I swear to fucking god if I see another infosec influencer account suggest that the solution to the threat of the US government being couped by Nazi billionaires is setting up meshtastic loraWAN nodes, I'll lose my fucking shit. What on fucking earth are you irresponsible pricks thinking? - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

mall.bsky.social • 25 days ago

I swear to fucking god if I see another infosec influencer account suggest that the solution to the threat of the US government being couped by Nazi billionaires is setting up meshtastic loraWAN nodes, I'll lose my fucking shit.

What on fucking earth are you irresponsible pricks thinking?

Comments

mall.bsky.social•25 days ago

Meshtastic is a great hobby project, we should have more of it.

You know what else it is?

A weird little bespoke thing that's got no battle testing, will have massive supply chain security issues at scale, & has an as yet under developed threat model compared to tech already used in dictatorships

emly.bsky.social•25 days ago

also nextnav wants most of the 902-928 spectrum and will probably just get all of it and not even chirp is going to cut through if they do

mall.bsky.social•25 days ago

That's not a problem you can route it over any ISM band you want if you really must

sarahviktoria.bsky.social•25 days ago

Meshtastic would probably be security by obscurity for all but the local equivalent of GCHQ, and all the Hams listening in of course.

mall.bsky.social•25 days ago

At best

sarahviktoria.bsky.social•25 days ago

I think that where these alternative communication modalities may come into their own is as a backstop when communications are cut. Internet is vulnerable when antenna to antenna wireless is not as much. Or maybe coordinating protest to bypass internet being jammed. Where total secrecy is not needed

mall.bsky.social•25 days ago

As someone who hacks embedded for a living, homebrew messaging network is fucking quaint. It will continue to be fucking quaint. Real world deployments of this tech as a replacement for using signal disappearing messages or whatever will only be secure for as long as they are irrelevant.

mall.bsky.social•25 days ago

Not in a "I have a working exploit for your personal network" way, but in a "hapless tech noobs who don't know what they're doing will trust you and get hurt" way.

mall.bsky.social•25 days ago

If you don't have an infosec savvy friend to review what your resistance movement is actually doing, be careful not to say anything over digital networks you wouldn't want to be repeated back to you in a government basement by a guy with pliers and a blow torch later

mall.bsky.social•25 days ago

And by infosec savvy I mean someone who understands stuff like the threat model human rights defenders face in Saudi Arabia. Not just "runs Kali Linux and can use metasploit".

mall.bsky.social•25 days ago

I'm genuinely angry about how many infosec people have pulled this shit in recent wks.

It's good for one thing and one thing only: increasing dependency of social movements on internet infosec guys.

deeneely.bsky.social•25 days ago

I hear ya. I've seen a lot of that.

aidapsibr.bsky.social•25 days ago

Yeah meshtastic is useful for beacons and local positioning where there aren't cell towers, not really for comms anyway. My message send/receive rate in a reasonable time successfully is under 50%

wearahelmet.bsky.social•24 days ago

For the life of me I cannot figure out how to "re-flash" (???) this fucking LilyGo I was given, searched "meshtastic" for funzies while the "connecting ...___...___..." screen dashes and dots at me endlessly, cracking up a lot at this post