AnarchismIsCool
AnarchismIsCool on Hacker News
They also claim to be a potential candidate for a next gen Air Force One.
That's the game with aerospace startups though. The CEO gets everyone wrapped around a "vision" for some gonna-save-humanity green peace machine (insert obligatory disaster response mission) and then once everyone is hooked you look up one day from your cruise missile design and wonder WTF just happened...
Source: have worked for several of these kinds of startups, have seen this happen pretty much everywhere.
It's dependent on the speed of sound, which is only dependent on temperature, not specifically altitude contrary to popular belief.
Why is everyone trying to ackshewally this? The stat's are publicly available. Aircraft are optimized for a particular speed range and that impacts the designed cruising speed as well as Vs and VNE.
If you're not technical, signal is hands down the best solution.
If you have a group that's going to something and you are willing to take some extra steps, something like matrix/briar/simplex/whatever setup with a self hosted instance provides you with the knowledge that all the infrastructure is under your control and that the feds just aren't going to have the time to sit down and figure out how this shit works.
The thing this thread is wildly missing the point on is unless you off a ceo or are a prolific organizer, the feds are systematic. They pick a set of techniques and technologies that cast the widest net possible with the money they have, then spend their time trying to nail people within that venn diagram. Yes, security through obscurity is not ideal in-and-of-itself, but combined with encryption and chaos, you can get much farther than using the same stuff everyone else has been using for a decade+. If you stay near the leading edge of tech the feds are a decade behind you, they still have years of threat briefing powerpoints to sit through before they can even think about implementing a countermeasure.
You could find 1000 CVEs in briar but if only a handful of of people at a demonstration are using it, the feds are still going to be sitting there beating their heads against signal because that's what they know how to do. If they ever find a single high severity CVE in signal, it's game over for everyone.
If you just want to talk to a few friends, don't bother with the default public mesh config, setup your own with encryption enabled.
Don't use longfast, use a higher speed setting if possible. Longfast will go 10km+ in optimal conditions and in a city environment, won't go any further than medfast.
Don't use the default radio channel, pick another one.
MAKE SURE ALL SYSTEMS ARE CONFIGURED IDENTICALLY - meshtastic is picky about all the radio settings being the same for bits to go through. It cannot figure out that the sender is using a faster/slower bitrate than you are so you will just get nothing. Do not attempt to use them until you've verified that all systems reliably send and receive messages in an uncontested environment. It's very easy to misconfigure meshtastic but once you do, fixing it in the field is going to be very difficult.
However...
The first rule of emergency communications is that if you can conceive of the need in the future, you need to practice using it now. Getting people to download the meshtastic app or figuring out a weird setting is a lot easier when you have working uncensored internet.
They're far dumber than most people give them credit, unless you off a rich guy they just don't have the resources to even think about penetrating anything but cell networks.
The encryption is pretty good, they're not likely to break it any time soon. The device MACs are whatever, unless you go to protests then go wandering around an urban area with the same radios for an extended period of time they're not going to do shit about it. They would have to geolocate from the RF emission and that's difficult to do to an accuracy necessary to uniquely identify you. Further, LoRa is still a bit of a pain to work with outside of using vendor chips which don't have non-cooperative DF capability so we're in the realm of expensive custom solutions from an RF shop which is far more money than the feds are willing to spend to dragnet a couple people.
He's selling weapons to both sides, the ai bullshit spam machine gun, and the anti spam identity verification system.
He knows what he's doing.
It is intensely frustrating that you need to be an aero embedded remote sensing SWE to defeat all this bullshit though. It used to be that having a basic knowledge of javascript was sufficient.
I wonder what this says about where the US is headed..........
If everyone is doing better objectively but have been hammered with propaganda so much that they subjectively believe they're doing worse, how do you square that?
I'd argue there's an easy solution in getting rid of the propagandists that are making everyone sad, so twitter, facebook etc.
The issue is that spectrum auctions are probably the least efficient and equitable way of distributing allocations available. There isn't a standard unit conversion between utility in dollars and bandwidth in Hz. There are individuals with enough money that they could buy their own national spectrum allocations just for their personal use alone.
That said, there are ways to maintain efficiency. TDMA can still be implemented in a distributed fashion using GPS or device collaboration, we just didn't do it with wifi because it would have been cost prohibitive 20 years ago.
For the sake of argument, a naive approach would be to generate a UTM grid square based on a fraction of some maximum reasonable wifi footprint, then the system in that grid would get a frequency allocation, and everything within that grid would time sync and TDMA on that frequency. Neighboring cells would get a different frequency and devices 2-3 cells over could start reusing frequencies. Obviously this doesn't work in an apartment high-rise but that's fixable.
I agree though, reasonable EIRP is something we need to talk about. For instance, there should probably be more of a logarithmic equation for calculating an EIRP alternative that allows more effective power in beam forming systems but to a sane limit. In other words, don't handicap people trying to be responsible with where they send signals but that doesn't mean you can build an absolute laser of an antenna array and start screaming at satellites coming over the hill behind your receiver.
It's a long game. Yeah, we can't just say "fuck it, everyone go nuts" tomorrow. There are satellite downlinks that cant be readily changed, equipment capex that needs to depreciate etc. What we should be doing is adding and expanding ISM space as aggressively as we reasonably can and refusing to issue new exclusive licenses without an extremely good reason (and probably exclusively for public/civil purposes).
It's also worth pointing out that we're about to lose about half of one of our ISM bands (915MHz, LoRa, Meshtastic, ELRS, various smart home protocols etc) due to the lovely folks at NextNav wanting dedicated bandwidth for a paywalled GPS alternative. It's by far the best ISM band in the US for long range unlicensed communications due to being in a sweet spot of path loss, penetration, and bandwidth.