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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is more of an anti-censorship thing. Most useful in areas where somebody turns off the Internet for political reasons.

A really reliable low-bandwidth emergency network would be more useful. Something that forwards short text messages via phone to phone WiFi until they reach some place with more connectivity would be helpful in emergencies.

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> This is more of an anti-censorship thing. Most useful in areas where somebody turns off the Internet for political reasons.

Yup, that's exactly the only use case I'm targeting (I'm the author of Awala)

> A really reliable low-bandwidth emergency network would be more useful. Something that forwards short text messages via phone to phone WiFi until they reach some place with more connectivity would be helpful in emergencies.

That's also useful, but I'm not sure about either option being more useful than the other. These are very different problems within the realm of offline comms.

> Something that forwards short text messages via phone to phone WiFi until they reach some place with more connectivity would be helpful in emergencies.

Even in non-emergencies this would be extremely useful! Bluetooth LE has hundreds of meters of device-to-device range on the newer modulation schemes and would be excellent for this; low-frequency things like LoRa would be even better and could probably easily incorporated into phones, given that mobile networks use adjacent frequencies and the power amplifiers are probably already there.

It's a real shame that Apple has been curbing even the one P2P communications tool deployed at scale (Airdrop) supposedly out of censorship concerns, and given that, I unfortunately don't see something like "P2P iMessage" becoming a thing any time soon.

The challenge with out-of-band RF networks in certain situations is that they can be triangualted by a hostile power. In places like Ukraine, that can trigger indiscrimante artillery or rocket fire onto civilians, for example. In China that can get people disapeared. Sometimes sneakernet is safer and more secure.

Sure, but that's not the threat model being discussed.

Right. I'm thinking North Carolina floods in populated areas. Even if nearby cell towers are out, there are probably enough phones around to pass short text messages out to an area with network connectivity.

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