News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by lxgr on Friday May 07, 2021 @04:00PM (#27080246)
Amazing, I've been long hoping for a popular messenger to adopt seamless mesh/p2p integration.

Being able to chat in a train/on an airplane without wifi, between a convoy of cars without cell signal etc. seems like a no-brainer, especially with medium-distance unlicensed spectrum radios becoming more widely available.

I was always expecting Apple to enable this for iMessage first, but maybe this is something that can help Matrix get more traction.

Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by the_duke on Friday May 07, 2021 @04:34PM (#27080566)
Sharing files is also a great use case.

We still don't have a good cross-platform way of doing that.

Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by cyphar on Saturday May 08, 2021 @02:45AM (#27084565)
It would be great to have an mobile version of magic wormhole, though sadly I'm not an app developer so while I would really like to implement it, it's outside of my skillset.
Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by throwaway82003 on Saturday May 08, 2021 @03:25AM (#27084776)
For Android, there is one from Peter Sanford (psanford on HN). He implemented the Go version of magic-wormhole, which I think is used by people like tptacek. So I guess it can be trusted.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.sanford.wor...

https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william-mobile

One disadvantage is that current magic wormhole doesn't support resume but they plan to implement it.

Another app that you might have heard of is croc, but it doesn't seem to be secure:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27056746

Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by lxgr on Saturday May 08, 2021 @06:16AM (#27085680)
The biggest problem here is that Apple unfortunately doesn't provide any API for peer-to-peer wi-fi access [1], as far as I know.

This means that all solutions will either require sender and receiver being connected to the same wi-fi network (possibly provided by one of the devices involved, which is pretty awkward and also has its downsides like unintentionally sharing the internet connection [2]), or resorting to Bluetooth LE (resulting in extremely slow connection speeds not really suitable for file transfer).

Finally, any solution requiring installing a third-party app has an inherent growth impediment given that sharing the app itself is all but impossible when offline.

[1] Wi-Fi Direct would seem to be ideal for this use case but is Android only, and even there does not seem to reliably work on all devices. Even Google's native AirDrop alternative resorts to using mobile data in some circumstances/device combinations.

[2] It seems possible to avoid this given that the Android device is providing the network: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/Wif...

Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by neilalexander on Saturday May 08, 2021 @07:50AM (#27086285)
Apple do provide two APIs for peer-to-peer Wi-Fi access — one of them is the Multipeer Connection Framework and the other is the NetService API with the “includesPeerToPeer” parameter. This only really helps us when talking to other Apple devices though as the AWDL protocol is proprietary.

The Wi-Fi Alliance have been trying to standardise something not dissimilar to AWDL under the name “Wi-Fi Aware” (NAN/Neighbour Awareness Networking), but it is not widely implemented and will probably never be supported by Apple either, limiting cross-platform potential.

Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by Arathorn on Saturday May 08, 2021 @07:37AM (#27086179)
Apple provide AWDL, which Pinecone implements.
Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by psanford on Saturday May 08, 2021 @01:15PM (#27088989)
Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by lxgr on Saturday May 08, 2021 @07:31AM (#27086144)
Oh, if you simply want to send files from a command line utility to a browser and vice versa, may I recommend WebWormhole [1]?

There is both a webapp (which works on mobile browsers) and a command line client. The command line client can even display ASCII QR codes for easy access on mobile devices.

The only problem is long-running background uploads/downloads, but I don't think a mobile app could help there (at least on iOS).

[1] https://webwormhole.io/

Re:The Pinecone Overlay Network by eternityforest on Sunday May 09, 2021 @08:35AM (#27095462)
I've been mostly ignoring and periodically checking back on Matrix to see when they get real decentralized identity and the ability to run with only RasPi grade hardware.... Hasn't happened yet but I'm still hopeful!

Applications are definitely the big problem with mesh. No point in using mesh if the only applications either don't support it well at all, or are such bandwidth hogs you wouldn't want to use them on anything but fiber.

I have wikis and notetaking mostly working in a Yggdrasil aware manner in my HardlineP2P app(Only on the github version for now), eventually I am hoping to add chat and social media.