anyway im thinking about cheap raspi meshnets for protesters to carry in bags to enable rapid communication, using like, 20$ of hardware including battery and raspi zero
@nire organizer here: could you elaborate about this tech and what it's practical uses are? sounds interesting.
@PoliticalVoyeur how much do you know about mesh networking?
@nire Less than nothing haha
@PoliticalVoyeur ok so: they're basically if your wifi device were to connect to other devices through their wifi, except infrastructure to extend that across arbitrary many hops
@PoliticalVoyeur and they do the routing between themselves automatically, so everyone within range of a node of the network thats in range of another node of the network, has access to any of the linked nodes
@PoliticalVoyeur it works kind of like how local firechat works, except harder for cops to just arbitrarily log into
@PoliticalVoyeur but also gives you 3g/wifi connections within range of any of the nodes,allowing the whole network to (slowly) use connections outside of it, and you could probably give priority to, say, livestreams. the main use i was thinking of is both anonymization (it would basically be black bloc for data if you dont keep the logs, other than the exit nodes which could easily be a starbucks wifi hotspot) and for when cell+4g jamming gets used like they've said they're gonna start doign
@PoliticalVoyeur i dont know MUCH about the current generation of things, but you could probably do it for 20$ per node, maybe a bit more if the range sucks and you want to craft external antennae. raspberry pi zero W (comes w/ built-in wifi), USB battery pack, fits in a bag, used enough in projects that it wouldnt seem that suspicous
@ajr @PoliticalVoyeur CHiP is less friendly for people not used to computers, though
@nire @PoliticalVoyeur Sure. That's true.
@ajr @PoliticalVoyeur the thing about mesh stuff is even if you arent using it for like, activisty stuff, the best usecase is the one where anyone who is willing to add to the mesh just, can
@PoliticalVoyeur @ajr (and most of the mesh networking stuff right now is aimed at rpi hardware anyway)
@nire @PoliticalVoyeur Pi 0 also needs an SD card for booting.
CHiP has BT/Wifi, doesn't need SD card, is $10.