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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
by maqp 9mo ago
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.
- melting_snow 9mo agoI see two use cases: * Communication between protestors * Illegal activities, but here I can imagine that bluetooth range is too small
- reddalo 9mo agoI remember when Telegram had a "Nearby" feature. I remember seeing many not-so-legal activities around me, even in the range of 1 km.
- thijson 9mo agoI 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.
- catlifeonmars 9mo ago> Communication between protestors > Illegal activities Often one and the same since the first thing those in power try to do is make various activities by protestors illegal
- 3RTB297 9mo agoThe 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.
- maqp 9mo agoIs this LoRa BT network thing something that actually exists? Is there a coverage map?
- c16 9mo agoThere are yes for Meshtastic. This map seems to have the highest coverage of people sharing their nodes, but in reality in my area there are significantly more which are not shown on the map. https://meshtastic.liamcottle.net/ https://meshtastic.liamcottle.net/
- maqp 9mo agoWhoa, at the same time it's negligible but also a LOT more than I expected. Thanks!
- c16 9mo agoAbsolutely, from Amsterdam I can sometimes hop all the way into Germany, The Hague, Haarlem. That doesn't mean my messages will always travel that far. Far from it, but it does mean that an identification message _has_ made it from there. On average there's around 80-100 nodes that I can connect to.
- Almondsetat 9mo agoThis is simply an app that allows to communicate through bluetooth locally. Why are you saying its only two use cases are protesting and criminals?
- melting_snow 9mo agoIm not saying that those are the only use cases, but I really see that there multiple other apps that make the "normal" communication much easier.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- yaris 9mo agoAny 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.
- oreilles 9mo agoOr planes.
- em-bee 9mo agobut i use mobile internet because of the distance. how does bluetooth help with that?
- Almondsetat 9mo agoWhat is your implication? This app is not for talking across the globe with people.
- em-bee 9mo agobut 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.
- yaris 9mo agoThe 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.
- gchokov 9mo agoThis particular one supports mesh, so the range could be way way higher.
- behnamoh 9mo agoIn Iran right now... Internet shut down while the regime keeps slaughtering people at the order of 4x9/11.
- sgt 9mo agoI think you need to try to get MUCH more video and photo footage out. I heard thousands have been killed.
- throwaway758439 9mo agoInternet is exploited by US as a tool for regime change [1] in coordination with sponsored on the ground terrorism. [1] [1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY
- throwawayheui57 9mo agoHey 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.
- Ajedi32 9mo agoAh yes, of course it's entirely America's fault Iran's citizens are revolting against the despotic theocratic regime currently in power. Because surely nobody would organically want regime change when the ayatollah is such a nice guy. Better cut off internet access to the entire country, can't have our citizens reading that terrorist propaganda. They can get all their information from reliable sources instead, like our state-sponsored TV stations.
- behnamoh 9mo agoNo, the internet is shut down by the islamic regime, not the US!
- ShroudedNight 9mo agoFor the audience: I had never heard of Brian Berletic previously. In an attempt to understand what this person's undisclosed conflicts of interest were, I found numerous reports of him painting the Myanmar Junta in a positive light: https://www.reddit.com/r/InformedTankie/comments/ufq4oq/a_conversation_with_brian_berletic_from_the_news/ https://www.reddit.com/r/InformedTankie/comments/ufq4oq/a_co... https://forsea.co/bangkok-based-conspiracy-blogger-brian-berletic-spreads-fake-news-about-forsea-as-a-tool-of-us-imperialism-in-southeast-asia/ https://forsea.co/bangkok-based-conspiracy-blogger-brian-ber... There's a certain event-horizon where bitterness taints / skews perspective enough that even what would otherwise be helpful insights becomes so costly to disentangle from grudge-extrapolation that it's not obvious if any of it ends up being worth the cost of entry. At least to me, this person's work seems well beyond that point.
- zenmac 9mo agoOne 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.
- nly 9mo agoIt's a cruiseship. Your family are at the nearest bar. Just get off your ass and go and give them the message.
- marliechiller 9mo agoThis seems a bit reductive. You could use this argument for any small town
- appplication 9mo agoIt was how things were for a long time, and in a lot of ways it was better.
- cheema33 9mo ago> 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?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- exe34 9mo agoI've checked, they're not there. Now what?
- bcraven 9mo agoBack in the 2010s I used the 'Notes' applications to send messages via Bluetooth on my Sony Ericsson to chat with a girl in the next bunk. There was no signal in the remote Irish hostel so it was the perfect way to send messages covertly in the dormitory. Fun night!
- pbiggar 9mo agoConsider 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
- ifwinterco 9mo agoIn 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
- maqp 9mo agoSo 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?
- ifwinterco 9mo agoYes, 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?
- fc417fc802 9mo ago> definitely not practical for messaging Text based messaging ala IRC? Just how quickly and how much do you type? A few hundred KiB exchanged between nodes only every 10 seconds or so ought to be able to accommodate thousands of simultaneous users in most scenarios. The impact on battery life should be far less than using a bluetooth headset.
- ifwinterco 9mo agoSorry 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
- lxgr 9mo agoBluetooth 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.
- IshKebab 9mo agoHuh 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.
- ostacke 9mo agoIt falls quite close to the "super ideal scenarios" you described, but Nordic did a real world test and got a range of 1300 m using coded phy. https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/posts/testing-long-range-coded-phy-with-nordic-solution-it-simply-works-922075585 https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/pos...
- IshKebab 9mo agoInteresting, so it roughly doubles the range. So we might be looking at like 50-100 m in the real world I guess.
- lxgr 9mo agoRegular 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.)
- jojobas 9mo agoWhen your Ayatollah decides to shut down internet and you are near people you don't really know in an urban environment?
- kozika 9mo agoNow that Wi-Fi Aware is supported on iOS, I think supporting it should significantly expand the transmission range.
- ellis0n 9mo agoI have seen a test of bitchat using radio communication over a distance of more than 5 km. There were also other methods to extend BT range.
- elicash 9mo agoAsking "what good is this?" in a dismissive tone should be against the rules in a space like Hacker News.
- jcims 9mo agoI've wanted something like this numerous times for long flights. I also have recently got into caving, which usually results in 5-50 people camping over weekends in rural Kentucky. No signal most of the time.
- einaralex 9mo agoI was at a music festival last summer, and the phone network was completely down. I could use BitChat to find my mates.