Comment by DonsDiscountGas
4 months ago
Right but Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi are very short range so it doesn't actually solve that problem
4 months ago
Right but Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi are very short range so it doesn't actually solve that problem
It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay.
This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.
> It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay.
Let's think this through. Imagine civil war breaks out in Australia, and communications infrastructure is destroyed or shut off. I'm in Sydney and want to transmit a message to a friend in Perth.
How exactly is "everyone acts as a relay" going to work? In particular, how is it going to scale when everyone in the country is trying to do the same things?
> This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.
This is incorrect. Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think. Those nearby Internet-connected devices send the airtag's location to a server.
Nothing about this would work without the Internet.
Yeah, I think current tech assumes a server relay. However imo, and if I were to imagine a solution, in this case I think a message would need a ttl, say 24 hours. In a local mesh/hive everyone would store a copy of the undelivered messages. When people move between hives they would sync these undelivered messages where ttl didn't expire. With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. Undelivered means a destination user that didn't show in a hive. Wdyt?
2 replies →
> Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think
Yes, exactly (BLE, UWB, NFC).
First, Airtags only have a coin-cell battery. It is not remotely viable for them to be doing any sort of serious "communicating" because the battery would die in seconds.
Second, making the Airtag effectively a dumb device means you gain the various security and privacy benefits, and means everything needed to make the magic happen can be transmitted in a single BLE/UWB/NFC packet (bringing us back to the battery life aspect already mentioned).
30,000ft view of how it works: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sece994d0126/...
I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues.
Airtags have a totally different architecture than what this protocol is describing, I think.
> I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues.
Yes indeed. I don't understand how the peer-to-peer relaying can possibly scale without some directed routing algorithm.
If my phone running Briar is literally handing off every as-yet-undelivered message to every other phone running Briar, we're going to pretty quickly become overwhelmed.
It'll have all the routing issues of a Wi-Fi mesh network, except at a vast scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network#Briar