What's wrong with Signal? Made by Moxie Marlinspike (respected), open source, free, and from what I've heard it has excellent encryption tech, and it is ready to use now.
Of course, if NSA wants to spy on Signal conversations, they attack the weak endpoint (your phone), and even hardened phones probably cannot withstand. If they can, dirty tricks.
Yes - Android is hopeless that way,
and now we can see that iPhone has also sold its soul.
Mobiles are hopeless until we replace centralized TelComs.
We need decent mesh networks
"We need decent mesh networks"
Imagine what the crypto community could achieve if most people weren't just eyeballing charts and hoped to get fiat rich without effort.
I originally approached these guys:
https://althea.net/ long ago
but when they descended into the realm of ETH solutions
their focus on payment protocol skewed toward greed.
Mesh networks are a hard sell when Joe Sixpack does not understand why, and has an Internet connection that works fine already. And there are other problems like connecting over oceans
When the "Grid" goes dark
and phones die
Joe SixPack will come around.
I paved 6000sq km of jungle
with a wifi mesh a few helpers and a bit of kit.
It is not that hard to do.
and how to incentivize people to be data hubs, and being allowed to use a band of the wireless spectrum. And if it really gets secure, obviously NSA et al will fight it and fight dirty
"being allowed" is irrelevant to "we will not comply"
I am not saying this is impossible, but I believe it will be really, really hard to sell it to Joe Sixpack, and you pretty much have to, because you need critical mass of users.
Onboarding a few small community is enough.
We built local networks that lived on after we left because
the communities kept them going, by themselves, on their own.
Not saying it cant be done. But you do compete with well established firms making mature hardware of all sorts to solve the same problems centralized. There is a bump in the road there
And again, your opposition is people who go to war to stop countries from switching from petro-dollar for example. They do not play nice. Ready for that?
Not even on the same page economically.
They cannot recognize some random guys
building a community mesh.
Such already exist in many places,
ignored by all but their users.
A couple hundred users is not an economic threat, no. But you want to grow it to the whole world do you not? If you can do that it will become one.
If just one big giant aggregate network
then it could be ended just as easily as switching off an ISP.
But millions of small meshes each a few hundred nodes can outlive governments
Maybe. There is of course already lots of war tech on this that you might end up competing with. Low tech communication channels are usually easy to find.
There is no competition - none at all.
There never is any competition
when the entire community is trying to communicate
against the will of the government.
I quite agree that the hardware and stuff to do this would be very useful in certain crisis situations, but enough people need to have it before the crisis, that is the problem.
Such things already operate in places like Hong Kong and other locales I prefer not to name here.
The setup would also be almost completely useless without (indirect) connection to the Internet. A ham radio could do most of the extra stuff I bet.
just a few rotating pirate links would be adequate to keep some activities operational.
