Comment by liotier

Comment by liotier a day ago

Mesh networks are the foundation - they are essential to disaster resilience. Then what services to run over them ?

Real time chat: wild unsecure simplicity proven to run anywhere (IRC), bells & whistles with contemporary security (Matrix), some mesh native that almost no one knows ? What about post-disaster onboarding of actual users ?

Store & forward messaging: SMTP & friends may work nicely, but with actually distributed servers - in each local disaster POP. Also needs timeout and retry parameters to keeping stuff in queues practically forever.

Forums: anything better than ol' NNTP ? Other protocols merely adopted intermittent indirect connectivity - NNTP was born in it !

Is anything more sophisticated or more interactive realistic for actual disaster ?

An onboarding kit with clients for each major OS (à la AOL CDROM !) might be handy too, for snearkernet distribution over USB dongles.

myself248 21 hours ago

Post-disaster onboarding is complicated by app store lockdowns and the difficulty of sideloading. Heck, even establishing plain http or self-signed https connections is tricky on phones now.

I'm sure someone smarter than me has a toolkit for these things, I just don't know where to find it.

Store-and-forward-wise, NNCP is designed for this, but it's not widespread yet.

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cormorant 14 hours ago

> Heck, even establishing plain http ... connections is tricky on phones now.
I had no idea. I guess this refers to app-store rules? Related to https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/applicat... and https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/preventin... ?
Or is it even hard to browse to http webpages? (No problem on iOS that I see.)

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wpm 20 hours ago

I was just thinking about this sort of thing the other day. Thinking if I need a techno 'bug out' bag, my Macs would be the most useless ones to waste the weight on because if anything happened I'd never be able to reinstall macOS without phoning home to Apple for an activation.

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- myself248 20 hours ago
  
  It's time to sell your soul to Big Penguin.
  
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- GTP 18 hours ago
  
  Throw-in a USB key with a Linux distro that works with your Mac. You could also flash Ventoy on it, so that you can have multiple distros in case you end up needing to boot some other machine.
  
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  myself248 18 hours ago
  
  Trouble is a Linux-on-a-key that you've never used before, is still a long way from being productive without a network to install all the packages you actually want to use.
  It takes me about a month after a reinstall or new machine, to feel like I've really spread my wings and have everything installed that I initially forgot about. So I guess the recommendation would be "daily-drive it for a month before refrigerating it". And at that point, you might as well just make it your everyday machine.
  
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  cormorant 14 hours ago
  
  With Apple silicon, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a Linux USB boot. The install instructions for Asahi begin from macOS.
  Even if there were, it may be orthogonal to the anti-theft online Activation feature that wpm was talking about.
  
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bkummel a day ago

I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.

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lambdaone 19 hours ago

The real "resilience teams" are going to be at the telcos/ISPs, and they will have dark fibre between their networks and autonomous backup power in their data centres. They will be able to do IRC, VoIP telephony, email, etc. between their networks over statically routed point-to-point IP between their local networks even if BGP and the transit networks go down so they can "black start" the Internet. (Back in my ISP days, I remember reading about there being a private telephone network just for AS operators' NOCs to talk to one another quite independenty of the PSTN.)
For anything that takes even those out (eg. a "Big One" quake in California), you fall back to radio hams and autonomous radio links for the disaster services.

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- GTP 18 hours ago
  
  The article's author mentioned speaking with some telco people, which apparently weren't aware of any resiliency emergency plan. Maybe there's some difference between EU countries and the USA on this.
  
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