
How Hong Kong Protesters Are Connecting, Without Cell or Wi-Fi Networks - evo_9
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/09/29/352476454/how-hong-kong-protesters-are-connecting-without-cell-or-wi-fi-networks
======
ondrae
An aside: Some group was pretending to be Code for Hong Kong and was spreading
a fake messaging app. [http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-
kong/article/1594667/fake-occu...](http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-
kong/article/1594667/fake-occupy-central-app-targets-activists-smartphones)

You can read about a tear down of the fake app at
[https://code4hk.hackpad.com/Fake-Code4HK-Mobile-App-
HQXXrylI...](https://code4hk.hackpad.com/Fake-Code4HK-Mobile-App-HQXXrylI6Wi)

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LeoPanthera
I wanted to like FireChat, as it was previously possible to use it entirely
offline, in a purely P2P fashion.

While this is still possible, you are now forced to first create an account
online, and subscribe to a bunch of internet-based channels, before the app
will let you use the P2P portion.

This is frustrating. The market is wide open for someone to make a pure P2P
communications app that doesn't require internet access at all, even
initially.

~~~
sounds
servalproject.org is free (and open source)

P2P voice, chat and online status.

Uses Ad Hoc networking, which iirc FireChat uses bluetooth so servalproject
should get better range.

I'm not affiliated with the project in any way (I'm not in Australia) but I've
happily used it for some tests.

~~~
notastartup
this is interesting what is ad hoc networking and how does it work offline?
Firechat uses bluetooth but doesn't work with iphone to android communication?

~~~
benliong78
They somehow managed to do that: allow communication between two platforms. No
one is quite sure how though. It's their secret source that they aren't open
sourcing.

~~~
jschwartzi
You could conceivably do this with Bluetooth Low Energy, which has pretty
diverse support nowadays. Mesh networking is one of its touted capabilities.

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tszming
Used firechat in the area yesterday, I think there are two issues:

1\. information overload, hard to catch up the messages from all the people

2\. some people are spreading rumors and fake information.

It would be great if we still can use the underlying network but have a way to
filter out information (e.g. mgs from friends or friends or friends only)

~~~
xnull2guest
2\. some people are spreading rumors and fake information.

Yeah that would be government purposefully trying to sabotage the protests.

~~~
koyote
Or trolls being trolls.

~~~
chippy
More like good people unwittingly spreading information which they do not know
are fake. Memes in the proper sense of the word - idea viruses.

Every circular warning email you got in your email 10 years ago with the words
"This happened to a friend of my fathers and is true" and "Share this around!
Everyone must know about this!"

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vog
I find it interesting that here in Berlin (and other cities in Europe, mostly
in Germany), we have this for many years - not just for protesters, but for
anyone. However, it's not a smartphone app (the network predates smartphones),
but a mesh network of WLAN access points. The name of this project is
Freifunk: [http://freifunk.net/en/](http://freifunk.net/en/)

~~~
Swannie
IIRC a number of the contributors to the downstream projects of Serval were
some of the early contributors to freifunk.net.

My understanding is that freifunk was a pretty major testbed for peer-to-peer
mesh network protocols in Linux, and it's that heritage that's made it into
things like Serval and the Mesh Potato.

Whilst Serval has moved on to its own OSLR variant, its roots are firmly
embedded in the B.A.T.M.A.N. protocol.

------
ck2
By the way, check out the sheer size of the protests via drone:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ7r8qi3NIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ7r8qi3NIY)

Near the middle they fly higher and zoom out and what you thought was large
before turns out to be massive.

~~~
Moru
And then you watch the news reports daytime and realize what you thought was
massive during night was pretty small after all.

~~~
monort
Your statement seems to be incorrect:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q919bQOThvM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q919bQOThvM)

~~~
ldng
I don't how it's incorrect. It's a matter of context and point of view. I's
one big avenue blocked over 3-4 blocks.

Last 11 of September, at very least 600000 Catalans over 11km protested in
favor of a referendum for their independence. That was a huge manifestation.

The Hong-Kong manifestation isn't that big in size. But it's important and in
a more repressive context.

------
niutech
Serval Project seems more secure and it's open source:
[http://www.servalproject.org/](http://www.servalproject.org/)

------
ck2
Given how China is able to completely hide the protests inside the mainland, I
fear for how this is going to end, because they can hide that too.

I mean who really is going to come to their defense, look how everyone
immediately abandoned Ukraine.

~~~
xnull
Wait who abandoned Ukraine?

~~~
socceroos
Sanctions don't count. When people are dying sanctions don't count.

~~~
xnull
There are nuclear treaties that prevent stationing and mobility of NATO troops
and armaments in the Baltic, Ukraine isn't even a member of NATO, and they are
getting far more than mere sanctions - intelligence, equipment, financial aid,
strategic advice, political and global media support to name a few.

NATO can't just abandon nuclear treaties. And trust that, as it controls 90%
of the pipeline of oil between Russia and Europe and that because the conflict
arose during highly contented offers for Ukraine to join the EU, that NATO is
doing everything it can.

------
Zirro
If the authorities sought to disrupt these networks, would it not be possible
to jam Bluetooth (and Wi-Fi) signals within a certain area?

~~~
morsch
The next step would be exchanging messages via NFC.

E.g. say for a p2p-twitter app, users A and B go into the exchange with their
own versions of the global p2p-twitter feed, and exit the exchange with a
merged version.

You could do federated, store-and-forward direct messaging, too. We already
have a protocol for a very similar use-case: SMTP. :) Of course, with a
sometimes-offline P2P mesh you usually don't know if any given hop decreases
the distance to the destination.

You'd probably end up just merging all existing messages, so that everyone has
everyone elses "email", and filter out the messages belonging to you via
asymmetric encryption. So it's just an application of the above p2p-twitter
thing. Public messages could be unencrypted.

I think some blockchain-based messaging systems work in a similar way, since
there everybody has everybody elses messages per definition. Maybe a
blockchain-based protocol is a good fit anyway, probably not though since I'm
not sure how it would do the merge(A,B) function.

~~~
nitrogen
There were also systems designed for the BBS days that expected to have zero
connectivity most of the time. They would dial other computers periodically
and exchange data. e.g.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet)

------
igonvalue
Was anyone else wondering what actual _protocol_ FireChat uses (answer:
bluetooth), and found it strange that the article only mentioned it once, and
not at the beginning?

~~~
aragot
Correct. They didn't mention alternative points of views either, like "Is it
secure", "Is it encrypted", "Is it centralized", "Are there competitors". It's
a bit one-sided towards FireChat.

~~~
lucb1e
Reading up on FireChat, it appears to have no encryption or security
whatsoever. The owners are like "we don't want you to do illegal things with
it anyway" (or so I read). Doesn't sound like the greatest app...

------
portstarboard
It’s good that the weather is really gentle now in Hong Kong.

Here in Ukraine this past winter the “designed in California” didn’t last too
long during -13C..-18C nights, even with an external battery, so walkie-
talkies were helpful at times. However, the cellular networks did work in the
downtown, perhaps with just minor outages, even during the most violent
crackdowns.

And to address some of the either Russian trolls or just misinformed minds
elsewhere in the comments. I won’t go into much details, just address some
points.

\- The whole situation in Ukraine was, and is, largely provoked and inflamed
by Russia. Empires being what empires are, even fading ones, try to concur
and/or influence as much neighbours as possible, especially if a neighbour is
posing an indirect threat to the empire’s regime rulers. No need to take my
word on it, just study recent conflicts around Russian borders since the 90s.

\- All sorts of people, from all kinds of backgrounds, education, income, etc,
took part in the protests. From poor farmers and peasants, through students
and professors, to entrepreneurs, CEOs of big companies/multinational
branches, and other well-off people.

\- To call all these people “fascists”, “junta”, is something a Gebbels would
do. Especially when coming from a state that has extreme press and internet
censorship, where all the power lies in the hands of the state security
service, and where sexual/national minorities live under real threat and
danger of persecution. Especially ridiculously it sounds given the number of
Jews, and well-off ones, taking parts in the protests, alongside the so-called
“radicals”.

\- Somebody mentioned “Svoboda” and “Pravyj Sektor” as boogeymen. “Svoboda”
has like 1% support now; it lost the support greatly during the protests
themselves, when people found out that their “radicalism” is only in words,
but not in action. The leadership is very money-oriented, and it shows.
Regular members are more or less OK, as members political parties go; most are
just regular patriots, like you have in the US and elsewhere. “Pravyj Sektor”
is really just a bunch of kids; we’ve bought them socks and some underwear
during the winter. Aren’t any more radical than most kids their age anywhere
in the world.

\- Russian propaganda was working very hard all these years against the
Ukrainian state, but as we can see, it took root only in some parts of the 2,
out of 25, regions. The reasons are simple - these are very “depressed”, poor
regions; people live there in constant poverty, without decent jobs, repressed
by local feudal lords, without proper education and perspective on life. This
is not an excuse for what they’ve started, but at least it explains the
causes. In other, considered “pro-Russian” but wealthy, regions the propaganda
didn’t take as much root, and after the events of this year, there’s little
left of the “pro-Russian” part in them, even as they continue to speak Russian
in everyday life.

\- As for the West, we’ve seen who’s who now, and what they are worth. That
was a hard yet an important lesson. We are learning to rely only on ourselves,
and we’ll manage. Also, given that Ukraine has given up the world’s 3rd
largest nuclear arsenal in 1994, in exchange for security guarantees, it will
be a good lesson for other countries for the future. One which will probably
not help improve the global demilitarisation, however.

Thank you for reading, and please excuse the long post.

P.S. Didn’t find my old “Startup News” account credentials, not really much of
a poster, but decided not skip this one thread.

~~~
portstarboard
As we joke here, if the CIA gave the world the internet, the KGB gave it the
internet trolls. Try harder, @teekert, link-spamming buddy.

~~~
tonyplee
In the internet age as in any other time in history, whoever controls the
communication channels win.

For now IMO the winners are: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple(on the top but
sliding down?), Amazon, US Gov, NSA, CIA, FBI, KGB, Russian Gov, Chinese Gov
(win by block out others), Badu, Alibaba, WeChat, Line, SnapChat,

For now, the losers or losing players are : Yahoo, Nokia, Windows Phone,
BlackBerry, Liberian Gov, Ukraine, Egypt(almost?), Most of Japanese Electronic
firms.

~~~
gcb4
you forgot that behind all those are financial firms like Goldman Sachs.

without their fake money schemes Facebook for example would only have it's
revenue money, which is pretty lower than all the investment money they have.

------
qewrffewqwfqew
Oh, with a mesh wifi network. I have to stop taking headlines at their word.

~~~
hackuser
Does it use Wifi? Someone else posted saying it was Bluetooth.

~~~
arjunvarma2
i think its wifi else the reach of network would be far less

~~~
ldng
It's probably not just Wi-Fi but mix of Wi-Fi, 4G/3G and Bluetooth :
[http://opengarden.com/apps](http://opengarden.com/apps)

Given the density of the protest, Bluetooth could work.

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breezer00
One question, does it just use Bluetooth? Or is there something else?

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bitJericho
What's to keep the government from broadcasting 2.4ghz noise and disrupting
all communication on that frequency (or 5ghz in the case of some versions of
wifi)? Are cell towers capable of such a thing?

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calyth42
The only thing that bothers me about the article is I can't find anything
posted on RTHK's site stating that they will shut down the network.

[http://rthk.hk/rthk/news/englishnews/index_news.htm](http://rthk.hk/rthk/news/englishnews/index_news.htm)
[http://rthk.hk/rthk/news/clocal/index_news.htm?clocal&201409...](http://rthk.hk/rthk/news/clocal/index_news.htm?clocal&20140930)

And I know people who work at central, and live on the Island.

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e12e
So, Open Garden has an eco-system of mesh-networking that is a Walled Garden?

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jokoon
I've wanted that tech for years since wifi was being used.

serval use long range wifi to do it, but what's the range ?

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Sami_Lehtinen
Bitmessage would work beautifully over mesh network, because it's store and
replicate solution.

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erikb
Does the general population in HK still has access to FB/Twitter etc?

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jokoon
how does it work ? ad-hoc wifi ?

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notastartup
how does firechat establish mesh networking with just blue tooth? how do you
make iphone chat with android?

also, could it be possible to deploy some electromagnetic pulse to destroy all
phones?

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mkoryak
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End)

~~~
xnull2guest
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/power_and_the...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/power_and_the_i.html)

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_battle_fo...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_battle_for_1.html)

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/privacy_and_p...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/privacy_and_pow.html)

