[guardian-dev] GilgaMesh (was Re: FireChat moved off iOS proprietary mesh to their own xp mesh protocol?)

Michael Rogers michael at briarproject.org
Sat Oct 4 07:02:45 EDT 2014


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On 03/10/14 16:03, Nathan of Guardian wrote:
> Second, within the limits of Bluetooth, we can employ some useful
> app behaviors to extend the range of any message. In the latest
> code, if you have paired with a trusted person’s device (using the
> built-in Bluetooth settings panel of your device), and the
> Gilgamesh app receives a broadcast message from that user, it will
> be automatically re-shared, aka re-tweeted, aka RT. (Yes, we are
> building old school Twitter here, just over Bluetooth). What this
> creates then is a chain reaction – “the wave” phenomenon that I
> blogged about earlier – that allows a message to propagate up to
> 30ft in any direction, over and over again, as long as there are
> trusted/paired devices out in the crowd.

Are you assuming that trust is transitive? If Alice and Bob have
paired their devices and Bob receives a retweet from Alice, who claims
it was originally tweeted by Carol, then Bob will trust Alice and
retweet it, right? Likewise for anyone who trusts Bob. So Alice only
needs to fool a single person into trusting her in order to spread
forged messages.

> In addition to the auto-retweet feature, anyone can press and hold
> on a message, and it will allow for a manually RT, whether you are
> paired with the sender or not.

I think this is a better way to handle retweets. Make it as easy as
possible, but make it manual.

This is essentially what we're planning to do with forums in Briar.

> Finally, let’s not forget that anyone with any bluetooth device, be
> it a simple feature phone, an iPad or a laptop, can participate in
> this process, by changing their Bluetooth device name manually
> themselves, and setting it to a retweet message.

Perhaps it would make sense to use a special character (such as >) at
the start of the device name to indicate that it's meant to be
interpreted as a message? Otherwise people will keep saying "Alice's
iPad" in the chatroom. ;-)

Cheers,
Michael
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