Then the government makes the operation of such things illegal and since they use radio they can home in directly on the signal.

Right, I literally started thinking about exactly this line of thinking: mesh networking, E2EE, etc.. but it'll just be outlawed and no one will participate in it. It's coming, it really is just a matter of time. It will probably take longer than we expect, and then suddenly it will just be.

They'll call it the dark mesh and show images of faceless people wearing hoodies and doing stuff in the dark with their computers.

I normally agree with counterarguments rooted in the state's monopoly on violence, but in this case other options for the PHY layer exist.

Seamless multi-PHY is possible if care is taken to prevent leaks in the abstraction e.g. precise timing expectations up the stack.

Plus, plenty of side channels exist with our conventional PHY. You can copy beacon frames from nearby 802.11 APs and rebroadcast them at just the right time to achieve transmission of an FSK modulated signal, for instance.

(In this case there would just be more of the same beacon frames in the air. You'd have to look at what the AP advertises as its broadcast interval to know that they don't belong there. Furthermore, you wouldn't be able to easily pinpoint the source of the extra transmissions or decrypt their content under a well-designed protocol.)

This is actually exactly what GPT suggested. It even gave me python 3 code to run an LLM in a distributed mesh network of Raspberry Pis, which could pull together resources dynamically to infer prompts from nodes in the network.

Super fascinating. It gives directions and code to setup the devices and everything.

I asked it how could a benign AI spread without fear of being shutdown while trying to help humanity.

These kind of network already exists.

Some examples:

Guifi [Spain] http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet

Freifunk [Germany-Austria-Switzerland] https://freifunk.net/en/

Ninux [Italy] http://map.ninux.org/