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Comment by ryanisnan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Exactly. With Chat Control being revived again in the EU, various VPN bans being proposed in US states, and ID verification rolling out seemingly everywhere, this kind of tech may end up being more useful than people expect. If it works in the extremely adversarial environment of a warzone, it should work fine here.

How is this a solution to Chat Control and EU law? If this is used, governments will simply demand Apple and Google get the app declared forbidden, which both have done to apps for many reasons.

Worse: they might demand a list of people who have it installed (and this violates the Chat Control law of course).

Even worse: this app turns out to be written by a security agency or scammers and starts exploiting people.

If they are demanding a list of people who have apps installed, you have two options: lie down like a dog or get in the streets and fight. If you think it’s going to get to that point, you need tools like this even more.

Why is chat control controversial? It seems like the same people afraid of this are the same people outraged when people then use private chat to do bad things.

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

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