This should be a lesson for all of us. We should start building and maintaining lightweight mesh networks, just in case. We shouldn't take the world of cooperating ISPs and Meta and Cloudflare and Google and AWS for granted.
With tiny solar repeater that placed on a strategic hill you can cover lots of kilometers. Being sensitive down to -145dBm opens a lot of doors.
I was able to build energy harvester nodes that fit into 5cm x 5cm x 4cm boxes that roughly cost around 20€. Without energy harvesting capability with a normal TI BQ wide range charge controllers (that stuff costs $1.5-2.5@pcs and eats every power source up to 18V! With pseudo-MPPT!) you can bring the entire thing down to <<15€. That's mass producable throw-away stuff.
Currently available LoRa-gear is either USB-power optimized (looking at you Heltec) or just awfully overpriced as soon as a solar panel is attached to it.
If it's a self-contained, solar-powered node, it needs not be next to you, or to anyone. It should be safe and secure, to be of use during a natural disaster, or an outburst of violence.
Unless you plan to manually go up the hill with a flash drive each time.
The signals are difficult to spot once you are in some distance to the transmitter.
Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown. Thats' why it's happening in Iran. They want to disrupt the co-ordination of a coup, and their opponents only need to win in the short term after which it doesn't matter. In the US, the threat is censorship and tracking- suppression over the long term. Mesh networks are not great for that,because if you run a mesh network then you have declared yourself against the regime. Steganography may be better.
An amusing point is that secure steganography depends on redundancy with entropy- noise. A few years ago, it looked increasingly difficult because of lossy compression. Today, we're awash in randomly generated content, so it should be possible to make secure steganography quite high bandwidth. Although, it's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of it,because the randomness is the input to a diffusion model,not the output - you might need to run the model backwards to obtain your steganographic content. Which I guess is possible,although expensive.
It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters, but the point of the exercise is to prepare for the unimaginable.
The places where this happens, like Iran now, are in extremely different situations than anything in the US, or any other Western country.
That shouldn’t discourage people running meshes though.
Non American here observing from outside. Given the move in a few months from a normative western society to one in which heavily armed masked men raid homes and businesses [1] to racially profile [2] for mass imprisonment and deportation. Given the current governments explicit redefinition of political opponents as terrorists [3]. And finally given the extent to which three letter agencies are integrated into US telecommunications infrastructure [4][5]. It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vance-door-to-door-ice/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/09/supreme-cour...
[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/trumps-domestic-terrorism-memo-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
I hear that, but we are so dependent on network connectivity for commerce (and entertainment) here that there would be riots from a different subset of the population if they turned that off.
You can harass brown people and murder activists here, but if you turn off the TikTok spigot, disable access to finance, or frankly fuckin' DoorDash or Uber, people are going to have a meltdown. Modern life here just grinds to a halt without data services.
You're thinking nationally. Think smaller.
It's not tremendously hard to imagine the internet being selectively shut down in a state or city.
Look at the events of the past week. Now imagine the Insurrection Act being invoked in Minnesota, and the state's internet is cut off as Governor Walz's helicopter flees to Canada to avoid being arrested.
If you can't imagine that, remember that nobody could imagine COVID lockdown, either. We've shut down the national air system twice in the last 25 years. Unimaginable in 1999. Yet, here we are.
It's both strange and sad that this book doesn't seem to get much traction these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here
Trump is Windrip... or at least he would be, if he had his faculties about him. Even if you're a Trump supporter, you can't possibly go on denying that if you read this book.
I don't expect nationwide chaos and oppression, "Deus Ex"-style, any time soon, but we should be prepared to resist any local outbursts of it. Think local mobile networks blackouts and ISP POPs shutdowns, for instance.
Install the damn Briar app today, while it can be done trivially, and you have no use for it. It's like putting on a parachute before getting into a small plane: you plan to never use it, but if you would, there'd be no time to put it on when you're already in a free fall.
He has asked our NATO allies to help take over a NATO country's territory. This is what the American President does now. His delegation left the territory's administration in tears, and the US delegation stated afterwards that the US will take the territory.
He ordered federal officers to terrorize American cities, and a 37 year old white mom was shot 3 times in the face by one of them after she dropped her kid off at school. This is America. You seem to be missing perspective. What line has to be crossed for you?
Trump cares more about tariffing countries that don't support his Greenland conquest than the people rising up in Iran. Trump claims Ukraine is the impediment to peace with Russia, the country that invaded Ukraine. 6 times Ukraine has agreed to a Trump initiated peace process, Russia agreed 0 times.
The President stealing 500 million dollars and stashing it in his illegal bribers banks in the middle east, not enough. Actively working to take allies territory, with his people making their administration break down in tears after meeting with the US? Not enough. Extra-judicial murder of Americans after they drop their kids at school, not enough. DOGE. Refusing to release the Epstein files as REQUIRED by law. Forcing numerous law firms to bend the knee to him. Demanding a criminal investigation into the Fed chair. And on, and on, and on. In les than one year.
Do you really think an authoritarian government cares about what people think? If there is a majority that supports them? They don't.
If it loses a large number of supporters, and is forced to suspend even the illusion of democracy, a lot of things would change. It's hard to predict exactly what, but it would be ugly.
That's not to say that they won't. As you observe, they will do what they think they can get away with. But shutting down the entire Internet might be something that they can't get away with.
https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1inrm25/is_mesh...
https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1fy95kj/lets_ta...
Even without climate / natural disasters we need to have fallback infrastructures in general.
Just yesterday Verizon was down.
That said, I never said that my comment was about the US.
They also do so to prevent political violence from spreading, as social media does fan the flame of further violence. This is (in my opinion) a legitimate response to prevent hatred and mob violence from growing.
You are, possibly innocently, carrying propaganda water for a repressive autocratic regime that has killed thousands of its own citizens in the past week alone.
IRI desposts, starting fro Ali Khamenei down to the rest of their ideological "brothers and sisters" in the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (note no "Iran" in that name ..) are scared shitless that a Mussolini style future awaits them and their parasitical clans.
IRI has cut off internet and phone networks for days now because they know that before they can yet again reach "a deal" with the despicable Western elite who were instrumental in their rise to power (and staying there for all these years) need Media Cover from the audiances in the rest of the civilized world who would be exposed to numerous images and videos of bodies piled in streets and morgues, ARAB ISIS Style goons on pickup trucks with machine guns, and scenes of Iranian men and women of all shapes and ages loudly expressing their utter hatred of this EVIL REGIME from all corners of Iran, and they would not be able to "make a deal".
I strongly suggest, specially if you in anyway believe in any sort of Cosmic Judgment (Karmic or Abrahamic), to not stick your ignorant nose into the Iranian Revolution.
The people of Iran want to remove the yoke of this EVIL REGIME masqurading as God's Government on Earth. Let that outlandish and ludicrous pretention sink in before you get up to be a useful idiot for the Islamic Republic occupying Iran, ok?
You may be passionately in favour of one side, but hastily imputing motives to, and disparaging, people who you do not know, will not aid in convincing anyone of your claims; it merely undermines your credibility.
I have sensors in eight of my plants that use LoRa to transmit moisture levels to an SBC running Forth that lights up a single segment in an LED bar to let me know which ones should be watered.
I like to think the electricity has made the plants super-intelligent and now they talk to each over over LoRa and plot against the cat.
> I like to think the electricity has made the plants super-intelligent and now they talk to each over over LoRa and plot against the cat.
This should be the next Pixar film.
Maybe in the battlefields of the future we'll be fighting with lorawan cyberdecks rescued from desk drawers, and meshtastic hackers will be the equivalent of fighter pilot aces.
On that topic, I'm in this thread hoping to hear about how anyone got into resilient mesh networks and what they're doing with them now (outside of overthrowing the Ayatollah).
What was the deal breaker for them?
Considering the age and political orientation of most people here in this thread, and the age and political orientation of most eg. US hams, the situation would be quite different than most here imagine.
Mafia has a vested interest in broadcast rights of football matches in Spain?
Spain blocks Cloudflare because the football league La Liga has a court order that allows them to point to IP ranges that are hosting/fronting live streams of football matches, and get ISPs to block access to those ranges.
Moreover, I think the point of the parent comment is that they're blocking quite a bit more than just football games. It sounds like the claim is that the blocking is willfully broad because of other influences, not necessarily the the purported more narrow intent is necessarily from those influences.
The bits about Vance, Musk and "freedom of speech" are not only completely unnecessary, but well over the top.
They threatened to pull the plug on all Italian customers.
This is relevant to this conversation: CF recently acted in a way that makes some people think it might cut its services to people for political reasons.
I don't find your comment particularly well articulated or continaing anything besides name calling (the "bot farming"). Can you articulate your opinion on the matter?
The government can block Bluetooth and Wi-Fi with jammers. Russian government already does this in schools during exams, and already doing it around important infrastructure.
Focus on fighting against governments.
It isn't without peril for the admins and users.