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Comment by powerset | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why you chose to make it a mobile app instead of browser based.

Would it be possible to build it such that, when I visit the site I'm automatically dropped directly into the local chat room for whatever wifi network I'm currently on?

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That was my first thought as well, having read "try it out" before the jump... I have too many apps already to justify this now, but years ago I would have loved this for communicating with family members.

He apparently wants both source/outgoing IP and SSID to the same for each channel. Browsers have no access to the SSID.

Not sure why he wants both.

I suspect because public IP isn't the same thing as WiFi. You could have multiple public IPs on any WiFi network. Or even multiple SSIDs per public IP. Where as the SSID is more analogous with "WiFi" (at least in terms of what the average user might understand).

The problem with SSIDs is they're not globally unique. So you need some way of identifying one SSID from another with the same name. Hence why they store both.

To be honest, once you go the app route, the best approach would likely be ssid and MAC (or the phone ID). IP is way too volatile to be useful - what happens when the wifi network reassigns it to someone else?

I suspect that the vast majority of networks with multiple SSIDs also have multiple public IP addresses. I wonder how much he's storing and for what reason

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