[Hackupy-discuss] Dovetail protester communications system

[Eleanor Saitta]

On 2012.01.10 00.52, Joshua Marker wrote:
> A a friend-of-a-friend contacted  me about a project she calls
> 'dovetail'. It's a peer-to-peer message transfer system designed to
> route messages without reliance on cell phone networks/etc - eg, when
> cities or governments shut them down to prevent protesters
> communicating. It uses adhoc wifi and bluetooth to flip messages
> around.
> 
> Good idea, I was surprised it didn't exist. They're raising money
> with a kickstarter to get it done - they're serious people, I think
> UN/etc NGO level stuff, but the idea of needing that much money to
> write this seemed absurd to me. It sounded like something Hackupy
> would do in a few evenings. I told her so. She's interested in
> talking to someone at NB/Hackupy/anyone about it. Anyone interested?

Actually, getting something like this right is *very* hard, because of
hardware and OS limitations.  There are also a lot of serious security
implications with systems like this; Meredith Patterson, Travis
Goodspeed, and I took another similar system called Fluid Nexus apart
last fall, and it was really ugly.  People without a security background
building tools like this *will* get people killed.  The Briar project
(http://briar.sourceforge.net) is an attempt to build a system like this
done correctly, with the right attention to issues around security,
scalability, etc.

I'm planning on reaching out to the Dovetail folks shortly to see if
they're interested in working with Briar, because I think that
duplication of effort here is a poor use of community resources at best.
 I think their estimate of $30k to get a system running across multiple
OS platforms in a production ready state is very low, unless all of the
developers are working for free, and that if they're going to do it
right, it's going to take much longer than they think.

E.

-- 
Ideas are my favorite toys.

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