This Little-Known iOS Feature Will Change the Way We Connect
wired.com
wired.com
You could, but it's unlikely to do you any good using a radio whose output is measured in milliwatts. Unless "out in the woods camping" means a KOA.
"Similarly, during a natural disaster, you could help locate loved ones and people in need, even with non-operational cellular towers."
Same deal: no, you probably won't. A cell phone is a radio, and it's a pretty crappy radio that relies very much on existing infrastructure. When that infrastructure goes down, the only people you'll be chatting with will be the ones you can physically see. Even the 5 watt handheld radio that I have (which requires a license to operate) may only be good for a few miles in rough terrain.
It would nice if the article stuck to what is feasible (the music festival example) and disposed with the hyperbole. Remote villages in Bumfukistan will not be getting internet access because of this.
I regularly hit a repeater 12 miles away. A bit fuzzy, but it works. But I'm using a gain antenna that's a bit longer than stock, you know, for street cred (street cred being very important amongst ham radio operators). Hook it up to the mag mount antenna in the car, and it expands to 20 or 30 miles (dunno exactly, haven't hit the limit yet).
In an attempt to keep this on the topic at hand, anecdotal evidence would suggest (and solid empirical evidence confirms) that the antenna is important as well as power output. Combine wimpy power output with an antenna that has to fit in a 4" phone, and without cell towers or WiFi APs you might as well just shout to the person you're trying to contact.
Well, that's not true. I just don't invest much in ham equipment; I devote my radio funds to my emergency services band equipment instead.
It eventually means the people you really want to read your articles (the educated, tech-savvy influencer types) will avoid them. I know I've started to avoid buzzfeed-style titles since they are more often than not just leading to something with more effort going into the title than the article...
So that leaves me wondering why they chose such a title knowingly. I suspect it was to poke fun at such linkbaity titles. I also suspect that they rely more on regular readers than being linked to, thus they can allow themselves the risk of being confused for linkbait.
Of course, this argument is somewhat one-sided: people who didn't read the article won't bother to come here and tell us whether it lived up to their expectation for the title. In some cases, I do read the HN threads but not the articles just to avoid a website but see what poeple have to say about a topic.
Multipeer and WiFi Direct are not compatible. Stackoverflow user @barbazoo hypothesizes Multipeer is using Bluetooth Classic.
iOS Bluetooth Classic is known the be under the Apple MFA Accessory API tight control and lockdown, including the MFA authentication challenge-reposne. Apple controls the MFA encryption keys (either in software or by the accessory authentication chips). It makes it inaccessible to other platforms.
I once read in the documentation an interesting fact (note that I haven't tested it, so I could be wrong or misremember a detail), for instance if using this framework a device A wants to send a message to a device C but A only has activated BLE and C only has activated Wifi, if there is a device B nearby with BLE and Wifi activated it will automatically be used as relay between A and C to transmit this message.
Also, the surveillance issues around mesh networks seem rather thorny. Being open, it seems trivial for authorities to set up listening stations everywhere. Yes, you are an anonymous handle, but you are also very localizable.
Just as an additional data point, another example of mesh network is the smart meter. It uses more powerful wifi, but it sends its data through other smart meters (down the street through your neighbor's smart meters) to reach its recipient (the phone company).
I think maybe the news here is not actually the Apple tech, but rather the first app in this class to really catch on.
Alljoyn from Qualcomm has been around for quite a while as well.
played around a bit with Aljoyn.
It effectively works like a service bus. You send a message and the bus will route it to the correct receiver. Pretty awesome.
You could have two people drawing on the same canvas at the same time and info appears almost instantaneously. Also opens up other types of gaming experiences.
Anyone with experience with the Apple side, care to provide more info?
*Edit more details on alljoyn
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mobile-couchbase/...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mobile-couchbase/...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mobile-couchbase/pNq...
Maybe that helps someone wanting to share JSON around a peer group.
You want to cut off the internet? Fine. You can't stop us from communicating, though.
Although if there was an agent with a phone in the area, he could see what everyone was saying, even if not who was saying it.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_protests_in_Turkey
[1] People started using VPN's and most people knows what DNS is now. So, there is hope.
Years ago we would have said the same thing about internet access. 'How could the internet (or mobile data) help in emergency or oppression situations ? Only geeks would have such a thing. ' (1990s)
Super-local: android beam does NFC pairing -> bluetooth transfer. Not exactly multi-peer, but perhaps it's possible to keep those connections open?
Peer-to-peer: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/p2p/... though apparently it's a bit buggy. A game or two I've played seems to use this, and it works 90+% of the time, but it's definitely not foolproof and there are random drops.
"The Multipeer Connectivity framework provides support for discovering services provided by nearby iOS devices using infrastructure Wi-Fi networks, peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth personal area networks ..."
No kidding. It'd be great if this evolved to where half or more of phones in a nearby vicinity could completely shutdown their cellular radio and use the mesh network for connectivity, saving (on average) lots of battery life and providing more reliable service for all.
It's a lot like BitTorrent, where on average everyone must seed as much as they leech, except in this case every packet is relayed N times. So for a healthy network, everyone must relay N times as much as they consume.