jrexilius

When you say "GPS" what do you mean? Offline maps? or do you mean tracking the location of the device (and kid)?

You are touching on my thoughts exactly. It seems everyone would come out better if the insurance company just paid for them to rebuild. I suspect that'd come out cheaper and it would maybe deter the attacks by making them worth less..

Why did they agree to pay the ransom? Such a small org it seems like they could rebuild the systems they needed for less than $1mil?..

That's the exact opposite model of what I built [1], because I view the phone as just as unreliable as desktop or laptop. Actually even less reliable, given my choice of workstation OS.

I went with a USB and BLE chip on the external side of my keyboard to connect to both workstation and phone to push the passwords, MFA, and encrypted text from the manager I built into the keyboard itself.

1: https://www.anomie.tech/products/anigma/ce/

Yes, SPE could get you ~1km. https://electricui.com/blog/spe-sensor-node

There are multiple roles for a small airborne asset. One of them is ISR (video feed), used for targeting artillery or movement tracking and such. Jamming can block the down stream feed and defeat that support role.

If this topic is a serious concern in your threat modeling, then this is a far better solution than glitter nail polish, and also doubles as a digital identity signature:

https://dustidentity.com/

I'm looking at using this for certain shipping and packaging needs.

yeah, that was my point. sorry I wasn't more clear

Yeah, it's also worth noting that Starlink and a few other commercial companies are offering text-based services to _unmodified_ cell phones (no special sat hardware), which means they can get signal, IMEI, etc. LoRa is also used as transport layer for some cube sats and edu type sats. A new company just tested Bluetooth-to-sat. So even on the commercial side there are overhead sensors that you may need to be concerned about on the triangulation front. It's a hard problem to crack...

I would wager that is has more to do with leveraging existing infrastructure that is commonly deployed to more than just G7 nations and working with people in those countries who may not have a Q branch handy nor could afford to be caught with gear-turned-evidence.

As well, as any honest engineer knows, new tech is rarely reliable and bug free. You may adopt it for other benefits, but assurance is generally not one of them. So if lives depend on something, you may keep using things that have been proven reliable.

LoRa is just a transport layer. You can do whatever encryption you want and LoRaWAN has some basic encryption built in. It's hard(er) to triangulate if you don't have constant traffic (like route updates in mesh, or heavy concentrated users like at a concert or protest), but be aware that AWS sidewalk (and all the alexa devices fielded in peoples homes, etc.) run LoRa antennas and traffic. So in the US, Amazon could do a reasonable job at triangulation of frequent emitters. In China and EU there is infrastructure in place (5G/SDR stuff overtly) that can do a pretty good job at triangulating a wide band of RF emitters.

Meshtastic is not really designed to avoid that, but more for resiliency and off-grid type scenarios. Your best bet of really avoiding triangulation by state or telco level infratructure is to get creative with frequency and even transport layer hopping. None of which is really consumer friendly.

[edit-to-add] another tactic to for low probability detection is to hide in noise on high traffic channels. basically figure out what their filter sensitivty is and see if you can go below that threshold and still maintain coherent channel, etc.

How is this different from WiGLE?

I was just going to ask, what ever happened to WiGLE and why build a clone of it rather than add to it?

That is the key line from the whole piece.

There are a couple good points in the linked Wired article, such as the fact that the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and North Korea are already escalating attacks on civillian and commercial targets and our restraint isn't being matched.

I fully understand why the US and partner governments won't be able to respond in kind, but there is certainly a lot more that could be done in that domain.

I worked with him briefly on another project and he was pretty comfy and open about the whole thing. In fact I think I remember him mentioning doing a talk at a conference about it. He's a genuinely nice guy and fairly laid back about things. NK regime maybe is annoyed with him, but there is an almost zero probability of them being able to do anything other than digital harrassment to him.

I've always thought (wished?) this was a killer app for crypto currency. I would love to have a pool of news "coins", that get auto spent on articles I choose to read. As the OP stated, I'd prefer to pay for content, but I dont have an infinite pool of $9.99-a-months..

I bought the last version and ran it for a while. The one huge red flag is that they have access to all your contacts and messages via their servers. You can't upload your contacts directly to the phone from a USB cable or import them from a loccal file. You have to go to their website and upload your contacts and then they push them to your phone. The way MMS works is that the messages gets relayed to their servers, which then email it to you. It's an absolute security and privacy disater. Which is really sad, because almost everything else about the phone is pretty good and it's filling a need in the market.

[edit to add] as others mentioned, no TOTP auth app was the other requirement missing

Yeah, I miss the real physical keyboards. I started with the Palm Treo smart phone in 2001 and stuck with Palm till they died. Better even than blackberry keyboards.

No connection other than being a fan. I started working on my (simpler) approach before precursor was launched and think there is a place for both, but I'm a big fan of all the work he and his team are doing.

Sadly, proly not till next year. I'm funding this myself and hardware is hard. Embedding it into a case has a whole lotta mechanical engineering challenges as well.

The desktop and tablet version will be released this year though.

My approach has been to move it out of the vendor OS entirely and embedd it in the keyboard. I'll be releasing this as open source (hardware & software) soon:

https://www.anomie.tech/products/anigma/ce/

My approach has been to move all of the critical secrets out of the vendor device and embed it in a keyboard. It then works with anything that accepts a keyboard.. I'll be releasing this as open source (hardware & software) soon:

https://www.anomie.tech/products/anigma/ce/

I'm getting ready to release ours as open source (hardware and software) soon:

https://www.anomie.tech/products/anigma/ce/

Having worked in many low-trust countries, I very much agree with that assertion. And seeing the effects of the trust-decay in our own, and the trajectory it sets, reinforces that view.

That is a very good summary. I'm stealing that line..

An alternative approach I am working on is simply doing the encryption outside of the phone. Yes this requires a second device, but it allows you to do true E2E hardware encryption and still use twitter or whatsapp or whatever platform. With this appraoch Apple, Google or the EU government cant really stop you.

[edit-to-add] obvious downside to this model is that your friends then need to have the same type of device as well, so it's kinda apple-to-oranges comparison...

Not sure about this current proposal but the previous one was on-the-phone based, which Apple double-timed into production so capability is there for EU to access when they finally flip the switch. That proposal would mean that it is Apple and Google that would provide access to your data before any apps or VPNs saw it (i.e. at the OS of the phone level). This new proposal sounds like maybe they backtracked on that and will just coerce the app and platforms?... not sure.

That isn't really much better, except that Apples ad network is smaller than googles perhaps?

I think the expectation is that China is the one that would massively outproduce the US. And that our technological "advantage" is roughly that of Germany over the US in WWII (i.e. noticable, but not meaningful). We likely would be barely capable of a WWI performance as far as output..