14 ms·

Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

• 1oooqooq 1y ago
  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.
• feiss 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    I had seen a documentary about how people in cuba used lora devices to play multiplayer games, basically they made their own local internet.
• deleted 1y ago
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• aamederen 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    I host many services from a small rack in my home using FreeBSD jails.
  • greybox 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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/ https://library.kiwix.org/
• nunobrito 1y ago
  OK but kind of outdated and incomplete. Meshcore is largely competing with Meshtastic nowadays: https://meshcore.co.uk/ 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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.
• deleted 1y ago
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• kcaseg 1y ago
  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=8WRNTkbRuCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdHB_5Z_CFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdHB_5Z_CFE
• specproc 1y ago
  I read the title and the first few sentences as resilience _to_ rather than resilience _for_ the internet.
• charcircuit 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    I guess being dependent on the daily mood of some random guy in Texas isn't really resilience.
    • powgpu 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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_ 1y ago
    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.
• qwertox 1y ago
  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 (~3€/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 1y ago
    freifunk.net is building these mesh networks but based on volunteers without a fee. Big communities have thousands of nodes.
• yannickdoteu 1y ago
  any people around Leuven, Belgium that want to start a club?
• lljk_kennedy 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
      • killerstorm 1y ago
        Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day
        • BLKNSLVR 1y ago
          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/ https://air-stream.org/ Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.
• swiftcoder 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Electricity is not really an expensive resource for communications. You need like a single rooftop to provide WiFi for the entire village.
      • nunobrito 1y ago
        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 1y ago
          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 1y ago
            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.
• blueflow 1y ago
  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, Bürgernetz, 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 1y ago
    It sounds like the author is envisaging a system that works without power (as long as the batteries last).
    • lambdaone 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  * 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-for-Meshtastic-p-5913.html 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/ 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 1y ago
    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/sensecap/card-tracker/ https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/seeed-studio/se... Its range is also much worse than the T-Echo's.
    • estsauver 1y ago
      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.
• lormayna 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    yeah it is kinda like starting your own internet infrastructure. For protest there are already bluetooth messenger for that: https://briarproject.org https://briarproject.org but yeah it is only for Android.
    • nunobrito 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 (à la AOL CDROM !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB dongles.
  • bkummel 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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.
• amelius 1y ago
  > a flood-forward mesh protocol Is this scalable?
  • M2Ys4U 1y ago
    In a word, no.
• lormayna 1y ago
  This module from SeedStudio is perfect for a small portable node. https://www.seeedstudio.com/Wio-SX1262-with-XIAO-ESP32S3-p-5982.html 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.
• adornKey 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • NoboruWataya 1y ago
    Mass hysteria arguably belongs on the list of Bad Things, but I don't think it is as likely to knock out your internet or power supply for a prolonged period. Maybe more of a reason for a Toilet Roll Resiliency Club.
    • adornKey 1y ago
      Mass Hysteria is seriously dangerous. A few years ago I've seen a full room of people applauding Military for ordering more tanks. ("Enough to have those shot down by Russia in the calculation"). And young German politicians being proud of it. They even said publicly "The best outcome of the Ukraine War would be reinstallment of the old German-Russian border." Germany has the potential to go full Nazi again... And the population is mostly crazy in a scary way "We need sirens", "We need bunkers", "How can I make my pupils go for a career in the army"... Instead of of investing time into making a mesh network. I'd like to see more energy spent on preventing real dangers. If people don't start going against the real troublemakers, loss of internet will be very low on the list of problems of the future. And still nobody I've ever seen in public speak or comment about climate has ever read any paper on atmosphere physics... Before you build a mesh network against climate change, people should better read at least a few papers about atmosphere physics first.
      • pharrington 1y ago
        Please explain yourself, downvoters!
        • mynegation 1y ago
          Commenting on voting is against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). To understand why your comment fares as it does, helps to re-read the guidelines in their entirety.
• deleted 1y ago
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• erremerre 1y ago
  Wouldn't having something like this, you automatically became a target in case of the case of war?
• dansmith1919 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        Good premise for a cyberpunk novel. I recommend keeping the weird chins though, because plastic surgery makes anything possible!
        • 1y ago
• Fokamul 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      "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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
  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)
• Elaris 1y ago
  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.
• Brendinooo 1y ago
  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?
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• aaron695 1y ago
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• lambdaone 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      "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!)
• xondono 1y ago
  Sounds like a reinvented HAM radio club to me
• jvanderbot 1y ago
  Just dropping a HAMWAN link for anyone who is interested in higher power / longer range links. https://hamwan.org/ https://hamwan.org/
• 1706213 1y ago
  I would use Reticulum instead of Meshtastic. https://reticulum.network 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    Nice, it took less than a minute to find a PDF of the docs. That's already more seriously "offline" than the alternatives.
• firesteelrain 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    The Gopher and (more recently) Gemini protocols are something like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://geminiprotocol.net/
• nancyminusone 1y ago
  >...all you hear is “Swan Lake” on repeat Have I missed the meme on this one? What does this mean?
  • te_chris 1y ago
    I assume an allusion to when there was a coup in the 90’s in Russia the govt put the ballet on tv
• pwndByDeath 1y ago
  Its been on HN before but its worth a repeat https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/ Its got more optimization for a low bandwidth LoRa without the brute force stuff of meshtastic
• alnwlsn 1y ago
  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/ 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 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
• __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt
    • __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    > to carry "internet" traffic on a filesystem in their pocket. What do you mean?
• esafak 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet [2] https://forum.amsat-dl.org/index.php?thread/4306-npr-vsat-ip-access-over-qo-100-wb/ https://forum.amsat-dl.org/index.php?thread/4306-npr-vsat-ip...
• 7373737373 1y ago
  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 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 1y ago
    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 ~€20) 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 1y ago
      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://youtube.com/watch?v=lYJFwXw1ZIc https://eu.store.ui.com/eu/en/category/wireless-ltu-5ghz/products/ltu-xr 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 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 https://youtube.com/watch?v=v30z-0bGbHQ
• deleted 1y ago
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• bb88 1y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v6UbC5blJU 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A7A-CSd3e4
• 6510 1y ago
  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.
• techgirl1637 1y ago
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• niczem 1y ago
  Meshtastic is fun but limited—more of a radio chat app than real mesh infrastructure. If you're serious about decentralized comms, check out Reticulum: https://reticulum.network https://reticulum.network It’s not limited to LoRa—Reticulum works over IP, serial, packet radio, or whatever you have. Delay-tolerant, multi-hop, encrypted, no servers needed. Still lots of work to do and apps to build, but the foundation is solid. Great talk from EH22: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking
  • genpfault 1y ago
    > Great talk from EH22: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking 404s for me. This[1] perhaps? Note trailing hyphen. [1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking- https://media.ccc.de/v/eh22-97-eggceptional-meshnetworking-
• protocolture 1y ago
  I was once doing a review of an ISP's emergency response documentation, and it was 1 page. All stakeholders were to report to the primary datacenter and begin restoring services. It only really accounted for a single risk (Outage with no physical hardware failure) and didnt account for the scope and presence of their network. When I flagged it with them, they added a second section for cyberattack that was also loosely defined. I really love the idea its the proposal itself I find odd. "Internety people" isnt really a well defined list of stakeholders. And I am struggling to figure out what outages could be handled by a group of undefined meshtastic users, especially with the overall tone that warfare might be involved. Really the work of network resilience begins before the bombs drop. And its basic stuff. Keep everything patched. Keep your physical infrastructure secure. Ensure your data is safe, and you implement security best practices. And thats a list of things that largely we know that ISP's dont do. Once thats done, every netadmin needs reliable OOB access to their networks. Now, OOB access might cease to function in this scenario. In which case, you are looking at ensuring that you have reliable physical access to your network. If you need cell service to communicate with your OOB solution, and it fails, dont also rely on cellular access to hands on techs. I dont know if Meshtastic is a useful solution here either, but having pre drilled emergency response plans so that qualified staff show up to the right locations for briefings/network access are crucial. Generators within reach of technicians, you might not be able to buy a generator during an incident. Console cables and tools already distributed. Of course this all costs money. Ultimately if you have no power, your peers dont have power, and theres an unspecified amount of physical damage (like a datacenter getting bombed) theres not going to be much you can do on a timescale that makes meshtastic make sense. If anything theres probably some room for a government solution. Propose a hardened communications channel for private sector network engineers. Make sure that access to government infrastructure comes with a requirement that you actually patch and secure your network. Begin any large scale internet infrastructure collapse by getting a list of available engineers and resources and working out the compensation later.
• Mila-Cielo 1y ago
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• whamlastxmas 1y ago
  Really tiring to see Trump injected into everything. The accusation that Trump is going to cut off access to American software companies is fear mongering with no basis in reality
• perlcommunity 1y ago
  Valarie must be an AI powered roomba, don't fall for it fellow humans.
• Dachmwr 1y ago
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