4 ms·

So 'round about 100 years ago, amateur radio was starting to ramp up after the WW I shut down. It actually meets your definition. Of course, every node requir

So 'round about 100 years ago, amateur radio was starting to ramp up after the WW I shut down. It actually meets your definition. Of course, every node requires some infrastructure, and the ionosphere as a long-haul back-bone has its vagaries, but peer-to-peer over HF radio is a well understood technology. Now, for certain, ionospheric channels are very challenging for digital communications. Anything north of a few kilobits per second is probably a non-starter. But it would be sufficient for tactical comms, print news, and a few small images. It strikes me that an Arduino "shield" (it would be more the size of a book) could make an interesting HF gateway node, within the bandwidth limitations. It could be built in ham-radio friendly countries, and allowed to leak into less tolerant regimes -- although in some countries possession would probably come at considerable personal risk. The actual field-radio node would not need huge power and a great antenna -- because radio nodes can be asymmetric a larger station in a safe country with big antennas and a big amp could make up for a pip-squeak field node.

JoshTriplett 7y ago
Amateur radio is great for last-ditch communications in a disaster, but it is not in any way covert or safe for people in a hostile regime to use; a bit of direction-finding equipment will easily track down anyone using it.
- dbcurtis 7y ago
  Agreed. Covert radio ops requires non-trivial op-sec.
pmoriarty 7y ago
I like the radio idea. It brings to mind the good old days of pirate radio stations. As for the objections regarding the of locating radio transmissions by adversaries, as technology becomes cheaper and more miniaturized, it will become more and more feasible to have very small, very cheap, disposable repeaters, which could be deployed on mobile, relatively anonymous transport (like flying drones, trains, and ships), and perhaps automatically activated long after their owner has left.. and perhaps activated only in case of emergencies, like this blackout. Individuals wishing to communicate through these repeaters could send very short and rare transmissions from different, and maybe also mobile locations, so that finding them will be much more difficult. Unfortunately, if adversaries are aware of these devices (and they would be were such devices to ever become widely deployed), they could still either jam them or perform a denial of service attack by flooding them with their own transmissions. Some sort of steganography might be of use here, but I'm not sure how effective it would be if lots of people know about it, which is a requirement for any widely deployed technology.

JoshTriplett 7y ago

Amateur radio is great for last-ditch communications in a disaster, but it is not in any way covert or safe for people in a hostile regime to use; a bit of direction-finding equipment will easily track down anyone using it.

dbcurtis 7y ago
Agreed. Covert radio ops requires non-trivial op-sec.

pmoriarty 7y ago

I like the radio idea. It brings to mind the good old days of pirate radio stations. As for the objections regarding the of locating radio transmissions by adversaries, as technology becomes cheaper and more miniaturized, it will become more and more feasible to have very small, very cheap, disposable repeaters, which could be deployed on mobile, relatively anonymous transport (like flying drones, trains, and ships), and perhaps automatically activated long after their owner has left.. and perhaps activated only in case of emergencies, like this blackout. Individuals wishing to communicate through these repeaters could send very short and rare transmissions from different, and maybe also mobile locations, so that finding them will be much more difficult. Unfortunately, if adversaries are aware of these devices (and they would be were such devices to ever become widely deployed), they could still either jam them or perform a denial of service attack by flooding them with their own transmissions. Some sort of steganography might be of use here, but I'm not sure how effective it would be if lots of people know about it, which is a requirement for any widely deployed technology.