Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or without internet access

Re:Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or with... by loceng on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @06:39PM (#25935726)

I'd love someone with knowledge-experience with radio to chime into the feasibility of such a system, what the constraints and potential legality of it could be. I'd imagine a mesh network like this could be most useful during natural disasters that disable wired/powered communications, maybe for wartime anti-tyranny - however radio waves could be blocked/tracked and targeted afaik, so maybe not foolproof for that use case.

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Re:Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or with... by adrianpike on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @09:28PM (#25937349)

There's a few groups working on this in various forms.

Two ones I've been paying close attention to are; https://www.meshtastic.org/ http://disaster.radio/

Legality-wise can get complicated, there's only certain frequencies you're legally allowed to run encryption on, and then there's wrinkles around hardware and transmission power.

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Re:Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or with... by superkuh on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:42PM (#25936500)

Only[1] height above terrain matters for VHF radio and up. Unless you pay the big bucks for power and space on a tower or the top of some building, it doesn't matter how impressive your modulation gain is or how powerful your transmitter is or how high of gain your antenna is. Your software is barely relevant.

The thing that makes the cellphone mesh network work is that they spend lots of money getting their antennas up high above the terrain and getting power to them.

[1] Yes, there's sporadic e tranmission but it's just that, sporadic. And yes, there's troposcatter but that literally requires kilowatts and highly directional large antennas.

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Re:Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or with... by pabs3 on Thursday January 28, 2021 @02:37AM (#25939229)

See this "Roundup of Secure Messengers with Off-The-Grid Capabilities (Distributed/Mesh Messengers)":

https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10205-roundup-of-sec...

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Re:Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or with... by nemosaltat on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:05PM (#25936032)

I’ve been playing with Meshtastic and some ESP32s recently. Works like a charm, but no security other than “channels” and currently no iOS app. The Python API has a ton of features, and it seems like this could tie in nicely.

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Re:Berty: Peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or with... by bigiain on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @09:26PM (#25937339)

Ummm, I've not touched any of my Meshtastic devices for a few months, but I'm _reasonably_ certain everything other than the "default" channel is encrypted.

First ht on Google seems to agree: https://www.meshtastic.org/software/crypto.html

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