All volunteer efforts are welcome, and using AI tools to support volunteer work is completely reasonable to me.

I personally value well-crafted human-made art more highly than AI-generated art. If someone wants to invest the time to create original icons and donate them, I am always very happy to see that!

That said, requiring unpaid contributors to meet a craftsmanship standard before they are allowed to help does not seem constructive to me. Volunteer communities usually work best when people contribute with the time, skills, and tools they actually have available.

A middle-ground alternative to AI-generated work is searching through Creative Commons assets, but even that still takes time to source, filter, adapt, and integrate. Expecting volunteers to always provide fully custom artwork or spend significant additional time curating assets does not seem like a fair expectation to me.

Here is the homepage, and that is not what it says: https://meshtastic.org/

I promise you I am not lying to you. I may be mis-understanding you.

Here is the source code for Meshtastic firmware: https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware

But I am assume that we have a different understanding of what is and what isn’t open source.

Don’t worry, I wouldn’t ban you for this.

Yes, the physical modulation implemented by LoRa transceivers is proprietary.

It is not entirely correct to say that the “mesh” itself is proprietary. Meshtastic is open source, even if it relies on proprietary radio hardware. In principle, one could take the Meshtastic codebase and adapt it to a different physical layer.

It is perfectly reasonable to reject a technology because the full stack is not open. That said, once you look closely at most modern digital and RF hardware, you are extremely likely to encounter proprietary ICs, firmware, or physical layer implementations somewhere in the stack.

I’m not familiar with Canadian suppliers, sorry. I have bought directly from them in the past, but I’m not sure about shipping to Canada.

Yes, you have many options. It depends on how much “from scratch” you want to go.

The simplest method is to purchase a module with the radio transceiver + microcontroller, flash it, and assemble it. If you don’t want any sensors, you can for example purchase from RAK the kit a kit with a ‘RAK19003’ base board + ‘RAK4631’ module (nRF52840 micro-controller + SX1262 transciever) . For Canada, you would pick the 900 MHz version that operates in the 915 MHz band. (https://store.rakwireless.com/products/wisblock-meshtastic-starter-kit?variant=43884035113158)

For an enclosure, you can look up ‘Project box’ or 3D print a case.

If you want to go even more “from scratch”, you can buy a module without a micro-controller (Waveshare core1262, Ra-01SH, Wio-SX1262), and interface with these using a micro-controller via SPI. At this layer it starts to become more of a hassle if you want to implement Meshtastic, because you will need to either copy an existing configuration, or modify the firmware so that it matches the way that your electronics are connected.

Then, if you do not want to purchase a module, you would buy the transciever directly (for example, the SX1262), and assemble your own module. You can look up the schematic of the basic modules to get an idea of what this looks like. For example, you can see the Waveshare Core1262 schematic here: https://files.waveshare.com/upload/c/c1/CoreSX1262_Sch.pdf

If you do not want to rely on an already existing LoRa transciever, but instead use a more general radio transciever, that is also possible. But, more expensive, and is unlikely to match performance. This is something that one might want to do if you already have an SDR transciever connected to raspberry pi and want to use it to interface with LoRa (still, it is much easier to connect a LoRa device over USB). I would not recommend building a meshtastic device from more general transcievers.

About the immortality of the crab

They are banned

Not really, no

Since my work involves sensors, I set up a continuous testing setup on a raspberry pi and got its IP whitelisted. I ssh into it when something is annoying to do in the Windows laptop.

I’m surviving, and definetly not the fittest.

I think that the TinyTapeout concept is super cool (https://tinytapeout.com/). In the past, it was not really feasible to design and manufacture a semiconductor device as a hobbyist… Unless maybe an extremely wealthy one.

Now, we have open source design tools, open process design kit, and the ability but small part of a manufactured wafer.

There are also now multi-project wafer runs for photonic chips at reasonable prices for startup/academia. I think these developments are pretty cool.

Thanks a lot for the examples! I have been looking through these, and, as far as I can tell:

1. In SSL stripping, the site would appear to your client as HTTP, not HTTPS. If that’s the case, I think SSL stripping is blocked when using ‘HTTPS-Only’ mode
2. For DNS spoofing, the visited site would show up as insecure because they would not be able to generate a valid certificate for the target website

I still have not had the chance to look into leaky metadata. But, generally, I think metadata issues can in part be addressed by not generating much metadata.

Probably the biggest vulnerability is the captive portal. There is no way to verify you’re connecting to an official Starbucks router. I think that when connecting to a public router it is wise to assume that it is malicious.

I’m curious about an example that comes to your mind as you say this. In your view, what is a privacy risk associated with public WiFi use that is not easily mitigated?

By hand. We are only two people, and we usually clean after we cook/eat. When one is cleaning only 2 plates + a pot/pan at a time, it is easy to use little water. Spray of soap, metal scrub, sponge scrub, and then turn the tap on to rinse for a few seconds. Utensils get individually scrubbed and then all rinsed together for a few seconds.

Maybe when we have kids a dish washer will make sense.

Hopefully the English language is developed and Rick Astley gets to make his song before anyone figures it out!

I would take a portable CD player, place a CD with Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up on it playing backwards, hook up solar panels, remove the ability to shut it on/off, and set it up a circuit that will:

• As the device solar charges, keep it off until some voltage threshold is exceeded
• Once the voltage is high enough, start a random timer (8 - 100 hours), so that it is not immediately obvious that the sun activated the device
• When the timer ends, turn the music on on repeat mode
• Sometimes turn the music off at random, and then turn it on again at random after a long delay, so that in some cases you can have turn ‘ON’ events without the device being exposed to the sun
• When the voltage drops below a low threshold, turn the device off until it is charged again

No worries! If you need me to test something with it I can this week, just let me know

I am currently near Cologne in Germany. I placed one of these LycaMobile SIM cards from NL and it activated automatically. It does recognize that it is connected to the German network and roaming, and still activates data and assigns a phone number.

So, it seems to work fine

It’s spider season! That’s very normal in September/October. At least in the Netherlands but I imagine it’s similar in the UK.

I didn’t know about Foxes. I very rarely see them.