One missing feature: deferred message propagation. As far as I understand, while messages will be rebroadcast until a TTL is exhausted, there is no mechanism to retain in-transit messages and retransmit them to future peers. While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage.
You should be able to write a message and not rely on the recipient being available when you press send. You should also be able to run nodes to cache messages for longer, and opt in to holding messages for a greater time period. This would among other things allow couriers between disjoint groups of users.
this is prob the 100th time ive read about bitchat here, and the comments are largely the same (use briarchat, none of these really work that well, i dont like jack dorsey, etc) every time.
but this is interesting. and i agree strongly with this: "While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage."
i suppose events like iran are really making me wonder if this stuff is possible it feels like anyone who's under the chokehold of regimes has completely run out of options, but even in America I'm getting the sweats wondering if there's going to be a time where such techs are needed. from what i gather none of these decentralized p2p messengers work well at all, but I also haven't truly tried. I can think of some moments that would've been viable test grounds though. Was at Outsidelands festival in San Fran and cell service was pretty much DOA due to the volume of people trying to hit the same tower(s). Even airtags which everyone in the group had on their beltloop weren't working.
It's funny how 3 or 4 similar BLE systems each are slightly different, and yet no one wants to just merge all the features for an obviously superior product. Everyone seems fine squabbling about which incomplete app/system is better.
Just take what's there and include the obvious next steps:
- Meshtastic and Meshcore ability to use relay nodes for long range BLE networks (Briar doesn't allow)
- Store and hold encrypted messages, as noted above.
- Ability to route through the internet, prioritize routing methods, disable internet routing, etc.
- Ability to self-host server for online relays (similar to Matrix)
Bitchat does work with Meshtastic as of the most recent release. It also lets you self host a relay, because it uses Nostr relays. I'm not so sure about white/black listing so yours DOES get used, but you can absolutely host one. Routing through the Internet is something both Bitchat and Briar support, Briar through tor, Bitchat through Nostr (optionally also through tor). Disabling Internet routing at this time may require turning off Internet for Bitchat -- haven't dug on that one.
I do like the store and forward idea, though a thought on that is that while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short. It makes good sense for forum like content though. I think so far Bitchat has treated this as a bit out of scope, at least at this stage of development, and it is a reason that indeed, Briar is still quite relevant.
Bitchat only just recently even added ad hoc wifi support, so it's still very early days.
Lack of retention can actually be a feature in these types of situations. It should be opt-in. The government would actually need to infiltrate the network in order to read the conversations, instead of just retrieving the messages from the cache on a confiscated phone
I'd consider end-to-end encryption to also be table-stakes, at least opportunistically after the first message in each direction. With encryption cached messages are far less harmful (though still leaking very useful metadata), without encryption it seems almost trivial to spy on any communications
E2E encryption probably isn’t enough to protect activists trying to organize. Without doing onion routing where you pre-compute some nodes it in the network that it MUST transit prior to delivery and having them decrypt it until it arrives to the recipient (like Tor) you still leak who’s talking to who.
If the user can get immediate access to older messages then normally those messages will be available on a confiscated phone. That's why things like Signal have you set a retention period. A retention period of zero (message is gone when it scrolls off the screen) is safest.
If you want to protect older messages you can have the user enter a passphrase when they are in a physically safe situation. But that is only really practical for media like email. Good for organizing the protest but perhaps not so great at the protest.
>At its core, BitChat leverages the Noise Protocol Framework (specifically, the XX pattern) to establish mutually authenticated, end-to-end encrypted sessions between peers.
Not just deferred message propagation, but also a way to setup medium to high powered rebroadcasting stations. For political unrest scenarios, you don't always need 2-way communication, but you do need to distribute critical info. A listen-only mode makes it very difficult to track individual users (no RF transmissions), and would cover a large percentage of a critical use case.
All of this is solved with the store-and-forward model that you highlight.
A Lora dongle seems to be better than BT, though potentially incriminating.
iOS definitely made a name for itself to the ire of many for this many moons ago, but it's a fairly ubiquitous default behavior for mobile phone operating systems now (because battery life) even on android
This feels like something Apple should do with iPhones.
Find My and air tags was already a huge success because of the ubiquitous nature of iPhones.
Apple could add this to iPhone, sell it as privacy focussed. Let you message anyone in your iMessage contacts with a new bubble colour. Propagate over Bluetooth when you don't have internet.
I can see a snazzy Apple reveal for this showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium, and then for the meme factor, 2 astronauts on a space walk. It writes itself.
Idk that there's much of a privacy sell vs. messages being encrypted. In the end users are just trusting Apple to actually be securing messages; they aren't going to love that they are trusting dozens of strangers instead of telecoms. Plus, police etc. already snoop on phones by spoofing cell tower relays anyway.
> Showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium
Stadiums will still max out the pipe out of the local area, so I suspect it wouldn't help much. Festivals and cruise ships, where you want to reach people who are nearby (and at a festival, you might even have a good idea via gps which peers are better) are in desperate need of this and idk why apple didnt solve it years ago.
The US, and likely Chinese, government(s) have too much potential leverage over Apple. I wouldn't trust that Apple would do this securely, or that the government would allow them to release it.
Unfortunately iPhones aren't ubiquitous outside their home market. It would have to be on Android to be really useful in the places this would be really useful, i.e. places where regimes turn off the internet when things go badly for them (current situation in the US notwithstanding).
That's not to say iPhones shouldn't have it, I'm all for that.
I doubt the equities analysts would appreciate this as much as a tech nerd would. It'd be seen as a step backwards and evidence of having no clue which way the world is heading.
choosing to build an application on top of bluetooth is like saying, "we've constructed a highway over the most terrain known to man: volcanic marshes prone to seasonal flooding."
how do you know when the messaging app is broken, and how do you know when bluetooth is just exercising its ability to hate mankind?
Could someone please explain in what situation do you use a BlueTooth messaging app? Like, even BT5 range won't exceed 400 meters. What good is this? You're not going to send images to journalists from protests with it (you'd do wisely to keep it in airplane mode until you get home and then you'd upload them to their securedrop or whatever), and you don't need off-band security to let the kids know it's dinner time.
Bluetooth 5 introduced "coded PHY", which allows ranges of over 1 km in ideal conditions. As I understand it, adding support for this wouldn't even require new hardware for most recent phones.
The real obstacles here are political, not technical, as evidenced by the complete absence of any built-in solution that could be so useful in both everyday life (messaging a family member on the same plane when sitting separately, national park trips etc.) and emergencies.
We literally got smartphone-to-satellite comms now, but we're lacking the most barebones peer-to-peer functionality.
Huh I didn't know about that. Seems like it uses 8 symbols per bit to increase the range (but I would very seriously doubt you ever get close to 1km except in super ideal "both in a field in the middle of nowhere" scenarios that never actually happen.
Apparently it's an optional part of Bluetooth 5, so not necessarily supported. However I just checked my phone (Pixel 8) and it is supported. You can check in the nRF Connect app.
Regular Bluetooth already has 100 m of range, at least for class 1 devices like most Apple devices. (Many older/non-Apple devices are class 2, which only does roughly 10 m. Very noticeable difference in an office environment using headphones.)
One of these bluetooth messaging app was made by a developer who was on a cruise ship with family, and the Internet over satellite costs an arm and leg. So he wrote an app to communicate with his families over bluetooth.
Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you? Seems like bluetooth is the perfect way to communicate for devices that are close to each other.
Yeah I can imagine a jam-packed cruise ship might be useful provided the signal propagates from deck to another (unlikely), but it's quite a niché use case.
>Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you?
Why would that matter? Use Signal to protect the content, or use Cwtch to protect content and metadata. If you need to exchange secret communications that mustn't go through some server, why not discuss f2f with no phones around? You'd also eliminate attack vectors where your (chances are, Chinese Android) device spies on you, as well as anyone who has compromised it to read messages from screen.
If your message goes though my infrastructure I can shut it down when I feel like it but even if I really don't want to do that I still might be forced by other parties commercial, private and state owned.
You shouldn't need any kind of permission to send a picture to your mum sitting next to you on the sofa.
I remember a different app thats was used on e.g. festivals where the local broadcast cells where overwhelmed when a quite rural area suddenly had to server 50000 to 100000 additional people and 3g and 4G basically stopped working. I think it was called Firechat or something.
> For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless
Projects like this one are a step towards fixing that. Personally I choose to keep both street and topographical maps of the entire continent locally on my phone. There are plenty of uses for a computer without a WAN connection.
I once wrote an article detailing as many prepper uses for an offline phone as I could think of. Dozens of offline apps useful for a survival situation. My favorite might be ATAK, which is from the US military and allows a team to communicate encrypted over Wi-Fi or radios, completely offline. Share GPS coords, camera feeds, messages, map markers, all kinds of goodness.
And if nothing else, you can always rupture the battery and start a fire :-)
I imagine in a situation like Iran, carrying a backpack full of WiFi gear to stay connected to the meshnet is a red flag.
Establishing a bunch of base stations is likely to raise red flags too.
It's pretty trivial for a nation-state that is jamming GPS to go around and jam WiFi or analyze WiFi spectrum for a meshnet operating in and around a protest area.
> Just get off your ass and go and give them the message...
If I need to have all 4 members of the family meet me at the pool, first I need to go find each one of them. They could all be at different place. And then tell them individually to meet me at the pool? Is that the better solution you are proposing?
Any situation when mobile internet cannot be used. That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings, i.e. street concerts, or places where mobile coverage is poor in general.
That depends on where your live (and when), but: Protest is the cornerstone of democracy and in general you shouldn't need permission to organize a demonstration.
I prefer voting. I find protests annoying. They're a good way for people to let off steam, hang out with friends, get photos for the international press etc. but they're not the right mechanism for finding out what the people want.
They're definitely effective when most of the country wants the government out, but by that point a vote would certainly do just as well, and with fewer flying bricks.
Protests can serve as an implied threat if the government is gaming the election process. They're certainly preferable to a riot or a coup attempt in that scenario.
They also serve to draw attention to issues that aren't showing up on the ballot for whatever reason. The system doesn't always work in an ideal way. To that end protests are supposed to be annoying to those who don't care.
Everyone prefers voting.. But to be able to vote, a vote must be happening. Protests are sometimes the only way to make a vote happen in the first place.
They are also a good communication tool for the world to see what the people are struggling with.
Name three currently existing democracies. USA is out (protests illegal), Europe is out (protests require registration which is denied for anything that has a risk of effecting change), the Middle East and Asia are out for obvious reasons. Maybe there's a democracy somewhere in Africa?
but the internet is for talking to people across the globe. and the app presents itself as an alternative for internet based apps. the reality is however that in any place where i can't use the internet, this app does not really solve that problem. it is only useful in situations where in most cases the alternative is talking face to face. it's not any situation where the internet can't be used, but just some of them. there certainly are good use cases for local communication, cases where face to face is just out of reach and many of these use cases are currently served with internet based apps too. but it's not an alternative to internet based apps per se.
The Internet is _not_ for talking to people across the globe. The Internet allows that, but not only that - one can have a Whatsapp chat with someone in the same bus, this is both legal and technically possible.
The bitchat app serves the niche where talking face to face is not an option and talking across the globe is not needed. And the app explicitly states "infrastructure independence" as one of its design goals: "the network remains functional during internet outages", which cannot be served by internet-based apps by design.
The Internet is _not_ for talking to people across the globe. The Internet allows that, but not only that - one can have a Whatsapp chat with someone in the same bus, this is both legal and technically possible.
technically possible but rather redundant and in most cases pointless. (yes, there are exceptions)
so i rather strongly disagree. 99% of my use of the internet is to talk to people across the globe. it's its primary use case. the example you mention is a fringe application, useful to a tiny minority.
"the network remains functional during internet outages"
that strongly implies that i can use this app to replace other apps that use the internet. but i can't, because it does not allow long distance communication the way internet based apps do.
so for 99% of my needs this app is not helping me. it does not make me independent of the internet. i have been in places where the internet was cut off due to political turmoil. and i have friends who have that happen to them. in all cases the main challenge was the lack of long distance communication. local communication was barely affected.
sms and phone still worked, and in fact the app that would have helped is one that can route data connections via sms and phone calls. like old acoustic modems.
infrastructure independence at a local level is nice, but much less serious or critical than independence for long distance communication. and long distance already starts at a few km.
I believe bitchat can also use the wider internet to exchange messages. So it is an app that can use either the internet or various other more local options. That seems like a desirable improvement to me.
Hey if anyone wants know exactly what Iranian state TV spews every day on national TV, look no further. Very faithful to the source material. Totally trustworthy.
In theory if as many people use bitchat as used whatsapp somewhere like central london, everyone actually could communicate in a fully decentralised manner - you're frequently in bluetooth range of other people's phones just walking around or even sat in your house.
Would that actually happen? No, but it's an interesting thought experiment
So other users are broadcasting messages of third parties onwards? How many devices does it take to saturate the channel? What does this do for phone battery?
Yes, but messages can be encrypted so relaying parties can't read them. And yes, it would have an effect on battery and have very limited bandwidth compared to whatsapp (no sharing videos etc).
Like I said definitely not practical for messaging but I think something along these lines is how airtags work?
Text based messaging ala IRC? Just how quickly and how much do you type? A few hundred KiB exchanged between nodes only every 10 seconds or so ought to be able to accommodate thousands of simultaneous users in most scenarios. The impact on battery life should be far less than using a bluetooth headset.
Sorry I should be clearer: I think it actually might be feasible in a high population density area and if everyone uses it, but because of the limited range of bluetooth you really do need a high density of active nodes for it to work reliably.
A messaging system that often takes hours or days to get messages to the receiver is fairly useless and people will continue to prefer centralised systems, so there's a severe chicken-and-egg problem to solve there before anything like this can work
There's no reason a mesh network can't use an internet connection as a transport when it's available. Moreover a P2P capable mesh can even make use of a centralized server in such scenarios. At the end of the day it's "just" a message routing and delivery problem.
When I enable WiFi calling on my phone that doesn't preclude it connecting to a cell tower.
The use cases stem from groups needing coordination in roughly the same area, with no internet. Disaster recovery efforts fit this exactly:
Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc.
Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other.
300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.
There are yes for Meshtastic. This map seems to have the highest coverage of people sharing their nodes, but in reality in my area there are significantly more which are not shown on the map.
I remember reading that men and women in Saudi Arabia are forbidden from interacting directly in a bar setting. So instead they were using Bluetooth to covertly connect and communicate.
Consider if you live in Gaza. Israel has destroyed all the telecoms equipment across the Gaza strip (and everything else). You were ordered to leave your home by Israeli soldiers, but now the school you're sheltering in is being bombed. You may need to leave, but you believe there may be sniper drones outside.
- You want to check in with people around you about what to do
- You want to check on the health of your family, from whom you were separated
That's probably because AFAIK Apple doesn't allow process forking, making any Tor-based messenger almost impossible to run as Tor would have to run as part of the main thread.
>iOS doesn’t allow apps to fork subprocesses. While on the desktop Tor is running as a separate process, on iOS Tor is hacked to run as a thread inside the app itself. Therefore, you can’t have a system-wide Tor process like desktop and Android. If Tor is running in one app, and you open a different one, it’s not automagically going to start using Tor.
Similar? Very different. The HKmap.live app was build and marketed directly for the protests. It tracked social media and geolocated where the police and protests were happening, etc. This is a big distinction.
I personally don't care if its bitchat or briar, I care about the most effective proven implementation in the end. Such a technology is needed now, not later, and if if bitchat started out as dorseys vibe coded side project last year and has now grown into something greater, then so be it.
Indeed, it's immature to disclose an opinion without being forthcoming and add some objective rationale behind a bold conclusion as disliking an entire person. It may be something they said, or did, getting specific would help, ideally something that is relevant to the original thread. It's not entirely helpful and potentially a negative impact to just imply you don't like someone. Do what you want obviously, that's my 2 cents.
It is a disease of modern (social) media and personal branding. People also now broadly think that an ad-hominem (attacking the person behind an argument, not the argument) is good argumentative style. I don't know about Jack Dorsey other then he founded twitter, and I don't care much about him. If there is a product, I will evaluate that product by my catalogue, not whether I like or dislike a person.
You are making assumptions about a future that hasn't happened yet. It is open-source, so whatever move the person might do in the future, you can fork it anytime.
I suppose the community around a product is also a reason to bring up an influential character's character. You can't fork the community, only fragment it. "I don't want to join a club with that guy in it" is a time when an ad hominem becomes a valid argument.
It is a self-fullfilling prophecy. If the community would adopt the style of not juding the person but only the product, that community would not care for that person. So the "I don't want to join a club with purpose X because of guy Y" leads to the problem that you are describing. If everybody would just "I join the club because of its purpose X achieved by means Z", that community split won't happen.
Thinking that good reputation in a law translates to a good lawyer is just as mature as thinking that a bad reputation translates to a bad lawyer, just two sides of the same coin. Credibility can be so cruel, it can make a brilliant mathematician like Terry Tao preemptively decline to read your mathematical arguments basically forever.
In both cases I think these may be characteristics of healthy judgment.
Obviously because he was one of the architects of the censorship regime of the late 2010s and early 2020s that nearly changed the internet into a three-letter-agency controlled space. If that isn't a risk for a censorship-resistant app, I don't know what is.
I agree, enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. The mere presence of a potentially-cancellable person poisons the entire tech stach, regardless of any other merits. If I were to use such technology I would risk becoming morally tainted by JD's potential-objectionableness, a social risk I am entirely unwilling to take. I simply cannot endorse such technology that is not fully sanctioned by the High Table of Moral Certification & Transactional Stamp Duty. I must therefore distance myself from any such endorsements and withdraw my support regardless of whatever so-called "technological" merits such technology may claim.
Please view my participation in this discussion as certified proof of the objective verification of my moral essence. I hereby claim superiority now and forever over JD and any such users of said technologies. Sincerely and respectfully (without any possible hints of objectionableness), the undersigned.
The project is interesting, the concept too, the idea of indipendent communication tools also.
I'll tell you a story.
Usain Bolt, the world 100/200m recordman, is not faster than cheeta. He needs a motorbike or a car to be beat a cheeta. But even with a car or motorbike is unlikely is going to overtak a cheeta on the ground of savannah.
This to tell you are thinking about optimizations of a system while you need to choose the right system for the environment.
A 433 MHz based link and a strong modulation is much suitable solution than a BT class 2 device included in the phone.
And here the real hack, most of phones has an integrated FM receiver, higher sensibility than BT, a simple FM transmitter (88-108 MHz) and problem solved.
but for that to work, you need to attach an antenna, no? and where do i get such an FM transmitter? AND android does not support it in the software level, and there's no protocol for the waves?
What are good file transfer apps that can be used in similar scenarios? (to be clear about the usage model: communications on a plane)
* I see LocalSend and LANDrop frequently suggested on HN but in my experience they rely on having a central Wifi router. No good.
* Android's QuickShare comes included by default, but it's buggy. Just yesterday it failed on me (I'm on an uncommunicated boat): it was defaulting to Bluetooth, so I had to reboot both phones to finally make it work over Wifi Direct. Not to speak about the "oh damn, you have an iPhone" scenario. Not ideal.
Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)
Unfortunately most P2P wireless solutions are likely to be somewhat buggy, at least in my experience. WiFi and Bluetooth chipsets are often "quirky". I will often lose the ability to ssh into my laptop across WiFi until I go to the laptop and poke the network from it. KDEConnect often temporarily loses sight of my phone, yet it still reports being connected to WiFi. Stuff like that.
This has released tags since back to July 2025. Does anyone know if it's being actively used to exfiltrate news from Iran right now? (if someone's been living under a rock: [1][2])
Tbf, if my government would be out to kill me for protesting, I'd use something that at least was security audited. Not to shit on bitchat, I haven't audited the code personally.
Do we have evidence of this? The only concrete claim made in that post is that Briar 'hit 252 points on Hacker News," which is orthogonal to if it's actually being used.
It's a neat concept, but in critical scenarios where you are trying to distribute information because traditional wireless methods are down, methods like this can make it easy for users to be targeted via RF transmissions.
Hard to imagine things like this getting much beyond the "cute" stage.
The problem with the App Store model is that the app could just be switched off by the powers that be. It would be better if something like this could be built into the OS. If one decentralised use case took off, then there could be other applications, like hosting the internet archive, wikipedia or LLMs, or digital cash. Might need waystations to get into rural areas but it sounds like the best long term way to secure the free internet.
is there an actual real good comparison of bitchat vs. briar from all sides? protocols, cryptography, supplychain, which software stack, usability and so on?
My fantasy is a P2P network that people can use from their everyday devices. The internet is becoming far too controlled, we need an alternative that is harder to monitor and censor.
Depends what your requirements are. For example, if you don't mind latency and can stay within 100m of the nearest node you can use wifi hosted on phones.
Even without something fancy (e.g WiFi Direct, iptables on a rooted phone) you could have phones alternating between offering a network and promiscuously connecting to offered networks, then routing between these.
It's simple enough that I'd be surprised if nobody has done it, maybe because it's slow and power-hungry? I haven't tested setting up hotspots and switching networks from inside app logic, but afaik it's fine as long as you don't do both at the same time.
edit: Having thought about it for a minute, a DTN over WiFi Direct is probably the way to go. Establishing identity for signing||encryption might be tricky, but if you can arrange that in advance or just yolo it in plain text then should be straightforward. Can't find any prior art though. I'll let Codex have a go and report back.
I don't think Meshtatic, or any Lora-based solutions operating in regulated spectrum, works in practice for chat while also abiding by the rules. In Europe (868MHz) and the US (915MHz) the transmissions allowed are so restricted that while you may send alerts you can't really "chat" and even less so in a group chat.
Why are these apps on bluetooth? I'm surprised no one has come up with a way to transmit data over local ad hoc wifi networks, it must surely be more simple if you could make some sort of transient hot spot
Bluetooth works most reliably across all devices (within its limited range), but all these p2p apps are indeed moving towards multi-transport support to diversify and widen the connectivity grid: https://hackmd.io/@grjte/bitchat-wifi-aware
Jack Dorsey is definitely a smart guy, I believe there is a big reason behind it. I wish he will surprise us to make it capable global communication. But my question is how long it will take to work it for a long distance?
I think he’s just a guy who got a lot of money who can pay people to implement his sometimes weird, sometimes useful, often ill-conceived obsession with decentralization and a very lame version of “freedom”.
Like, he quit BlueSky because he wanted it to be completely unmoderated which is, frankly, asinine. His view of what “censorship” means exists in a world along with spherical cows and no bad actors.
I work at a hospital. I think this could be a really interesting emergency fallback system in the event that there is catastrophic failure of mobile, bleep and WiFi
Jack makes cool stuff, but I fell off BlueSky and I have little desire to engage with the "community" on there. It's very echo-chambery like every social media and I feel it's mostly identical to X or Truth just a different echo chamber. It seemed like BlueSky was being sold as a solution to what happened with Twitter and I feel like it didn't make true on it's promise.
I've heard about technology like this for over a decade. Have never encountered a use case (even no coverage at music festivals) where it once became viable.
I'd consider this app a proof of concept, with limited practical applications.
The story of using Bluetooth in a cruise ship to chat with family sounds like it’s pushing the limits of physics; communication in those conditions is highly unreliable.
Most of our phones have onboard a class 2 device (the lower range, 10-20m), the real world has walls to reduce the range, and a cruise ship's metal structure creates a Faraday cage effect.
In case of protests, a jammer will silence all devices.
Anyway, I was thinking that in extreme cases we could modify our devices for communication at a community level—for example, creating a Wi-Fi mesh network with routers, or some other long-range protocol (e.g., LoRa).
We did an evaluation on Bitchat as we had also built our own and needed to choose whether to continue with it or look at Bitchat instead. In the end, after the evaluation we chose Bitchat. See more here https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messag...
Seeing Jack committing to this repo is kinda wild to me. I also wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
> wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
> One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive
For the U.S., yes, I'm assuming Medicare/Medicaid. For overseas: Vietnam and Portugal have affordable systems you can pay into, with private insurance options above that at $1,200 and $5,000 a year.
My health insurance (self employed, high CoL area USA, healthy/not old) is 6k$/yr. Kind of blows up that $18k/yr idea. I don't think it gets that much better if you live in a low CoL area.
For Portugal the "free" healthcare is extremely generous to anyone staying there, regardless if citizens or not. It does lose money, but then again Germany always pays the bill.
American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.
> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings
Wealth versus liquidity. I'm saying you sell everything you own, pay off your debts, and then take what's left to retire on. Someone with $10mm in home equity may still be strapped for cash on account of the mortgage.
My verdict is negative: BT has too limited a range. Can you communicate in a crowd? Yes, sure, the density of BT hosts can be very high, but can you imagine a crowd in the street communicating via messages instead of face-to-face? Can it handle communications for an entire city of a few million people with useful overhead? I strongly doubt it.
We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled.
So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them.
If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose.
We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.
You should be able to write a message and not rely on the recipient being available when you press send. You should also be able to run nodes to cache messages for longer, and opt in to holding messages for a greater time period. This would among other things allow couriers between disjoint groups of users.
this is prob the 100th time ive read about bitchat here, and the comments are largely the same (use briarchat, none of these really work that well, i dont like jack dorsey, etc) every time.
but this is interesting. and i agree strongly with this: "While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage."
i suppose events like iran are really making me wonder if this stuff is possible it feels like anyone who's under the chokehold of regimes has completely run out of options, but even in America I'm getting the sweats wondering if there's going to be a time where such techs are needed. from what i gather none of these decentralized p2p messengers work well at all, but I also haven't truly tried. I can think of some moments that would've been viable test grounds though. Was at Outsidelands festival in San Fran and cell service was pretty much DOA due to the volume of people trying to hit the same tower(s). Even airtags which everyone in the group had on their beltloop weren't working.
Just take what's there and include the obvious next steps:
- Meshtastic and Meshcore ability to use relay nodes for long range BLE networks (Briar doesn't allow)
- Store and hold encrypted messages, as noted above.
- Ability to route through the internet, prioritize routing methods, disable internet routing, etc.
- Ability to self-host server for online relays (similar to Matrix)
I do like the store and forward idea, though a thought on that is that while it makes sense for DM's, it makes less sense for group chats, which, being real time, make the shelf life of messages a bit short. It makes good sense for forum like content though. I think so far Bitchat has treated this as a bit out of scope, at least at this stage of development, and it is a reason that indeed, Briar is still quite relevant.
Bitchat only just recently even added ad hoc wifi support, so it's still very early days.
why wouldn't encryption be a part of recipe here rendering government acquisition of such a cache moot?
If you want to protect older messages you can have the user enter a passphrase when they are in a physically safe situation. But that is only really practical for media like email. Good for organizing the protest but perhaps not so great at the protest.
>At its core, BitChat leverages the Noise Protocol Framework (specifically, the XX pattern) to establish mutually authenticated, end-to-end encrypted sessions between peers.
If I understand correctly, this would still be true if the recipient is connected.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_and_forward
All of this is solved with the store-and-forward model that you highlight.
A Lora dongle seems to be better than BT, though potentially incriminating.
Find My and air tags was already a huge success because of the ubiquitous nature of iPhones.
Apple could add this to iPhone, sell it as privacy focussed. Let you message anyone in your iMessage contacts with a new bubble colour. Propagate over Bluetooth when you don't have internet.
I can see a snazzy Apple reveal for this showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium, and then for the meme factor, 2 astronauts on a space walk. It writes itself.
> Showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium
Stadiums will still max out the pipe out of the local area, so I suspect it wouldn't help much. Festivals and cruise ships, where you want to reach people who are nearby (and at a festival, you might even have a good idea via gps which peers are better) are in desperate need of this and idk why apple didnt solve it years ago.
If there is a decentralised system that doesn’t require infrastructure , what is left to monetise?
Low latency, high bandwidth
Google BT Chat. Android B Chat. Google Relay.
And Microsoft can get on board, too. With Microsoft Teams Decentralised For School and Work.
And natural disasters like in Jamaica https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becom...
how do you know when the messaging app is broken, and how do you know when bluetooth is just exercising its ability to hate mankind?
The real obstacles here are political, not technical, as evidenced by the complete absence of any built-in solution that could be so useful in both everyday life (messaging a family member on the same plane when sitting separately, national park trips etc.) and emergencies.
We literally got smartphone-to-satellite comms now, but we're lacking the most barebones peer-to-peer functionality.
Apparently it's an optional part of Bluetooth 5, so not necessarily supported. However I just checked my phone (Pixel 8) and it is supported. You can check in the nRF Connect app.
https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/pos...
Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you? Seems like bluetooth is the perfect way to communicate for devices that are close to each other.
>Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you?
Why would that matter? Use Signal to protect the content, or use Cwtch to protect content and metadata. If you need to exchange secret communications that mustn't go through some server, why not discuss f2f with no phones around? You'd also eliminate attack vectors where your (chances are, Chinese Android) device spies on you, as well as anyone who has compromised it to read messages from screen.
Reliability? Why should we want to centralize things unnecessarily? It's nice as a fallback but then so too is P2P.
You shouldn't need any kind of permission to send a picture to your mum sitting next to you on the sofa.
For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless, not much I can do on it, might as well sue a purpose built device. They're also very cheap.
Even better if Nextel still worked on phones (but without service).
Projects like this one are a step towards fixing that. Personally I choose to keep both street and topographical maps of the entire continent locally on my phone. There are plenty of uses for a computer without a WAN connection.
And if nothing else, you can always rupture the battery and start a fire :-)
I imagine in a situation like Iran, carrying a backpack full of WiFi gear to stay connected to the meshnet is a red flag.
Establishing a bunch of base stations is likely to raise red flags too.
It's pretty trivial for a nation-state that is jamming GPS to go around and jam WiFi or analyze WiFi spectrum for a meshnet operating in and around a protest area.
If I need to have all 4 members of the family meet me at the pool, first I need to go find each one of them. They could all be at different place. And then tell them individually to meet me at the pool? Is that the better solution you are proposing?
Oops! You (unintentionally?) make it sound like protests are illegal.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-democracy-exist-witho...
They're definitely effective when most of the country wants the government out, but by that point a vote would certainly do just as well, and with fewer flying bricks.
They also serve to draw attention to issues that aren't showing up on the ballot for whatever reason. The system doesn't always work in an ideal way. To that end protests are supposed to be annoying to those who don't care.
Voting does not allow to express that a certain issue is politically important to you.
They are also a good communication tool for the world to see what the people are struggling with.
technically possible but rather redundant and in most cases pointless. (yes, there are exceptions)
so i rather strongly disagree. 99% of my use of the internet is to talk to people across the globe. it's its primary use case. the example you mention is a fringe application, useful to a tiny minority.
"the network remains functional during internet outages"
that strongly implies that i can use this app to replace other apps that use the internet. but i can't, because it does not allow long distance communication the way internet based apps do.
so for 99% of my needs this app is not helping me. it does not make me independent of the internet. i have been in places where the internet was cut off due to political turmoil. and i have friends who have that happen to them. in all cases the main challenge was the lack of long distance communication. local communication was barely affected.
sms and phone still worked, and in fact the app that would have helped is one that can route data connections via sms and phone calls. like old acoustic modems.
infrastructure independence at a local level is nice, but much less serious or critical than independence for long distance communication. and long distance already starts at a few km.
There was no signal in the remote Irish hostel so it was the perfect way to send messages covertly in the dormitory.
Fun night!
[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
Would that actually happen? No, but it's an interesting thought experiment
Like I said definitely not practical for messaging but I think something along these lines is how airtags work?
Text based messaging ala IRC? Just how quickly and how much do you type? A few hundred KiB exchanged between nodes only every 10 seconds or so ought to be able to accommodate thousands of simultaneous users in most scenarios. The impact on battery life should be far less than using a bluetooth headset.
A messaging system that often takes hours or days to get messages to the receiver is fairly useless and people will continue to prefer centralised systems, so there's a severe chicken-and-egg problem to solve there before anything like this can work
When I enable WiFi calling on my phone that doesn't preclude it connecting to a cell tower.
Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc.
Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other.
300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.
https://meshtastic.liamcottle.net/
Often one and the same since the first thing those in power try to do is make various activities by protestors illegal
- You want to check in with people around you about what to do - You want to check on the health of your family, from whom you were separated
I'd rather use Briar (https://briarproject.org/)
https://berty.tech/features
>iOS doesn’t allow apps to fork subprocesses. While on the desktop Tor is running as a separate process, on iOS Tor is hacked to run as a thread inside the app itself. Therefore, you can’t have a system-wide Tor process like desktop and Android. If Tor is running in one app, and you open a different one, it’s not automagically going to start using Tor.
https://www.quora.com/How-effective-is-the-Tor-app-for-iPad-...
In both cases I think these may be characteristics of healthy judgment.
Please view my participation in this discussion as certified proof of the objective verification of my moral essence. I hereby claim superiority now and forever over JD and any such users of said technologies. Sincerely and respectfully (without any possible hints of objectionableness), the undersigned.
I'll tell you a story.
Usain Bolt, the world 100/200m recordman, is not faster than cheeta. He needs a motorbike or a car to be beat a cheeta. But even with a car or motorbike is unlikely is going to overtak a cheeta on the ground of savannah.
This to tell you are thinking about optimizations of a system while you need to choose the right system for the environment.
A 433 MHz based link and a strong modulation is much suitable solution than a BT class 2 device included in the phone.
And here the real hack, most of phones has an integrated FM receiver, higher sensibility than BT, a simple FM transmitter (88-108 MHz) and problem solved.
* I see LocalSend and LANDrop frequently suggested on HN but in my experience they rely on having a central Wifi router. No good.
* Android's QuickShare comes included by default, but it's buggy. Just yesterday it failed on me (I'm on an uncommunicated boat): it was defaulting to Bluetooth, so I had to reboot both phones to finally make it work over Wifi Direct. Not to speak about the "oh damn, you have an iPhone" scenario. Not ideal.
Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667491
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384
Tbf, if my government would be out to kill me for protesting, I'd use something that at least was security audited. Not to shit on bitchat, I haven't audited the code personally.
Do we have evidence of this? The only concrete claim made in that post is that Briar 'hit 252 points on Hacker News," which is orthogonal to if it's actually being used.
[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
Hard to imagine things like this getting much beyond the "cute" stage.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485342
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929358
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364146
Even without something fancy (e.g WiFi Direct, iptables on a rooted phone) you could have phones alternating between offering a network and promiscuously connecting to offered networks, then routing between these.
It's simple enough that I'd be surprised if nobody has done it, maybe because it's slow and power-hungry? I haven't tested setting up hotspots and switching networks from inside app logic, but afaik it's fine as long as you don't do both at the same time.
edit: Having thought about it for a minute, a DTN over WiFi Direct is probably the way to go. Establishing identity for signing||encryption might be tricky, but if you can arrange that in advance or just yolo it in plain text then should be straightforward. Can't find any prior art though. I'll let Codex have a go and report back.
A bit unfortunate naming, indeed.
I think they just ran out of funding and died with a whimper.
Like, he quit BlueSky because he wanted it to be completely unmoderated which is, frankly, asinine. His view of what “censorship” means exists in a world along with spherical cows and no bad actors.
If you want kilometers of range in wide open air, give anything lora based a try.
Jack makes cool stuff, but I fell off BlueSky and I have little desire to engage with the "community" on there. It's very echo-chambery like every social media and I feel it's mostly identical to X or Truth just a different echo chamber. It seemed like BlueSky was being sold as a solution to what happened with Twitter and I feel like it didn't make true on it's promise.
The story of using Bluetooth in a cruise ship to chat with family sounds like it’s pushing the limits of physics; communication in those conditions is highly unreliable. Most of our phones have onboard a class 2 device (the lower range, 10-20m), the real world has walls to reduce the range, and a cruise ship's metal structure creates a Faraday cage effect.
In case of protests, a jammer will silence all devices.
Anyway, I was thinking that in extreme cases we could modify our devices for communication at a community level—for example, creating a Wi-Fi mesh network with routers, or some other long-range protocol (e.g., LoRa).
A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
[1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/
For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.
For the U.S., yes, I'm assuming Medicare/Medicaid. For overseas: Vietnam and Portugal have affordable systems you can pay into, with private insurance options above that at $1,200 and $5,000 a year.
Wealth versus liquidity. I'm saying you sell everything you own, pay off your debts, and then take what's left to retire on. Someone with $10mm in home equity may still be strapped for cash on account of the mortgage.
We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled.
So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them.
If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose.
We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.