[guardian-dev] FireChat moved off iOS proprietary mesh to their own xp mesh protocol?

[Nathan of Guardian]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014, at 09:42 AM, Nathan of Guardian wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 1, 2014, at 09:29 AM, Nathan of Guardian wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Wed, Oct 1, 2014, at 08:18 AM, Michael Rogers wrote:
> > > Interesting idea! With old school Bluetooth you can't make an Android
> > > device discoverable for more than 2 minutes, and it requires user
> > > confirmation each time. But maybe the situation's different with
> > > Bluetooth LE? I haven't looked at the API yet.
> > 
> > Even without LE, it seems improved in recent APIs, up to 3600 seconds. 
> 
> Confirmed, I just set my Moto E running 4.4.3 to be discoverable for 1
> hour. Interesting!

You can also dynamically change the Bluetooth device name within one
discoverable session, and that seems to be able to be the full 248 bytes
indicated in the API docs (at least testing between Moto E and Nexus 7). 

On the discoverer side, you can continuously trigger discover sessions
(which seems to be about 12 second long) without issue, and you will see
the updated names as they occur. 

All in all, it seems like using Bluetooth this way, while a total insane
hack, is viable and creates a very simple messaging system on top of
which we could easily run OTR or Axolotl. 

I am thinking of wrapping this up in the ChatSecure UI since we have the
pluggable protocol piece anyhow. Groupchats would be unencrypted
messages based on #topic but you could also init one-to-one chats with
specific devices as well, and OTR would work in that case.

+n