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579 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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liotier ◴[] No.44287756[source]
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.

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myself248 ◴[] No.44289079[source]
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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1. cormorant ◴[] No.44292928[source]
> 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.)