What an awesome piece of technology. I've been wanting to create something similar, just on the technical merits. We have some pretty amazingly capable technology these days, but so much of it relies on IP infrastructure, which is fine when things work and you are either aligned with your government, or live in a society where there are strong checks and balances on government overreach.
The thing that I really like about the approach taken by OP is that it AFAIK is broadcast-only, up to a certain radius. The hard part in mesh networking is routing, and broadcast sidesteps that
I looked into Meshtastic a while ago and they use AES with no authentication tags. Also decryption happens on the LoRa device, which is a lot easier to crack with physical access compared to my phone. Even if you delete the messages it's still possible to decrypt sniffed LoRa traffic if, at some point in the future, one device gets captured.
I'd rather the protocol gets updated so the crypto key can stay on the phone.
I guess if a serious audit is done then it could be a nice solution. I would love to read more technical details about it, especially how it can be sure the messages are transmitted to the good person.
Same. I once registered bithole.com because I wanted a better email address then what I had at yahoo.com...and I realized my mistake as I was typing it on my resume. This feels like a similar mistake.
This will be very interesting if they can conquer the distribution issue.
During the Hong Kong protests I recall several such solutions were created, but the dominant thing ended up being airdrop because it is what so many people already had locked and loaded.
This gives me the same vibe as OLPC. We had these places where people didn't even have electricity, running water, or public sanitation, yet some nerds at MIT thought (?) to themselves, "Hey, you know what these people need? Laptops!"
But even worse, you can install it from App Store or Google Play! Israeli territory or Israeli territory! What will these dipshits do next? Send the Palestinians some more pagers out of Budapest?
Other than the cold start problem which isn't discussed (what's the userbase size in Gaza?), the main argument for Bitchat (or any other off-grid network such as Meshtastic, Briar, etc.) in Gaza when mainstream E2E encrypted messaging apps already exist and are widely used, is to not be dependent on Israel for cell service.
While I do really like the idea of off-grid networks in general but for this use case, is it really that hard for a state actor to jam Bluetooth (or all ~2.4GHz communication) on a large scale?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 72.5 ms ] threadRepeaters/Router can, if you put a bit of love in to highly efficient 3.3V generation, forever an a 6V solar cell and a 18650 LiPo.
I've tested 60km with a 868MHz LoRa station using a shabby 5dBi omni antenna. Just run out of hills to test more.
But not as easy to use as BLE(+BLE Meshing) which is basically integrated into every smartphone.
I'd rather the protocol gets updated so the crypto key can stay on the phone.
How does that translate to local vernacular?
I guess if a serious audit is done then it could be a nice solution. I would love to read more technical details about it, especially how it can be sure the messages are transmitted to the good person.
During the Hong Kong protests I recall several such solutions were created, but the dominant thing ended up being airdrop because it is what so many people already had locked and loaded.
But even worse, you can install it from App Store or Google Play! Israeli territory or Israeli territory! What will these dipshits do next? Send the Palestinians some more pagers out of Budapest?
While I do really like the idea of off-grid networks in general but for this use case, is it really that hard for a state actor to jam Bluetooth (or all ~2.4GHz communication) on a large scale?
My problem is that when you are actually locally near someone you don't really need live chat; and if you're far, it might become too unstable to use.
But I might be wrong!