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Comment by iseanstevens | Hacker News Reader

Also Meshtastic.org is a cheap (various <$50 options) open source LoRa based hardware bridge (or standalone device) that can be used with an app over bluetooth (or WiFi web interface).

It supports strong encryption layer and over 1 km/mile per “hop” in most circumstances.

Designed originally for off grid, it’s very flexible and pretty polished.

Abstracts your phone into a UI. Has a whole ecosystem behind it. I’ve been using it for festivals and tracking my vehicles (high theft area) for years.

Very handy should infra not be available. Should be great for protests also :)

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I spend a lot of time in the RF space and Meshtastic is by far the most mature system out there for instant ad-hoc secure digital communications.

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.

This would depend on your phone being able to permanently disable its radio, right? I don't know if I would trust my phone well enough for that, I would be worried even in airplane mode about it making some small beacon checks.

There are a few devices floating around with a hardware switch built in. If you use a Pixel, grapheme OS is probably pretty trustworthy so you at least no there's nothing nefarious down to the OS level.

But yeah, in general if you take a phone just assume it's tracking you or at least making it possible for those with access to know you where there.

There are Meshtastic devices with keyboards that don't require a phone

Do you have any information about the privacy achievable by Meshtastic?

From a quick glance it looks like it‘s using static NodeIDs derived from the Bluetooth MAC address in the always unencrypted Packet Header.

So not only can you sniff these messages from far away at greatly simplified complexity when comparing to cellular communication, but also tie it to the hardware that you carry with you.

Mesh networks sure have its uses, but I‘d be wary of their offered privacy in the presence of adversaries you could be facing at protests!

For the next few years it's fine. Functionally the feds just don't have the infrastructure to care about Meshtastic. In a decade maybe that'll change but two decades in the best they can do against drones is receive the ID DJI manufactured ones voluntarily broadcast and lookup the owner if they registered it correctly.

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.

LORA is a such a painfully low bitrate the best you would get is some text. I think 20/50 kbps in absolute best case, more like ~1000 bits per second.

1000 bits/s is still way faster than anyone can type a text message.

how have you been able to use it at festivals? I tried it once and maybe the default settings are terrible but no communication could be achieved. There were dozens of other nodes that it found in a tight space and I think the entire network was saturated with pings/messages that I couldn't get mine to work. Are there settings to change that get around network saturation issues?

Four rules:

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.

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