Jack Dorsey floats specs for decentralized messaging app that uses Bluetooth Serial entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter and currently acts as CEO of payments company Block, has released the source code for a peer-to-peer messaging app called bitchat that relies on Bluetooth for network connectivity. In the project's GitHub repo, Dorsey describes the project thus: "A secure, decentralized, …
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Now someone please correct me if I’m wrong but I can’t see this working, in practice!
So day one, it launches, unless a significant number of people download and start it up also on day one, then it’s useless, you, as a early adopter can’t connect to anyone because you need to wait for people local to you to also sign up…etc!
OK probably Jack has a better understanding of such matters than I do, but……
Maybe it'll start with friends in the office. But yeah would seem to be a problem. Are we near constantly in range of a mesh, I'm not. Or is he hopimg to piggyback on everyone leaving bluetooth active on phones, laptops, cars, TVs etc - bluetooth is quite ubiquitous in cities and towns. Out in the country you might need to be near a tractor! Jack may have got over excited on this one. But ... I'm all for privacy.
....but doesn't quite know what it is.
For ElReg readers who haven't heard of it, here's a brief explanation. Its built on low power "LoRa" radios that typically work in the 900MHz unlicensed band (in the US around 915MHz.) These radios use a "Chirp Spread Spectrum" modulation technology that has quite absurd range for the power deployed (40mW), its line of sight but people have been getting 40Km or more point to point. Meshtastic is a community software effort built on inexpensive radio modules (pre-tariff they're typically about $20 for two or so) where the radios form a cooperative mesh like a Zigbee network. Using these I can send low bandwidth messages around the Los Angeles area (that's where I live).
There's lots of information about this on the Interweb. Despite this its still an obscure technology, one reason being that its too small, too low powered and too cheap for people to take seriously -- I have a radio amateur license and live in an area where there are lots of active amateurs but with a handful of exceptions they all turn their noses up at this technology as if it wasn't real. "We're working on it".
(You could do a similar mesh with BLE but won't work anything like as well.)
Sounds interesting. Could it replace bluetooth?
LoRa is designed for low-bitrate, low-power, long-range comms. It's billed as "IoT". It's got lots of interest in agricultural and environmental circles for remote sensing stations - popping a few bytes of data back every 15minutes or so. BLE power consumption but over distances up to 10km. Ideal for soil moisture sensors or weather stations to talk back to the farmstead without needing relays or higher power demand.
These projects are mostly via LoRaWAN, which overlays a MAC layer protocol onto LoRa (which is the modulation technique). This uses various modes for sensors to send data, go into receive mode for a window in case an update is being sent, but involves them being idle or off most of the time. If you want to run it all the time, it'll consume much more power. So less advantage over BLE. It's also much lower bandwidth - 433-915MHz vs 2.4GHz for BLE, so mostly won't be suitable for things like bluetooth file transfers.
Meshtastic uses LoRa (not LoRaWAN) to send small text messages.
It's neat and fun to play around with, but you need special hardware and it's not necessarily doing anything that existing systems don't (or couldn't).
We're seeing mobile phones integrate sat-comm chips for emergency use. I guess in future it's not inconceivable that a phone could include a 433/868/915MHz LoRa-capable transceiver which could be used for interacting directly with LoRA IoT hardware (if that becomes mainstreamish), or by a meshtastic app (or as a further fallback for apps like Briar, which works on IP & Tor, but can also work P2P over bluetooth). Additional standards get supported all the time - 3/4/5G spectrum and protocols. LoRa is a different standard altogether but it's not inconceivable that it could be included in future chipsets.
Reminds me a bit of packet radio that was a messaging protocol for amateur radio that peaked in the 1990s. Users connected a TNC to their radio and joined the network, a message could be sent around the world by hopping across peers to a BBS. Using low power VHF the network was dense enough to send stuff around the world with a few bridge links using other mediums.
Protocol was AX.25 but it fell out of use with the rise of internet then evolved and repurposed into APRS.
The CIO of the internet company I worked for in Oz left to found a company using that tech in 1995. It didn't last long from my recollection. We were still using pagers, the internet was the wild west, and everything was fair game at the time.
Hello K6MDU. UK amateur here, not wishing to reveal real-human identity though. I've looked into meshtastic as well, but I just don't see the point. Not that I'm turning my nose up at it – I just can't see a use case for it. Barring onanistic prepper "SHTF" scenarios, what is the actual point on a day-to-day basis? Genuinely interested.
Amateur radio emergency communications is well organized in the US, it being part of official planning. What that means locally is that radio equipment is maintained in key facilities -- government buildings, large hospitals, police stations etc. -- that's dormant except for a scheduled weekly test to verify its all working. Really serious emergencies needing this equipment are likely to be very rare but should something like a large earthquake occur that takes out the normal infrastructure then its handy to have backups while systems are being restored. Because of geography and size communication can be quite spotty here, especially in remote areas, with the amateur VHF repeaters actually being one of the few systems that give practically universal coverage. Satellite messaging will improve things but there are few technologies out there that can boast the potential range for the ultra low cost and ultra low power that LoRa offers.
As for paranoia, a year ago I'd say "Nah, no chance" but given what's been happening with raids by armed paramilitaries some level of paranoia might now be prudent. Needless to say, there's now a tracking app -- "ICE Block" -- but its only a matter of time before cell service gets selectively blocked in operational areas. (...and if you think "It can't happen here....." then you should remember the words of Pastor Niemoller.....)
Interesting. While we do have Raynet, it seems to be amateur in every sense of the word. I mean, look at that website (the 1990s tried to call, but the line was busy with dialup...). Don't get me wrong – it's an honourable cause, but I suspect it's very unlikely to be used here "in anger" any time soon. We don't get hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, etc. here, and emergency services have their own thing going on (admittedly based on infrastructure that could fail). It's telling that they don't list a great deal on that front page as having been useful since 1953. We also don't have any vast wilderness to speak of, barring some parts of Scotland.
But yeah, I think with the current US situation, I'd be wanting to keep as much of myself off-grid(dable) as possible. This is no way for a civilised country to behave. I'd say that the US was a global laughing stock, but (a) so is the UK since the shambles of Brexit and (b) some things are just too scary to be funny.
"Barring onanistic prepper "SHTF" scenarios, what is the actual point on a day-to-day basis?"
If the SHTF, I've got my Extra (not giving out call sign), several radios and solar panels/batteries. I don't do text so it's not a factor for me anyway. If somebody wants something from me, they can bloody well ring up.
Bluetooth also has a maximum range of a few feet. Between friends in an office fine.. but as a true decentralized messaging app it's a nonstarter. You would need *millions* of people to install this app, and it would likely still suck outside major cities.
Oh and good luck getting apple to allow your app to turn your phone into 24/7 bluetooth router..
I'm on a hill and have a decent antenna attached but still haven't managed to receive a single meshtastic packet despite (according to the maps) there being a user less than a mile away. It's less acute.. I imagine in dense cities it's quite useable, but getting enough coverage to actually form a mesh outside that environment is hard.
For both security and power consumption reasons, I have Bluetooth turned off unless I need to use it.
So Jack comes up with an idea to do messages in mesh networks of Bluetooth devices. Nice idea, but it's kind of like using BitTorrent. If you're a good citizen, you make sure that your upload/download ratio is about 1. Here. we're being asked to keep our Bluetooth on all the time to enable a mesh network. The network doesn't work unless lots of people decide to have Bluetooth on all the time, without any benefit for them, rather they get the disincentive of less battery time and an enlarged attack surface.
Nice try Jack!
However, in order to receive and relay the messages in any intelligent way you're going to need the processor too. Bluetooth LE covers an area roughly the size of a soccer pitch. You can get a lot of people at those.
For simple cases of a few people in close proximity, maybe they could just talk to each other.
"The network doesn't work unless lots of people decide to have Bluetooth on all the time, without any benefit for them"
How is it not any benefit for them, if they are actively using it? Did I miss the bit where Jack asked people who didn't use it to keep their Bluetooth switched on and install an app specially so everyone else could use their phone as a hop?
Or perhaps even uucp ;)
I imagine a secure and privacy preserving store-and-forward network protocol might be deployed over just about any network transport (rfc1149?)
I suppose incorporating cheap low power a RF open mesh component like BT into light bulbs, light fittings, power points etc etc might enable this kind of application but might also lead to all sorts of covert buggery†. :)
† surveillance.
Yeah, my first thought too. Rebuilding Briar as a personal project.
Briar runs over Bluetooth, plain IP ("Wifi") or Tor offering messaging and forums.
So a range of transport options, which they're looking - in the long term - at leveraging into things like crisis mapping.
This is something i thought would be useful years ago while i was in another country, i had no roaming data and my friends were the other side of the coach we were on. It would've been nice to be able to message them about the noisy bugger sat next to me.
And while this sounds useful in some cases, i think it would work far better if the bluetooth mesh networking was a fallback for something else. I seem to remember reading many years ago about Matrix looking into something like this, where a chat could fallback to local comms if it lost server communication. Think something like Signal going 'oh this guy is on the same coach as you and you have no data, you can still message them'. This can get pretty complex though so i don't think it was ever implemented.
But hey, i hope somebody develops on this, i can see it being useful in some situations.
I'm struggling to see how a company could make money from this app, its a nice idea for places with bad phone reception but a lot of people around to make the mesh network. But is anyone going to pay for for an app which would only really be good as a messaging app some of the time?
So it either has to be done as FOSS project not for profit and maintained by the community and released as a free download or you have to be ad supported app, which is then not going to be anonymous if the ad networks are involved.
. . . rather than implementing this approach as a separate messaging app, it could be used as an alternative or fallback transport for existing messaging apps (e.g. Signal) when existing transports such as WiFi or cellular are too congested or unavailable. This could be very useful in cases like crowded concerts, or, as mentioned above, protests, especially where The Powers That Be decide to shut down local cell towers. Security is obviously a concern, but it's also a concern in cases where the police set up Stingray devices to intercept cellular traffic. Either way, encryption needs to be handled by the application. Shutting down peer-to-peer connectivity is a lot harder than shutting down cellular or WiFi access, so this approach would provide enhanced communication resilience.
Despite some obvious shortcomings to this approach, I like it, and I'll be interested to see where Dorsey takes it.
So let me get this right.
We already have way too many ways of "communicating" by way of email, mobile phones (+ landlines for the elderly amongst us such as myself), Slack, Teams, Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram & Signal (for budding Nazis) and anti-social media (Twatter/eX, Faecesbook, Instabrag, LinkedOut, Tik-Twat etc.) and the answer to all this one-way shouty communication is to add yet another way of sending drivel to narcissists who don't care what you think.
No. Just no!
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