
| relatively effectively.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Yeah it's not ideal for sparse populations but I think you
| could get a lot of coverage by just running a node with a
| solar panel wherever your mailbox is and also having your
| mail driver put a node in their vehicle.
|
| Really the thing I'm trying to push back against is the idea
| that the entire path between them must be connected all at
| once in order for two parties to communicate. If we design
| for short range, partition-tolerant, pocket-to-pocket
| background gossip, then that same protocol will work just
| fine if you attach specialty radio hardware and give it miles
| worth of range, and you've still got the fallback ready for
| cases where all you have is consumer grade hardware.
|
| On the other hand, if you design for persistent connectivity
| and then try to use it in an intermittently-connected
| context, you're going to have a much worse time.
| apitman wrote:
| Maybe I'm being a little too cyberpunk but it would be cool if
| the system somehow rewarded people for delivering messages over
| a long physical distance. You could end up with a courier
| community where runners spend some time walking around high-
| traffic areas collecting sent messages then jog to the other
| end of town so the encrypted messages can find their
| recipients.
| esafak wrote:
| The problem with these things is that people have no urgency to
| prepare, by pro-actively improving software and documentation, or
| even simply installing them. They need to be something people get
| value out of even before disaster hits, by improving performance
| or decreasing costs, for example.
| Bender wrote:
| For grid-down data my preference would be laser instead of RF as
| laser is regulated by the FDA and not the FCC not that either
| would take interest. With laser one could send incredibly large
| amounts of data very fast. It's more manual setup but I would
| expect once set up it would be far more reliable, better for
| setting up mountain top repeaters and meshes. Laser is also
| better for data privacy _encryption aside_ as the beam is
| directed to a target vs. omnidirectional broadcasting. During
| grid-down most people that would be using a mesh would be at
| static locations. One could then bridge in these RF
| omnidirectional devices into the mountain and home repeaters to
| prevent over-saturation.
|
| Another nifty feature of a manually positioned laser is the
| automatic measurement of time domain. One could have an optional
| security feature to automatically disable the data-stream if the
| time domain of the laser changes in physical distance of more
| than {n} user-defined meters or centimeters to prevent MitM
| _(Monster in the Middle)_ beam interception for the extra
| properly paranoid types.
|
| There can be weather issues for laser but for that one could fall
| back to voice using any one of the hundreds of makes and models
| of HAM gear that can operate on and around 11 meters by moving a
| jumper or holding down two buttons when it is powered on.
| _Illegal but only enforced by monthly example of someone
| impacting revenue generating sites. Voice changers and scramblers
| FTW. RF signature ignored. Don 't use sloppy SDR's._ In a grid
| down event TLA's will be busy with higher priority issues _and
| will "look into it" eventually_ by which point the transceivers
| mysteriously vanish assuming one can even get the TLA to show up.
| cameldrv wrote:
| One thing I've been very curious about along these lines is
| troposcatter systems. These, depending on the bandwidth, power,
| and antenna size available, should allow you to get tens to
| hundreds of megabits over up to hundreds of miles with moderate
| sized dishes. The military has some of these systems, but I
| haven't seen too much ham activity with them.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Initially I looked into ham radio, but it is just too
| expensive, difficult, and power-hungry to be practical.
|
| Beg to disagree here. 30 dollars for a cheap-ass Quansheng will
| get you pretty far as long as a repeater is in reach (if it's
| Echolink capable, worldwide), and a bunch of repeaters for all
| kinds of modes are tied together not only via the Internet but
| also via AMPR / HamNet [1]. APRS and DMR capable devices are in
| the 200 dollar range.
|
| For high bandwidth data communication it becomes a bit more
| involved - Ubiquiti hardware for example can be trivially
| software-modified to transmit on the amateur radio ranges, which
| is how that gear ends up powering a lot of HamNet stations.
| Sadly, unless there's a HamNet node on a nearby large structure
| you'll _probably_ need to raise a tower large enough to achieve
| line-of-sight to the nearest HamNet node.
|
| For people in reach of the QO-100 satellite (i.e. Europe, Africa,
| about half of Asia), there have been experiments to use that
| satellite not just as a repeater for voice and video, but also
| data [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
|
| [2] https://forum.amsat-dl.org/index.php?thread/4306-npr-vsat-
| ip...
| 7373737373 wrote:
| I don't understand this fascination with networks that require
| special hardware to intermediate between end user nodes. Would be
| much nicer if things just ran, zero-click, via WiFi, on most
| common computers, netbooks and phones, pure p2p with automatic
| forwarding, no?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network
|
| By requiring special hardware, and be it just some common router,
| or any sort of special technical skill, you are already excluding
| 99.99% of the world population...
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| This isn't about convenience and accessibility so much as
| resiliency in emergencies.
|
| You can run LoRa from a small power bank for days, or run it
| off of a small battery and solar panel indefinitely. Wifi is
| much more power hungry. Wifi also doesn't offer kilometres of
| range, making that power cost largely wasteful.
|
| In an emergency, if you have limited power, WiFi will exclude
| 100% of the population simply because it's not practical to
| operate at all. LoRa, even if it enables 0.01% of the
| population (primarily experts in the technology) in that
| emergency, is a greater benefit to everyone at that time.
|
| WiFi is a peace time technology based around a rich
| infrastructure that is not resilient in emergencies. If you
| skimmed the article you should check it out again. She details
| this stuff, and it's actually really interesting and worth
| understanding if you're into this stuff: LoRa
| radios have several advantages for use in emergency
| communications: no centralized infrastructure
| needed no license needed cheap (starting at
| ~EUR20) low-power (< 1W, can power with an ordinary
| mobile phone powerbank) runs open source Meshtastic
| firmware can send text messages across several line-of-
| sight hops (several kms) can connect via Bluetooth or
| WiFi to phones/computers many urban areas have a good
| Meshtastic network already
| 7373737373 wrote:
| WiFi (with extra hardware, mostly antennas/routers, not too
| expensive anymore either) CAN offer (even tens of) kilometers
| of range, at least point to point:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=lYJFwXw1ZIc
|
| https://eu.store.ui.com/eu/en/category/wireless-
| ltu-5ghz/pro...
|
| only 9W max power consumption too! well, that's not a few
| hundred milliwatts, still, better then ye olde lightbulb
|
| PLUS gigabit throughput
|
| if only our network stacks and protocols didn't assume
| hierarchical (local) networks by default, and kernels
| included p2p network stacks, then i'd feel more confident
| about blackouts being handled more gracefully
|
| well, i suppose all this depends heavily on the nature of the
| emergency
|
| generally i'm surprised that the sheer computational power of
| modern smartphones are not used more for this purpose, i
| haven't come across much true p2p software
|
| on another note, there is still no (truly) cross-platform
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirDrop standard (especially
| one without artificial limitations), which is a shame
|
| also i want to note that smartphones can even communicate
| directly with satellites now:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=v30z-0bGbHQ
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Yes, I use my phone over satellite regularly now. It's
| still amazing to me that it's possible. Phones are a great
| tool here because everyone truly does have them, they're
| portable, and they have large rechargeable batteries that
| can charge from countless sources over USB. So, it does
| seem like we could use them to great effect to create
| networks when other systems go down. I'm not sure they can
| handle long range comms due to requiring antennas, but
| close-range in cities might work well. I'm not sure what
| routing on that mesh would look like, or how busy it would
| get and how well phones could handle that.
|
| Satellites could be an important component here, but
| there's always the need for redundancy. They can be
| compromised too, and you don't own them.
|
| The LTU Extreme Range hardware is way, way more expensive
| than a LoRa radio, and it still uses quite a bit of power
| (relatively). It still seems far from ideal in situations
| where you can't depend on power utilities. Great point
| though, I wasn't aware that exists. It appears you need the
| one you linked as well as the Rocket as its base station,
| which puts it close to $800 CAD after taxes.
| bb88 wrote:
| Meshtastic isn't very good (at least before their 2.6 release)
| [3].
|
| It's clear they didn't research any historical mesh network
| schemes (ALOHAnet [0] and other MANETs [1]) when writing it. And
| flood routing more or less kinda worked, but as it go popular, it
| stopped working reliably. There's a video from Jeff Geerling
| about it and he was generous I think when he called Meshtastic
| "Beta" [4].
|
| Meshtastic a few years ago released a youtube video describing
| how it worked, and there wasn't anything about topology
| resolution, it was pretty much about signal strength and device
| type [2].
|
| This caused an issue because anyone could create a router. And
| often they did. And when they did, this could break routing
| because the router is in the other direction of where the
| originator wanted the traffic could go.
|
| They also prioritized letting the edges forward the message on.
| AFAICT they could only detect this by signal strength. So a badly
| performing node (bad antenna or maybe a node turned on in a
| basement) could get priority.
|
| The last issue is congestion. Nodes can send telemetry, often
| rather quickly, but that could get flooded on the network. And
| with a hop count max of 7, it often will go where it's not
| wanted, wasting the network bandwidth -- as nobody really cares
| about one particular node's battery life.
|
| So in a dense Meshtastic metro (I can see multiple sites) I
| couldn't reliably get a message to a friend in the same city. The
| lesson is that the hardware is better than the software at this
| point. And there's no use using it until they fix their software.
| [3]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6UbC5blJU
|
| [3] I did some research on meshtastic and after finding and
| watching [2] I gave up on meshtastic, because it's clear that
| weren't super serious on routing algorithms, nor basic wikipedia
| reading. Version 2.6 maybe better, but there's a slew of nodes on
| 2.4 yet. And I don't want to bother with it anymore -- at least
| until they fix their reliability problems.
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A7A-CSd3e4
| 6510 wrote:
| Things would improve a lot if we added offline abilities to html
| documents. I think atm there is no way to guarantee a website
| stays in the cache(?)
|
| Designing a system to decide when to keep something is tricky.
| Maybe each visit and each click should extend the expiration date
| and increase the storage for static documents. Say, 10 visits
| should be enough to buy 1 mb of permanent storage to be spend on
| however many pages it takes starting with the frequently visited
| pages then a manifest or the order of links on the front page
| then the first from each sub page etc
|
| It should also be possible to have the browser manage updates
| rather than every man for himself with each website testing the
| connection, checking for updates and stitching things back
| together again. There are quite a few schemes it could follow,
| smaller requests would require more complicated backends.
| Different pages with different update frequencies.
|
| I think the single star bookmark button could have 1-5 stars with
| 5 assigning somewhat generous data to the website and 3+ allowing
| a prompt for very large things.
|
| Then, since I'm serving static content anyway I really couldn't
| care less how the user obtains the files. If there is a copy of
| the website on a network all you need is a public key or to trust
| the user (at the price of annoying prompts warning you on every
| page view and every request)
|
| If it all works well enough HN could be a tiny website managing
| only active discussions. If you have the key and a working
| connection to some other users most of the archive could be
| there. The catching priority could change to the rarest pages.
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