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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Android doesn't even support adhoc wifi.

It supports acting as a wifi hotspot. I've never tried it, but does that not work for local area networking with data off?

Also: http://multipath-tcp.org/pmwiki.php/Users/Android

The nice thing about Android is you get the source. If you want, you can add MultiPath TCP to Android.

I'd still love ad-hoc better. HotSpot allows you to share 4G through WiFi, but it doesn't scale. The hotspot because AP, and that's the center of the network. On contrast, ad-hoc can scale to thousands of nodes across miles by using multiple hops. Also, ad-hoc is a more distributed model.

I never understood why ad-hoc mode was disabled by driver. AP mode (hotspot) is still available; users can still share their 4G connection without being approved by their carrier.

Ad-hoc networking on wifi generally only supports point-to-point links, not routing, unless you use another routing protocol on top of it like BATMAN Advanced.

I'm not sure why connecting to an ad-hoc network is disabled in Android, but it's certainly never been anything that's caused me problems.

Right. But I supposed by hotspot/ad-hoc, we were talking about the link layer possibilities only. hotspot is also about MAC layer only as well. IP runs on top of that. However, the difference is that, in AP/client mode, all nodes need to associate with and be able to talk to an AP; while in ad-hoc mode, every node is equivalent and they can be as distributed as they want. For ad-hoc routing, there're olsrd, batman, etc. They are really cool :-)

We used to use Android devices to test different scenarios of ad-hoc applications. But none of current mainstream devices support ad-hoc mode any more. On contrast, iOS devices can still join (although not create) an Ad-Hoc network, which is ... ironic.

And what of it? Here's another unrelated whinge: no Apple stuff supports WPS even though it's highly useful for getting your device on the network quickly.

Way to find something negative to say when this MPTCP deployment is overwhelmingly positive no matter what you think of Apple vs Android.

From the wikipedia page:

> WPS has been shown to easily fall to brute-force attacks.

(along with citation).

Sounds like it's a good thing Apple doesn't support it.

Actually, the AP fails, and most of the vendors fixed the brute-force attack by throttling the amount of tries.

Not implementing it on the client side has nothing to do with this security issue, but some other reason.

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