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Now Get Weather Alerts Even When Your Mobile Networks Are Down, Thanks To IBM's Mesh Networking (cnet.com)
Communicating news of severe weather events or natural disasters is something mobile phones are well suited to, but if there's limited or disrupted network coverage the message may fail to get through. But not anymore. From a CNET report: A new Weather Channel app, though, can get the message through even during earthquakes, tornadoes, and terrorist attacks when mobile networks can be overwhelmed and may not work. The Android app, geared specifically for developing countries, uses IBM-developed technology called mesh networking that sends messages directly from one phone to another. The result is that information can propagate even when centralized networks fail. Using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networks, the app can send data from phone to phone across distances between 200 to 500 feet, IBM Research staff member Nirmit Desai said. It doesn't add any more battery burden than an ordinary app, and the mesh network can be used without having to reconfigure the phone's network settings.
I can't wait to see what new malware uses this technology to spread from device to device. You won't even have to reconfigure your network, and the hit to battery life will be less than Facebook's app!
UUCP 40 years ago.
AFAIK not possible with Android. You would need an AP.
you insensitive clod!
Really, now? Or the proverbial "now", as in "now we have done it once in a lab environment".
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
The Nextel is back!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What about data and txt costs?
How much do you pay for bluetooth and WiFi on your phone?
This is fascinating, intended for third world use. Do we imagine that the density of cell phones in the third world is really sufficient to meet the 200' range? Maybe in the city, on the streets. Anywhere else, huh?
I didn't know "terrorist attack" was a weather condition.
I've got this funny feeling that mesh networking is going to be used to track the crap out of people. Everybody on the mesh will be phoning home with the identifiers of everybody else they can see locally. You know, for optimization purposes...
"Based on secure bluetooth and wifi technology" -TM
I look forward to the inevitable security problem that gets found with this app when bored researchers find some unintended way that this new app has a security hole big enough to drive a truck through.
Welcome to 1990 IBM. What the fuck? Mesh networking has been around forever - using bluetooth/wifi/whatever.
I don't associate IBM with being a mensch.
Oh mesh!
I actually associate IBM with suppository networking.
If your communications networks have just been taken out by weather then the situation is already past the point where information about the weather is even relevant because it's already too late to do anything except hunker down in the basement (and maybe kiss your ass goodbye).
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And a dozen other mesh strategies. Qualcom's LTE Direct
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Do we imagine that the density of cell phones in the third world is really sufficient to meet the 200' range? Maybe in the city, on the streets. Anywhere else, huh?
Yes most people in third world have cell phones, they don't have to cost $1000
It's not supposed to be like TOR, it's more like bitTorrent but for a single public resource... you're getting non sensitive publicly available data - unless you are worried about people mining what you publicly look for - but that's what TOR is for.
Sadly, Google amputated Ad hoc mode (IBSS) in Android, even though that would have been the perfect method in this particular case. Not the technically inferior Wifi-Direct. Some people have tried to hack CyanogenMod on some devices to resurrect IBSS mode on some devices a while ago, but that is not so easy. I think this deserves more attention and love by devs and by Google. There's no reason why we don't have IBSS (ad hoc) mode on those devices out of the box, so we could experiment with real P2P routing algorithms that would be ideal for disaster recovery and deployment of ad hoc meshes.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Presumably, the alerts could use a "store and forward" mode, so if one person gets the alert in one town and then travels to the next town, it would start spreading again. Of course, the alert would have to have some sort of a time limit, otherwise it would keep spreading and re-spreading indefinitely.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
It is very difficult to control (censor) what passes over ad hoc networks. So it's best for Google to just disable it altogether.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Let's start the pool on how long until someone figures out a way to spread a virus via this new mesh...
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Mesh Networking was pioneered by Amateur Radio Operators (Also known as Hams), and the real, high-level engineering is being done by hams who have already set up Mesh networks to link mobile radios and the internet.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
You really spent 0 amount of time looking into this, didn't you?
Step 1: https://play.google.com/store/...
Step 2: https://play.google.com/store/...
Just as with email... viagra, stock pump and dumps, and "you have won" phishing.
There's the Serval mesh app: https://play.google.com/store/...
Yes most people in third world have cell phones,
100% of the people in Nebraska could have cell phones and you wouldn't have enough cell phone density in most of the state to make a mesh at 200' range.
President Trump will still send you tweets, even if you hide yourself in a tunnel or a sewer or a hybrid car.
You could repurpose a spud gun and fire cell phones off in random directions until you achieve desired coverage.
I have a weather radio that NOAA can trigger for warnings, and if I want real-time tracking information (like while I'm hiding in an interior room due to a tornado warning), local radio broadcasters simulcast the local TV station's audio feeds. Much more reliable, and doesn't require apps.
Not even the third world pays for texts any more.
Most smartphones come with a built in FM feature so how about activating it instead, and use it for weather band radio? It's old tech, but it broadcasts for miles, not 500 feet. Its proven, reliable, relatively cheap, and can take advantage of the existing infrastructure. And we get a radio with our phone.
Why do it with wifi? If it's a disaster and the network is down, we should be able to use the spectrum the phone normally uses to make mesh networks.
actually it's 200 - 500 ft, and your really missing the point... if you overload a cell tower cos it's a centralised network and sucks in an emergency, then you have your high density mesh right there around that tower, it doesn't have to cover an area the size of Nebraska... even in no-network scenarios populations are not spread out uniformly.
if you overload a cell tower cos it's a centralised network and sucks in an emergency, then you have your high density mesh right there around that tower,
The point was that this functions when the network is down, not just overloaded at one tower. And relying on having a high density of users right around the non-working towers is a dangerous assumption, outside the cities that already have other notification systems. From TFS:
And, of course, that the concern over data costs was ridiculous.
it doesn't have to cover an area the size of Nebraska.
I didn't say it did. I said it wouldn't be able to cover much of Nebraska at all, outside the cities. Even small sections would have no coverage with this, even at 500' range. Having an emergency notification system that relies on Farmer Bob being home, with a working and enabled cell phone, to bridge the warning from the next neighbor further away to you is a disaster waiting to happen.
Can you say FidoNet? Sure, I knew you could.
Some of the amateur radio enthusiasts around my area are building a mesh net utilizing ham radio frequencies/gear. Benefit of that is the range between nodes is far greater than 500'...
(If you run git blame on serval mesh's source code, you'll find my name on about 80% of the code)
Serval mesh uses Wifi and Bluetooth to share files and communicate securely. But it can't bypass google's removal of IBSS from Android. We've kept the code that turns on IBSS on some Android handsets version 2.3.3 or lower. If you really want a mesh network between phones, you can still get your hand on some old ones...
Android's bluetooth & Wifi-Direct stack are a buggy mess. It's far too easy to stumble over a bug that prevents you from getting any data through. Plus both API's are built around having the user confirm each and every connection. Almost completely useless for building a self organising network.
Then there's Wifi. Sure you can turn most phones into a hotspot... If you use reflection to call a hidden API. The carrier hasn't done anything to disable it. And in some cases, only if you have a functional cellular data service. But there's no easy way to tell if there are other nearby devices waiting to connect to you....
The main problem with this new weather app is that nobody will have it installed when they need it. Getting emergency weather information is not going to motivate people to use this app day to day and form the adhoc networks that are needed for it to work. Also this article and the summary is crap, IBM did not invent mesh networking.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Ok, say some disaster happens and the cell network goes down, generally that means that other utilities (like power) go out as well. The first thing that I am going to do (and probably 95% of everyone I know) is turn the phone off in order to save its battery for when the network comes back on in a day or two.
In 3rd world it's hard to get more than 150 metres from a phone.
On October 4th, 2001, I read this post https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... on slashdot. The article it refers to, http://archive.oreilly.com/pub... describes "SMS Relay -- An Idea for Fault-Tolerant Communications", wherein the author proposes building a mesh-like network capability into the SMS programming of cellphones. It's still a good idea.
And that article got me thinking about what I could do to make a difference. I shortly got my first ham radio license, volunteered with ARES, then the Red Cross, and now work there.
How much faster does a phone battery drain when attempting to do mesh communications versus only communicating with cell towers and scanning for access points? Also, how much storage will be required to contain the alert data? There is no such thing as a free lunch, although it wouldn't entire surprise me if this one turned out to be affordable.
What about data and txt costs?
How much do you pay for bluetooth and WiFi on your phone?
This is fascinating, intended for third world use. Do we imagine that the density of cell phones in the third world is really sufficient to meet the 200' range? Maybe in the city, on the streets. Anywhere else, huh?
Hello from the developing world. Yes, most people, even in remote areas, tend to live in clusters. These clusters increase in concentration during natural disasters. This kind of tech would allow news to propagate within population clusters, leaving disaster response people to focus more on hopping between concentrations of people. All in all, probably a useful addition to the disaster-response toolkit.
BUT... Android-based mesh network tech that uses a mobile's wifi has been around for years. I test drove one FOSS project back in 2011-12. And it's never proven practical because of the high traffic management overheads, and the fact that always-on wifi can eat a fully charged battery in hours. I've been through two cyclones out here, and I can tell you from experience that getting access to power is a huge challenge for most people. Unless they find a way to address power consumption, this will be a nice idea, to be tossed into the Nice Ideas drawer and forgotten.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Have a look at the Serval Project. http://www.servalproject.org
Requires rooted Android Phone
In 3rd world it's hard to get more than 150 metres from a phone.
No. The third world includes a lot of places like Africa where there aren't many people at all in very large areas. Maybe you're thinking of second world?
What about data and txt costs?
How much do you pay for bluetooth and WiFi on your phone?
This is fascinating, intended for third world use. Do we imagine that the density of cell phones in the third world is really sufficient to meet the 200' range? Maybe in the city, on the streets. Anywhere else, huh?
You only need to be a true shareholder in IBM stock to get the inside company information on how this will work with 100% certainty. *choke*
I think your "looking into" skills need some polishing.
You should have looked deeper into the projects you refer to and see what problems they have and have had a look at the Android bug tracker.
You need to assert the problem you are investigating and locate the relevant sources that would have the information you need. Obviously the Android bug tracker and then as you were very close to do right, find some Apps and see what their problems are. Just searching on an App Store or typing things into Google is not a good method of research. You just wanted to sound smart and now you just look like a jerk.
A great App that hopes for Google to fix ad-hoc Wifi is Rumble.
http://disruptedsystems.org/do...
https://code.google.com/p/andr...
https://code.google.com/p/andr...
That's how you look into things.
Well, I'm apparently the jerk here. I didn't finish my research. It seems like Android does support Wi-Fi Direct.
https://developer.android.com/training/connect-devices-wirelessly/wifi-direct.html
I like this idea. When disasters happen, one of the key issues is that ordinary infrastructure fails (so, cell phone towers and the cell network for instance). Then the next thing is that the servicing apparatus (people, trucks, crews) gets overwhelmed and cannot repair the infrastructure in a timely way.
Here's my concern though. Will people have the app installed and ready to go, prior to the disaster? If not then this idea probably won't work. You need the cell infrastructure (or Wi-Fi) working to get the app, but I'll bet that few will have the app prior to any large-scale problems.
A couple of ways out of this dilemma, off the top of my head:
1). The mesh network app is a secondary capability. The app has a primary capability and people are pre-loading it for that primary capability. Thus the mesh capability is there, ready to go in an emergency;
2). Maybe it's not a full-on disaster? Developing countries have a lot of infrastructure problems anyways and degraded infrastructure is an ever-present possibility. Having mesh networking just to deal with ordinary network problems could be a real use-case;
3). You distribute the app via the mesh network, during the disaster itself. The concept is that you bootstrap the users up during the emergency. Yeah, I don't know how this will work either, but just imagine. If people have the smartphones and they aren't working during the crisis, they are going to be very receptive to installing an app that would get the smartphone working, or working better. It does need a mechanism though, something foundational that would allow the bootstrapping process to occur. Maybe a core mesh networking protocol in the smartphone OS? A bit like the Wi-Fi support found there already?
What about data and txt costs? and can they remove the comcast as well all of crap from the tv channel? Also weather scan national / sat feed in HD?
I am on The Weather Channel team helping to bring this to life. There is no extra data cost as the technology is using peer to peer connections to securely pass the message. In fact, you can use this without cellular data at all.
The primary contributor to Serval posted in this thread
Check out this: https://github.com/servalproject/batphone Already there!