How to communicate when the Internet goes down? New Off-Grid App and Hardware

While I don't use cellphones much, I look for some things that I find interesting. What is truly interesting to me is anything that allows two or more products to communicate directly, rather than going through either an Internet connection or a cellphone service connection (though they appear to be merging) so that if "the infrastructure" goes down for any reason, you can still communicate with at least one or two people you Really Want to communicate with during an emergency.

Of course the Internet itself is overall quite resilient, however some local areas can be disrupted, and if either you or the person or website you want to talk to is in that area, there may be problems communicating.

A few months ago FireChat appeared - it allows two smartphones, whether Andriod or iPhone, to send text messages to each other. ISTR the distance limitation is 200 feet, but it gets better - if there's one or more smartphones in between also running FireChat, you can talk to any or all of them as long as there's no gap between adjacent ones greater than that distance limitation. This looks interesting for communication within a flashmob - it's a small network, but authorities disabling the internet and cellphone towers will NOT shut it down. I don't know offhand where that might be useful #Ferguson but I find it fascinating.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/24/fi...rm-off-the-grid-chat-between-ios-and-android/

There's now this device call goTenna, that connects to a cellphone with Bluetooth and then sends data to a similar device that can be miles away, also connected to a cellphone. The "straight-line" range claims to be 50 miles, and so it will be substantially lower in an urban environment, but it could still be very useful:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/21/gotenna_talks_radio_bollocks_most_tech_websites_parrot_it/

These things are just "extras" as long as your "normal connectivity" works (which it seems to most of the time), but there are times - on September 11, 2001 in and around New York City people were having a hard time getting in touch with one another. The Twin Towers had cellphone base antennas on them and when they fell they took those out, adding to the load of the remaining ones. Also the load on the cellphone systems was higher than usual with people trying to call one another. If two people on Manhattan each have one of these goTenna things along with their cellphones, they can likely text each other, even if all the cellphone and electric power goes down.

Don said:

I note the FCC doesn't allow this "store and forward" to bridge to the existing net, but I bet it won't be long until there's a hack for that. At that point, no matter who shuts down the existing grid, messages could still get out of the "no service" zone, and attempts by authorities to shut down the grid will be useless... unless they bring in jammers for the goTenna frequency, I suppose. A nice piece of liberation tech there.

Nice use of the #Ferguson hashtag, btw.

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Jamming is of course a felony, as it can prevent legitimate emergency 911 calls and cost lives, but when the police does it...

To stop every form of radio requires jamming (having a relatively high-power transmitter in the area) at many frequencies. Interestingly, the 150MHz frequency of the goTenna is not far from the aviation communication band, and jamming that could present a problem that even police wouldn't want to be responsible for (though from what I've seen recently...):
https://www.faa.gov/about/office_or...ps/spec_management/engineering_office/rfb.cfm

Ambrosia said:

But if there is a kill switch in every single phone and the government had a backdoor to activate the kill switch and used it, say, during civic unrest, then those phones wouldn't work regardless, right?

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Right.

Phones can be hacked to remove such backdoors, though looking through Arm object code in a commercial phone to see what it does is surely a pain in the butt (and ISTR a violation of DMCA or other similar law), but I have little doubt there's people who are doing underground crowdsourcing of such things. I'd be surprised if competitors don't have one anothers' code, one way or another.

But that's for iPhones. You can get the basic Android source code from Google, which makes things (relatively) easier. With that you can change things, add and remove features, and whatnot.