I'd love to see companies such as Google and Apple implement optional mesh networking as an over-the-air update to their phones in order to help people communicate during times like this.
That's a pretty good point, actually.
> I'd love to see companies such as Google and Apple implement optional mesh networking as an over-the-air update to their phones in order to help people communicate during times like this.
The tech isn't really there yet. It's both a hardware (BT doesn't reach far enough) and a software problem.
You don't just "casually" implement a global mesh-based network without a careful and quite explicit system design involving HW and SW in tandem.
Nevermind the largest problem: How do you prioritize traffic in a distributed, fair and and scalable way, on nodes that you can't trust, once the mesh network gets really popular?
Naturally, there is a compliance cost that they incur as a result, but I am sure there is an interest in US government to keep those lines of communications open for one reason or another.
Something I noticed once is that in AdWords geo-targeting, Iran is missing. Does that mean Google search is totally not available in Iran? Alternatively, if google search is available, are there any ads displayed?