• dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    To be fair, given what lengths the police will go to messing with protesters, would anybody trust some random mesh network?

    • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      Mesh networks can be built on zero trust principles and have everything E2EE. Kind of like Tor.

      But the more realistic scenario is the police will just deploy jammers to completely disable all wireless communication.

      • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It could go either way. The benefit of faking an activist mesh network is tracking and surveillance for later retaliation.

        • potatopotato@sh.itjust.works
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          13 hours ago

          It’s another thing they have to do. They’re not all RF/SW engineers so they’d have to adapt to it the same way they’d adapt to anything else. By building networks that aren’t corporate controlled, however, activists can engineer them around anonymity instead of serving the police.

          • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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            11 hours ago

            No, but if Musk and Zuckerberg has taught us anything, there are plenty of engineers who are willing to sell out humanity for fascism. No one is safe, and we should not trust random networks just because it’s “activist controlled”.

            • potatopotato@sh.itjust.works
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              6 hours ago

              It comes down to how the network is designed, Meshtastic is open source, you can go look at how the encryption works right now. There are issues with Meshtastic from a privacy standpoint but you could somewhat trivially design a derivative that is much more zero trust.

              As with all things, layer your defenses. Not using the network that’s known to be surveiling you and instead using one that you have some confidence is leaking less info on top of the usual precautions is a solid improvement.