Hi, on the article: "Wireless mesh researchers target defence applications" (itnews for australian business, 2013-01-30) It's so absurd that there should be no need to publically debunk. Don't feed the trolls. It should be pretty obvious that many design decisions would not be the first choice for defence applications. Rather among the last choices for defence applications. The 2.4 GHz band was more or less unwanted worldwide because of high absorption due to water. It's nicer to communicate when the weather is fine, but I doubt this a primary concern for military applications. Many households possess devices (microwave ovens, yes, it somehow has something to do with water) that could be turned into effective (powerful, dangerous) jamming devices for 2.4 GHz. The signal to noise ratio on frequencies which are used by commodity devices tends to be suboptimal. Well, it occasionally tends to be noisy in defence applications anyway, maybe let's consider signal: The RF power for wifi signals is _way_ lower than what Walkie Talkies have used more than a quarter of a century ago. Downsizing has my empathy and I like the retro aspect of it as well: In nowadays hectic it's nice to have something that needs one or the other minute to boot. (With solar cells the runtime of mobile phones can be prolonged so shutdown/reboot because of lack of wall plugs gets less of an issue.) Now we pondered about time, how about location: Wifi dongle/card/chipset/routers (preferrably one of those cheap devices which have multiple (phase shiftable) antenna) could be programmed to see the traffic by batphones. Well rather "can" be programmed than "could" be programmed to see the traffic by batphones as that is what batphone is about. No way to decode the content but ain't it nice to see that and roughly where there is traffic? Maybe some military camouflage spoilsport gets picky about being located but why not opt for a little transparency? Ever heard of location based services? Come on, don't be shy it's a new millenium! And what seems to be a good grassroot approach because of being (low budget) available everywhere is a double edged sword because drones could also lock onto wifi. Hey that was the hidden plan, how did you know? The objective of serval project to enable connecting with anyone anywhere has not yet been the primary focus of military communication. That's about to change: now there is batphone! One might consider renaming batphone though. "bad phone" casts doubt whether the phone really is for the good guys. The funding seems to be unconventional too. Maybe a little on the low side for military projects. Has downsizing been mentioned lately? And if military pays please pay attention to the bad phone - good guy conflict. Historically military has wanted to have an edge over competing military. This traditionally favoured secrecy over openness. Open source development is on the opposite end of that scale. Military might have changed though. On second thought maybe it's a nicely investigated article and worth to talk about but just got leaked 2 months and 2 days early? Greetings, Frieder -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Serval Project Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to serval-project-developers+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to serval-project-developers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/serval-project-developers?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE