"If you’re out in the woods camping and need help, you could broadcast your needs in the hope someone picks it up."
You could, but it's unlikely to do you any good using a radio whose output is measured in milliwatts. Unless "out in the woods camping" means a KOA.
"Similarly, during a natural disaster, you could help locate loved ones and people in need, even with non-operational cellular towers."
Same deal: no, you probably won't. A cell phone is a radio, and it's a pretty crappy radio that relies very much on existing infrastructure. When that infrastructure goes down, the only people you'll be chatting with will be the ones you can physically see. Even the 5 watt handheld radio that I have (which requires a license to operate) may only be good for a few miles in rough terrain.
It would nice if the article stuck to what is feasible (the music festival example) and disposed with the hyperbole. Remote villages in Bumfukistan will not be getting internet access because of this.
I'm not convinced the music festival example is feasible. While GSM's Slotted ALOHA protocol breaks down at "only" 36.8% load, I imagine that mesh networking at a music festival is about as productive as having a conversation with the person next to you at said festival (too much noise for the device to "hear itself think", let alone for the device owned by the adjacent person).
A 5 watt handheld is only good for a few miles in normal terrain. I think mine caps around 4-5 miles around town (suburb with absolutely no buildings over 3 stories), although that's with a factory ducky antenna
Wired, stop with the buzzfeed/upworthy clickbait titles for your articles.
It eventually means the people you really want to read your articles (the educated, tech-savvy influencer types) will avoid them. I know I've started to avoid buzzfeed-style titles since they are more often than not just leading to something with more effort going into the title than the article...
You know, I almost didn't click on the article because of the nature of the title. But Wired has been consistently good in my experience, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. The article lived up to their good reputation in my mind.
So that leaves me wondering why they chose such a title knowingly. I suspect it was to poke fun at such linkbaity titles. I also suspect that they rely more on regular readers than being linked to, thus they can allow themselves the risk of being confused for linkbait.
Of course, this argument is somewhat one-sided: people who didn't read the article won't bother to come here and tell us whether it lived up to their expectation for the title. In some cases, I do read the HN threads but not the articles just to avoid a website but see what poeple have to say about a topic.
Multipeer and WiFi Direct are not compatible. Stackoverflow user @barbazoo hypothesizes Multipeer is using Bluetooth Classic.
iOS Bluetooth Classic is known the be under the Apple MFA Accessory API tight control and lockdown, including the MFA authentication challenge-reposne. Apple controls the MFA encryption keys (either in software or by the accessory authentication chips). It makes it inaccessible to other platforms.
A long time ago unfortunately. The articles themselves are pretty good most of the time, but the titles are terrible. They always make sure to mention a big name company/product that may or may not be tangentially related to the article. I'm really sick of this behaviour.
Basically it is the same framework used internally by Airdrop on iOS.
I once read in the documentation an interesting fact (note that I haven't tested it, so I could be wrong or misremember a detail), for instance if using this framework a device A wants to send a message to a device C but A only has activated BLE and C only has activated Wifi, if there is a device B nearby with BLE and Wifi activated it will automatically be used as relay between A and C to transmit this message.
That is really the big question about open mesh networks: how much of other people's traffic is going through your open node. The more traffic you allow, the further the mesh can reach. But I really think it should be zero in the case of phones for security/privacy and limited battery reasons. That of course means you are limited to people within direct reach of your phone's broadcasting power (would be interesting to get actual numbers for this).
Also, the surveillance issues around mesh networks seem rather thorny. Being open, it seems trivial for authorities to set up listening stations everywhere. Yes, you are an anonymous handle, but you are also very localizable.
Just as an additional data point, another example of mesh network is the smart meter. It uses more powerful wifi, but it sends its data through other smart meters (down the street through your neighbor's smart meters) to reach its recipient (the phone company).
It effectively works like a service bus. You send a message and the bus will route it to the correct receiver. Pretty awesome.
You could have two people drawing on the same canvas at the same time and info appears almost instantaneously. Also opens up other types of gaming experiences.
Anyone with experience with the Apple side, care to provide more info?
What's special is it's on enough devices with a high enough proximity density to make such anonymous ad-hoc locale-oriented communications feasible. A chicken-and-egg problem, solved.
We've used mesh networking during Gezi[0]. But I don't think most people would understand how to use this or will have it installed in case of a general ban[1].
"The Multipeer Connectivity framework provides support for discovering services provided by nearby iOS devices using infrastructure Wi-Fi networks, peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth personal area networks ..."
No kidding. It'd be great if this evolved to where half or more of phones in a nearby vicinity could completely shutdown their cellular radio and use the mesh network for connectivity, saving (on average) lots of battery life and providing more reliable service for all.
How much power do you expect to save? I mean, standard star topology WiFi uses less power than a 3G radio. But you don't access a mesh network, you are part of a mesh network. Your radio will be constantly relaying information. Sounds pretty power-hungry to me.
It's a lot like BitTorrent, where on average everyone must seed as much as they leech, except in this case every packet is relayed N times. So for a healthy network, everyone must relay N times as much as they consume.
[+] [-] mikestew|12 years ago|reply
You could, but it's unlikely to do you any good using a radio whose output is measured in milliwatts. Unless "out in the woods camping" means a KOA.
"Similarly, during a natural disaster, you could help locate loved ones and people in need, even with non-operational cellular towers."
Same deal: no, you probably won't. A cell phone is a radio, and it's a pretty crappy radio that relies very much on existing infrastructure. When that infrastructure goes down, the only people you'll be chatting with will be the ones you can physically see. Even the 5 watt handheld radio that I have (which requires a license to operate) may only be good for a few miles in rough terrain.
It would nice if the article stuck to what is feasible (the music festival example) and disposed with the hyperbole. Remote villages in Bumfukistan will not be getting internet access because of this.
[+] [-] cbhl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sirkneeland|12 years ago|reply
It eventually means the people you really want to read your articles (the educated, tech-savvy influencer types) will avoid them. I know I've started to avoid buzzfeed-style titles since they are more often than not just leading to something with more effort going into the title than the article...
[+] [-] 205guy|12 years ago|reply
So that leaves me wondering why they chose such a title knowingly. I suspect it was to poke fun at such linkbaity titles. I also suspect that they rely more on regular readers than being linked to, thus they can allow themselves the risk of being confused for linkbait.
Of course, this argument is somewhat one-sided: people who didn't read the article won't bother to come here and tell us whether it lived up to their expectation for the title. In some cases, I do read the HN threads but not the articles just to avoid a website but see what poeple have to say about a topic.
[+] [-] kerkeslager|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talklittle|12 years ago|reply
Multipeer and WiFi Direct are not compatible. Stackoverflow user @barbazoo hypothesizes Multipeer is using Bluetooth Classic.
iOS Bluetooth Classic is known the be under the Apple MFA Accessory API tight control and lockdown, including the MFA authentication challenge-reposne. Apple controls the MFA encryption keys (either in software or by the accessory authentication chips). It makes it inaccessible to other platforms.
[+] [-] spikexxx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cliveowen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Codhisattva|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doe88|12 years ago|reply
I once read in the documentation an interesting fact (note that I haven't tested it, so I could be wrong or misremember a detail), for instance if using this framework a device A wants to send a message to a device C but A only has activated BLE and C only has activated Wifi, if there is a device B nearby with BLE and Wifi activated it will automatically be used as relay between A and C to transmit this message.
[+] [-] 205guy|12 years ago|reply
Also, the surveillance issues around mesh networks seem rather thorny. Being open, it seems trivial for authorities to set up listening stations everywhere. Yes, you are an anonymous handle, but you are also very localizable.
Just as an additional data point, another example of mesh network is the smart meter. It uses more powerful wifi, but it sends its data through other smart meters (down the street through your neighbor's smart meters) to reach its recipient (the phone company).
[+] [-] hk__2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talklittle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ismail|12 years ago|reply
I think maybe the news here is not actually the Apple tech, but rather the first app in this class to really catch on.
Alljoyn from Qualcomm has been around for quite a while as well.
https://www.alljoyn.org/
played around a bit with Aljoyn.
It effectively works like a service bus. You send a message and the bus will route it to the correct receiver. Pretty awesome.
You could have two people drawing on the same canvas at the same time and info appears almost instantaneously. Also opens up other types of gaming experiences.
Anyone with experience with the Apple side, care to provide more info?
*Edit more details on alljoyn
[+] [-] ctdonath|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchrisa|12 years ago|reply
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mobile-couchbase/...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mobile-couchbase/...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mobile-couchbase/pNq...
Maybe that helps someone wanting to share JSON around a peer group.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|12 years ago|reply
You want to cut off the internet? Fine. You can't stop us from communicating, though.
Although if there was an agent with a phone in the area, he could see what everyone was saying, even if not who was saying it.
[+] [-] batuhanicoz|12 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_protests_in_Turkey
[1] People started using VPN's and most people knows what DNS is now. So, there is hope.
[+] [-] qwerta|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|12 years ago|reply
Super-local: android beam does NFC pairing -> bluetooth transfer. Not exactly multi-peer, but perhaps it's possible to keep those connections open?
Peer-to-peer: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/p2p/... though apparently it's a bit buggy. A game or two I've played seems to use this, and it works 90+% of the time, but it's definitely not foolproof and there are random drops.
[+] [-] mdellavo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senthil_rajasek|12 years ago|reply
"The Multipeer Connectivity framework provides support for discovering services provided by nearby iOS devices using infrastructure Wi-Fi networks, peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth personal area networks ..."
[+] [-] fsckin|12 years ago|reply
No kidding. It'd be great if this evolved to where half or more of phones in a nearby vicinity could completely shutdown their cellular radio and use the mesh network for connectivity, saving (on average) lots of battery life and providing more reliable service for all.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
It's a lot like BitTorrent, where on average everyone must seed as much as they leech, except in this case every packet is relayed N times. So for a healthy network, everyone must relay N times as much as they consume.
[+] [-] pstadler|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://danilo.to/command-c
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bsaul|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fasebook|12 years ago|reply