FireChat messaging app unites China and Taiwan in free speech | Hacker News Reader

FireChat messaging app unites China and Taiwan in free speech

techinasia.com

Hey, libertarian "hackers"! If you actually want to make a difference stop messing with cryptocurrencies and make P2P networked chat. This is the kind of thing actually oppressed people need. Cryptocurrency is basically just cash without any of the regulatory benefits anyway. P2P networked chat is actually subversive stuff.

There are a lot of potential benefits of cryptocurrency. And why can't we have both?

Because there's a limited amount of ideologically motivated programmer man-hours available?

There has been tons of work done on mesh nets and secure messaging apps. It's not like it's been ignored.

I immediately looked up if android has the same functionality. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19067794/ios-7-multipeer-... sadly it does not

Yes it has, and it's far better:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.servalproj...

Advantages:

- It's working in a mesh setting (although I don't see anything preventing FireChat to do the same) - It's based on a protocol named batman, which is a cool name - It's open source

This is just an app, it doesn't indicate what networking capabilities are built into the OS.

Luckily I speak French! I clicked the link and the headers were in French, so I went to my Google Account page and everything was in French... except when I clicked "Langue," it was set to English! Freaked me out for a minute. Thought it was a dangerous and late April Fools' joke.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.servalproj...

It doesn't seem to use Bluetooth. I guess that's not very important, and I'm not sure why FireChat uses both Bluetooth and Wifi.

In very crowded areas, switching to Bluetooth could be a way of minimizing the radio interference footprint, perhaps?

I recently tested this app when I had no internet in South America and I was able to communicate with other members of my group who were nearby in the hotel, but different floors. It was cool and it definitely has potential for any off-the-grid situation, especially if it can do proper multipeering. I wonder how this will do at a place like burning man.

Open Garden's new FireChat tool is superb.

Just what the Taiwan / China doctor ordered. 台湾中国和自由 -- 加油！

Hopefully with the arrival of the pCell [1] technology, the Wi-Fi Alliance will start working on even longer range and lower bands for Wi-Fi than the 2.4 Ghz band. Lately they've only focused on short ones, but to make Wi-Fi meshnets work we need Wi-Fi that's longer range and doesn't suffer from interference.

As for FireChat itself, the disappointing thing about it is that it doesn't seem to encrypt the messages. So if there's someone listening within range, they can get that conversation. Obviously, this won't be a huge issue in the early days, but I hope they do intend to fix this eventually.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6NEnLvhFCk

I don't get it. Since the range is so low, at the point that you're close enough to chat via p2p, wouldn't it just be easier to actually talk? Or am I missing something?

The promise of multipeer connectivity is that each additional node can potentially increase the network. So for Alice, who is in range of Bob but not Cathy, can talk to Cathy is Bob is in range of Cathy.

Is it possible to map the network? How locationally anonymous are the participants?

Only up to 8 nodes per session (at least, at the moment), according to the docs and this post: http://lightyearsoftware.com/2014/03/multipeer-connectivity-...

Qualcoms Alljoyn has SDK for all platforms,and its supposed to be peer to peer without network connection as well. Not sure if it does the mesh networking thing... but for crossplatform Alljoyn peer to peer has been doing it for years now. https://www.alljoyn.org/about

I am really excited about meshnet technologies. I think they could eliminate some today's problems with internet. (Censorship, spying, throttling) Lets set up some more meshlocals HN. https://projectmeshnet.org

I wonder if this app has more capacity than Twitter to start and sustain revolutions.

Big congrats to Micha and team at Open Garden for this app. Really good work!

What about for Android? Where is such peer connectivity framework? What about connecting Android and iOS?

What about Alljoyn SDK?

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