I really feel like #meshtastic would be an awesome thing to get high schools on board with, even if just informally.

If most schools had a node on a high building they'd mesh really well. Students could create their own channels, giving them a resistant, capitalism-free way of communicating as individuals and groups. Advertisers and social media bans can piss off, as students can create and manage their own networks.

Baby's first solar powered LoRa #meshtastic node.

Still waiting on a better antenna.

Whatever stroke of luck that was giving my #meshtastic node access to the rest of the mesh is gone. Until yesterday there was an otherwise silent node out there that was forwarding packets to and from mine.

I'm now anxiously awaiting my new antenna to arrive, because it feels wrong for my tiny radio child to be cut off from its friends.

Genuinely impressed with #meshtastic thus far. I've got a pair of ThinkNode M2s, and the antennas that come with them are literally bits of printed circuit board, and yet they've managed to get a surprising bit of range (maybe 300m) out of them with suboptimal placement and no special care.

I can see that with a real antenna and an elevated position they'd go quite well.

https://meshtastic.org/

Rapidly moving my meshtatic nodes over to meshcore

Going very smoothly so far. Meshcore is notably very fast at message delivery and delivery confirmations back to the sender.

Thinking I'll leave my primary meshtatic infrastructure nodes up and build meshcore nodes to deploy next to them so as the network matures I can do head to head comparisons.

MeshCore has released their code today.

I've read most of the code and this is fairly early, limited docs, no mobile app and limited hardware testing.

That being said the over the air protocol+routing looks excellent. The code is well designed and fairly slim. The security posture is good and designed in from the start.

They get so much right in so little code. I even think I could make this messtastic compatible faster than they can improve.

https://github.com/ripplebiz/MeshCore

Finally I suspect that IF meshtastic ever does fix their routing algo they will suffer from MITM exploits due to issues around #1, #6, #8, and #9.

Bc when you have MAC as the root of trust I can respond to your MAC and poison the routing table.

There might even by a solid security downgrade attack here too bc they have backwards compatibility for insecure DMs. So once I clone your MAC I can also downgrade security and ppl are trained to accept downgrades.

#13 No conversation privacy in default scalable configuration. Anyone can see your to/from fields and bc #1 it's great metadata.

Need to verify how bad #13 is, I think you can mitigate but most people use a public channel. The header I think its technically encrypted BUT with a known public key so everyone can see whose talking to whom. I think you can get encrypted headers on the public channel but docs aren't clear and probably limits your hops.

11. Limited protocol privacy behavior by default responds to certain protocol events unless in specific mode (client_hidden). But they still leak data sometimes, possibly bugs???
12. Lack of strategy on #11 means once you know a node's ID you can track it trivially both via MQTT or physically or even via BLE or Wifi.

And if you've seen my defcon talk.... you probably can figure out what I can do with #1, #2 #11 and #12

Normally I'd recommend forking once a project is getting well known for bad leadership.... but IMO meshtastic isn't worth forking.

It needs so much work to be good, like it -might- be an ok starting code base but so much needs changing so it may be easier to start the fuck over.

So doing what LoRaWAN does(optionally using better router hardware), could help maybe 8x the ability of this chaotic shouting fest but it'd never improve things.

The ONLY routing approach meshtastic has seriously considered is this broadcast system. They keep futzzing around with how long people pause before shouting but they don't introduce anything more than this.

This is why the datarate sucks. Messages collisions. "router_late" etc won't fix this.

https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/#layer-3-managed-flooding-for-multi-hop-messaging

2024 rolls around, the cryptobro hype has died off, the corporate hold is doing its thing on TTN and well... all other types of public comms are getting spied on like no ones business.

Time to go catch up on the LoRa mesh going ons.

I noticed meshtastic was close to FINALLY merging their public/private key system in the fall last year and decided it finally hit my first min. bar for re-review.

Mind you they were kinda making misleading encryption claims up to this point.

I first found #Meshtastic in 2020. It was early, had aloha broadcast (aka floodfill routing) as the core routing protocol.

I thought it was a cute LoRa mesh demo but it was super buggy and the hardware wasn't good then.

Back to that flood fill tho... friends, THIS IS NOT HOW TO MESH. I've been playing with wifi, bluetooth, zigbee meshes since 2006. Friends, you can't scale flood fill.

So I made a note to check in on meshtastic when they did real routing.

This is a subtoot and should probably be a blog post. But basically some techbros are re-inventing mesh radios (badly).

Low cost, developer friendly mesh radios have kinda been going in circles for decades. I've personally been watching this space for 20yrs & it's not progressing.

So in many ways I guess I shouldn't be surprised to review yet another cheap mesh radio project and realize, "dude this just plain sucks and isn't improving at all, oh and the community is kinda awful".