
Catalonia protestors use distributed network to securely organize protests - wsc981
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/barcelonia-riots-catalonia-protests-news
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StavrosK
They also used IPFS to serve and disseminate the website for the referendum,
IIRC. I wasn't aware of retroshare, but it looks like a very useful piece of
software.

Personally, I'm glad distributed technologies are picking up steam again and
are showing that they can be used by non-technical people for real-world
purposes, especially for protesting against the government, which is a pillar
of democracy and has been getting harder and harder with the increasing
effectiveness of censorship tools.

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fesja
> What at first began as peaceful mass demonstrations has sparked sporadic
> violence, with protestors setting fire to buildings and damaging property

As engineers, we should be more careful about the consequences of what we
build. It can be used for the good, or for the bad. What will those engineers
think when there is first dead person (either violent protester, pacific
protester or policeman)? Will they feel responsible?

Pacific protests are allowed every day. Violent protests with people setting
fire to cars, bins, etc; and people throwing rocks or acid to the police must
be prosecuted.

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slx26
While I totally agree with the idea that we, as engineers, are responsible for
the things we build, I think your exposition here ("we have seen violent
protests + a group making apps to organize protests => we should be careful")
can be a bit misleading or suggest links between this group and the violent
actions, which wouldn't be well grounded based on what we know so far.

Without assuming that was your intent, but to add some context: this group
(tsunami democratic) is explicitly advocating for nonviolence. At least ~2.4M
people voted (2017) for parties that oppose the sentence that lead up to the
current protests. We are seeing ~1000 violent protesters, which should be
fairly compared to the ~0.5M people who are steadily mobilised on pacific
protests.

Given the context, I believe that the terrorism charges that some politicians
and judges are attempting to attribute to groups like this (this is the reason
the websites have been shut down in Spain) are far more dangerous and can
backslash in more violence than any of the apps or websites some activists can
possibly create.

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divan
The real challenge comes when govt controls / shuts down the underlying nodes
– cell towers, mobile providers and ISPs.

Communication patterns in a rioting crowd is vastly different from your
average friendly FaceTime chat, but most of the messaging solutions aren't
designed for it. I.e. I would be glad to not having offline storage, near
real-time delivery or video calls option, if the app allows me to send message
"I'm at the point A and I'm fine" to my friend, even if the mobile network is
disrupted.

As far as I'm aware it's still a largely unsolved messaging problem.

