I imagine Gaza may currently be one of the most difficult environments to write software code in. I happily admit that I would not be able to be productive in such an environment - my environment here in Europe is really quite sheltered (guess this also depends on where one lives; areas close to Russia may not feel as comfortable as in central Europe or Western Europe). The only distraction I have here is youtube music playing in the background - that's about it. My brain wouldn't be able to operate well in any high risk high danger environment or any non-standard environment in general.
Even in Ukraine it's quite possible to code. I worked at Google with people who stayed in Ukraine after Russia started the war. I can't say they were unaffected - there was stuff like meetings interrupted by missile alerts - but they managed to do normal work despite the ongoing war.
Comparing it to the war in Ukraine ("Even in Ukraine") isn't really helpful or informative, to understand the condition under which Palestinians are surviving.
The website you linked to specifies a subtly different thing from what you’re asserting:
>”Forty-eight percent of the people who died from blast injuries among our colleagues' households were children and 40 percent were under 10 years old.”
That is quite different from saying that “ 40% of the bombing victims in Gaza are under 10 years old”.
I have a couple of programmers currently in ukraine. Unless you are in a war zone there is low risk and life is mostly normal. Only risk right now is no electricity or getting snatched on the street to be sent to war.
The fact you think Ukraine is even a remotely comparable situation to Gaza shows that the propaganda is working. For one, Ukraine was immediately, universally condemned and armed by Western governments, whereas for the last 70 years those same governments have been enabling and arming the occupier in Palestine/Gaza, and its media has pontificated that occupation, continuous ethnic cleansing and the hundreds of massacres and hostages - sorry, prisoners - is actually somehow justified, because not white and European.
This will be very interesting if they can conquer the distribution issue.
During the Hong Kong protests I recall several such solutions were created, but the dominant thing ended up being airdrop because it is what so many people already had locked and loaded.
You are right but as German if I made that point publicly in regards to Palestine I would get arrested. I am not exaggerating
It is crazy how we have dehumanized Palestinians to the point that just hinting on the fact that they might have a right to resist it completely taboo. Like you don't have to agree with their methods but expecting them to do nothing while Israel murders them and the world looks away is such a cruelty that is hard to comprehend.
I don't know about that, if settlers in the West Bank cop some violence then that's going to be considered well deserved.
Soldiers of 'a government' committing murder, rape and hostage taking on a music festival is going to earn you a bit of looking away to the consequences.
I don't expect them to do nothing, I expect them to come to a deal not sacrifice everything in an eternal and vain attempt to remove Israel from the map.
> I don't expect them to do nothing, I expect them to come to a deal
Well that is what they did. People like you told shite like "The war ends if they release the hostages".
They agreed to the first step of the peace plan. They released the hostages. They are keeping the truce. (Israel claims they killed a few soldiers but that seem to be a lie, they probably died from explosive that were already lying around).
So what did it gain them? Israels keeps murdering them. People are still starving in Gaza because Israel refuses to let food in.
> committing murder, rape and hostage taking
This is what Israel has been doing for decades. We just call the hostages prisoners.
While the Palestinians have treated their hostages as well as they could even when Gaza was starving, the bodies of the dead political prisoners Israel gave back were so mutilated from systemic torture that not even family members are able to recognize them.
As for the accusation of the resistance committing systemic rape, that is just racist propaganda. Same when they justified the lynching of black people in the US with saying they raped white women. We would have video evidence if something like that had happened.
It's either a gross ignorance or gross deceit to compare those numbers to the amount of civilians who have been killed during the Palestinian genocide. A terrorist attack doesn't give you the right to ignore human rights.
The international criminal court has an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. He is a war criminal. Get your facts straight.
> Udi Raz, 34, is sitting in a cafe in Berlin, where he lives, reflecting on a turbulent six months. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October, Raz, an Israeli Jew raised in Haifa, has been fired from his job and had the activist group he’s part of labelled antisemitic by Germany’s official antisemitism commissioner.
> Last Friday, German authorities arrested Raz, a board member of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, after they cancelled and then banned the group’s three-day conference on Palestine.
Would you not try to resist if you were to live in an open-air prison like Gaza?
What if you lived in the West Bank and someone came to knock on your door and tell you that settlers were now taking over your land your family has lived in for hundreds of years and the bulldozer was coming the same afternoon to destroy your house, how would you react?
I never condone attacking civilians, but i can't reasonably understand what those people had to live through for decades while their neighbour get to go to the beach every weekend.
Sadly most repressive states and apartheid systems control who has a gun.
You can see that in Russia (as one example of many more, mind you), where officials search through your apps on the smartphone, or worse, people being carried away by cops merely for holding up a blank piece of paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbzV1it1YPY
Exactly when a group like Hamas controls your home and brutally executes any dissidents or even suspected dissidents in public on a routine basis it’s difficult for any individual to fight back [1], almost worse is torture and maiming of anyone who even hints at “disloyalty” [2].
In such situations though encrypted messaging becomes crucial, but it’d be hard to hide.
Yeah, it must suck to get brutally JDAM'd (along with your whole family [0]), sniper-droned (seeking to main and kill [1]) and mown down by "gaza humanitarian foundation" machine-gun fire (while queueing for food) [2] in Palestine, just for disagreeing with israel's position that your land now belongs to them. If you're lucky, you won't be thrown into one of israel's rape-and-torture-camps [3][4].
But anyways, great submission and great work. Remember though, your cell phone signals will earn you a JDAM, because you might be a terrorist for using a cell phone. So stay on the move.
It’s different situation in Gaza tho, unlike protests where you might need to hide your identity going there to participate so having that app will expose you, in gaza it’s more of a concentration camp where the main resources are controlled but on the ground, not really, so no police will stop you there because you have an app, bitchat might be the perfect solution.
I think in these kinds of places they beat you dead for being the wrong skin colour if they're in a bad mood. I'm not sure how much your installed apps are relevant to the decision.
The "wrong skin color" is projection of western ideologies to Israel/Gaza conflict.
Israelis have lighter skin Ashkenazi Jews, darker skin Mizrahi Jews(majority of hte jews in Israel now) and black Ethiopian jews. And of course 20%+ Arabs living in the country.
Gazan Palestinians skin color varies as well, some have light skin, while others
have darker skin tones.
For example, does this woman have the right skin color or the wrong one:
Zionism was what pushed Jews to accept the Partition Plan[0], and later the disengagement plan[1], both rejecting the idea of Gaza as an Israeli territory.
The colonization of Gaza is entirely driven by Hamas's attack on Israel.
Acting like the dominant political stream in Israel has not been interested in occupying Gaza since at least 1967 to this day is a bald faced and shameless misdirection.
Sure. Just look at how they're doing now: they have the full support of the world to re-invade Gaza, and this can be justified by the fact that no Jews live there (Just look three comments above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932249 )
If there were Israeli Jews (I am not referring to the religious group, but by which side of the conflict people are on) living in Gaza, such arguments wouldn't work, just like they don't work for the West Bank (which is also getting genocided but we're not talking about it, so maybe that strategy works too).
Israelis live in Palestine though - it's just that any area they live gets renamed from "Palestine" to "Israel", usually accompanied by heavily artillery fire and drone strikes, to clear out the natives.
And from Wikipedia: > The Israeli Security Forces use racial profiling at military checkpoints and during some of the duties they perform. In August 2017 Haaretz reported that security guards working for a company which provides security at Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station said they were instructed to demand ID from people who look Arab and detain those who do not have an ID with them.
OP said that Israelis beat people up for having the wrong skin color. The one I replied to said that is wrong and is a projection of western ideology. But it does not appear to be wrong in reality - OP was correct.
Too often the results of these efforts (like the HK protests just using Airdrop) are never really called out anywhere so these tools become nerd catnip and nerds continue to build solutions that nobody ends up using. It would be cool to maybe collect a list of situations where comms infra was disturbed and what ended up being used (if anything) in those situations to help guide future efforts.
This is a great point. Being able to run in a browser with airdropped code makes sense. Using Bluetooth and no central server does this mean getting messages out to a world wide audience isn't possible with the app?
I looked into Meshtastic a while ago and they use AES with no authentication tags. Also decryption happens on the LoRa device, which is a lot easier to crack with physical access compared to my phone. Even if you delete the messages it's still possible to decrypt sniffed LoRa traffic if, at some point in the future, one device gets captured.
I'd rather the protocol gets updated so the crypto key can stay on the phone.
There's a few issues that have been brought to light in the last couple years at Hackfest and other events related to LoRaWAN / Meshtastic (and derivatives). I think most notably was the failure in entropy generated during the flashing process, detailed here - https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-52464
I think we're a bit past the initial AES issues, at least the Meshtastic project promptly alerted people to their crypto issues and encouraged everyone to update firmware asap.
It's not too hard to use, as long as the hardware is flashed and ready. For the end user, it's an app that connects to a bluetooth connection. I think it would very trivial to have a few good LoRaWAN ops in the community, flashing nodes en masse and handing them out to peers.
Agreed – and MeshCore follows a similar "security on the radio" design.
With the "cell phone + companion radio" setup which is currently very popular, it would seem the correct solution is to perform encryption on the phone – using the Signal protocol – and use the companion radio only to send/receive these blobs.
This has the added benefit that you can pair with _any_ arbitrary companion radio, rather than your identity being tied to one specific radio you own.
Other than the cold start problem which isn't discussed (what's the userbase size in Gaza?), the main argument for Bitchat (or any other off-grid network such as Meshtastic, Briar, etc.) in Gaza when mainstream E2E encrypted messaging apps already exist and are widely used, is to not be dependent on Israel for cell service.
While I do really like the idea of off-grid networks in general but for this use case, is it really that hard for a state actor to jam Bluetooth (or all ~2.4GHz communication) on a large scale?
I feel like the idea here is cute; but does it realistically work at scale? Of course, a messaging app like this—if it's going to work anywhere, is going to work in Gaza, one of the (at least formerly) most densely populated areas in the world. But bluetooth was not designed for this type of communication whatsoever; phones can only establish bluetooth connections between devices at the very most 100ft under the most ideal conditions; and is probably much lower than that in practice.
Even if people are living in open-air conditions I can imagine messages getting stuck or being delivered very late; especially at night when there may not be a lot of human movement. How well does this actually work in practice?
A disaster, cyberattack, or prolonged blackout could take down cell towers in a broad area, this could be useful in that case. And in a civil emergency a government may be able to shut down cell towers centrally, but not have the resources to jam the entire country.
Tens of thousands of users? Globally you mean? I doubt it's the user base size in Gaza but if that is actually what you meant, where did you pull that estimate from?
I guess if a serious audit is done then it could be a nice solution. I would love to read more technical details about it, especially how it can be sure the messages are transmitted to the good person.
What an awesome piece of technology. I've been wanting to create something similar, just on the technical merits. We have some pretty amazingly capable technology these days, but so much of it relies on IP infrastructure, which is fine when things work and you are either aligned with your government, or live in a society where there are strong checks and balances on government overreach.
Exactly. With Chat Control being revived again in the EU, various VPN bans being proposed in US states, and ID verification rolling out seemingly everywhere, this kind of tech may end up being more useful than people expect. If it works in the extremely adversarial environment of a warzone, it should work fine here.
Why is chat control controversial? It seems like the same people afraid of this are the same people outraged when people then use private chat to do bad things.
How is this a solution to Chat Control and EU law? If this is used, governments will simply demand Apple and Google get the app declared forbidden, which both have done to apps for many reasons.
Worse: they might demand a list of people who have it installed (and this violates the Chat Control law of course).
Even worse: this app turns out to be written by a security agency or scammers and starts exploiting people.
The thing that I really like about the approach taken by OP is that it AFAIK is broadcast-only, up to a certain radius. The hard part in mesh networking is routing, and broadcast sidesteps that
I guess if even one or two people use it that's a good thing. BUT. It probably would struggle with RTL and LTR stuff regarding arabic script vs latin script (and people across the world are forgoing traditional scripts for latin characters ... seems bad)
BitChat can send messages over Bluetooth, and it uses a mesh network to relay messages across nearby devices. This allows messages to hop from one phone to another, extending coverage beyond the normal Bluetooth range, though the number of hops is limited and depends on nearby devices. When a device in the mesh has an internet connection, certain messages can be published to Nostr, allowing them to move from the local mesh to the global network. Not all messages are automatically sent online, and purely mesh-local chats remain local. Messages sent via Nostr can also be accessed through clients like NYM (Nostr Ynstant Messenger). BitChat combines offline mesh networking with a decentralized protocol to enable both local and global communication.
Was thinking the same thing. This seems better suited for chatting with arbitrary people nearby, but with zero verification of who you're talking to. You don't have to set up an account at all, just install the app and start chatting as @anon<number> or change the username to whatever you want.
I was wondering about Briar... seems maybe like reinventing the same thing over again although I assume there's some important functional difference I'm not thinking of.
fast and reliable (and encrypted) communication is so important in such conditions.
not sure how important that is next to not dying of hunger, being blown up, loosing friends, family and strangers, being erased and treated like an animal, but, you know. it's a start...
This is pretty cool. I could see the use in other disaster hit areas or even just large public gatherings like sports events or festivals where network coverage is temporarily a bit patchy.
802.11ah hardware is sadly still rather expensive. The cheapest thing I could find is a $40 PCIe card (M.2 form factor); USB dongles for it are still $100+.
At this point, it's probably worth abandoning 802.11ah as an idea and trying some different RF standard.
Most phone radios have RX/TX around the 40-30cm band already. It's just a question of having arbitrary send/receive, and I guarantee you the hardware is designed to make that as impossible as they can.
whats going to happen when adversarial entities perform a supply chain attack and booby trap these devices with c4 and kill all the users (men, women and children). we already know there are parties that are perfectly happy to make no distinction when killing them.
in the context of some encrypted vhf military radio, whats going to happen when adversarial entities use an anti-radiation missile to home in and blow the soldier up? like it's not that you're wrong, but that's not really in the scope of the problem being solved.
...except that he is definitely wrong about the targeting aspect as well. Almost all of the people hit by the pager explosions were legit military targets. In the videos of the explosions, you can see people unharmed who were standing within meters of the targets. It was one of the most well-targeted anti-terrorist strikes in history.
IMO, I think the decentralized tech is the next big thing, and I probably mentioned it before, but the current state of hyper surveillance especially now with AI and digital ID, plus the privacy violating companies like flock and ring, will push people further into ditching centralized to decentralized, or technology completely!
Same. I once registered bithole.com because I wanted a better email address then what I had at yahoo.com...and I realized my mistake as I was typing it on my resume. This feels like a similar mistake.
This gives me the same vibe as OLPC. We had these places where people didn't even have electricity, running water, or public sanitation, yet some nerds at MIT thought (?) to themselves, "Hey, you know what these people need? Laptops!"
But even worse, you can install it from App Store or Google Play! Israeli territory or Israeli territory! What will these dipshits do next? Send the Palestinians some more pagers out of Budapest?
This in turn reminds me to a meme where a guy was complaining that he got an empty package from Amazon, even though he didn't order anything. The quote retweet then wondered: what's his problem then?
Does it work in tunnels? Say, 65 feet underground.
Eden Yerushalmi and Almog Sarusi were executed by Hamas on August 29th 2024. Their bodies were found with gunshots to the head deep inside the tunnel system.
So standing soldiers of the occupying army taken from a military kibbutz mere miles from the world's largest open air concentration camp? Hind al-Rajab was 6 years old and was found with hundreds of bullets inside her body. This is not a game Israel can afford to play, so let's just rewind to the beginning and ask how many the Irgun and Haganah killed and bombed to strong-arm the British into giving them Palestine? Or we can skip ahead a few decades and start here: https://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and.... It's almost like Europeans have no business occupying the Middle East.
I imagine Gaza may currently be one of the most difficult environments to write software code in. I happily admit that I would not be able to be productive in such an environment - my environment here in Europe is really quite sheltered (guess this also depends on where one lives; areas close to Russia may not feel as comfortable as in central Europe or Western Europe). The only distraction I have here is youtube music playing in the background - that's about it. My brain wouldn't be able to operate well in any high risk high danger environment or any non-standard environment in general.
Even in Ukraine it's quite possible to code. I worked at Google with people who stayed in Ukraine after Russia started the war. I can't say they were unaffected - there was stuff like meetings interrupted by missile alerts - but they managed to do normal work despite the ongoing war.
40% of the bombing victims in Gaza are under 10 years old
https://msf.org.uk/article/gaza-msf-survey-shows-almost-half...
Comparing it to the war in Ukraine ("Even in Ukraine") isn't really helpful or informative, to understand the condition under which Palestinians are surviving.
The website you linked to specifies a subtly different thing from what you’re asserting:
>”Forty-eight percent of the people who died from blast injuries among our colleagues' households were children and 40 percent were under 10 years old.”
That is quite different from saying that “ 40% of the bombing victims in Gaza are under 10 years old”.
I have a couple of programmers currently in ukraine. Unless you are in a war zone there is low risk and life is mostly normal. Only risk right now is no electricity or getting snatched on the street to be sent to war.
The fact you think Ukraine is even a remotely comparable situation to Gaza shows that the propaganda is working. For one, Ukraine was immediately, universally condemned and armed by Western governments, whereas for the last 70 years those same governments have been enabling and arming the occupier in Palestine/Gaza, and its media has pontificated that occupation, continuous ethnic cleansing and the hundreds of massacres and hostages - sorry, prisoners - is actually somehow justified, because not white and European.
>I imagine Gaza may currently be one of the most difficult environments to write software code in.
That you think this says a lot about our news environment. I can think of a dozen places in Africa.
Burundi has entered the chat. Strange you're getting downvoted.
This will be very interesting if they can conquer the distribution issue.
During the Hong Kong protests I recall several such solutions were created, but the dominant thing ended up being airdrop because it is what so many people already had locked and loaded.
Another problem is what happens when police stop to search you. You don't want to have "please beat me dead" app installed when it's happens.
If goons are killing you for having an app you don't need more apps, you need a gun.
You are right but as German if I made that point publicly in regards to Palestine I would get arrested. I am not exaggerating
It is crazy how we have dehumanized Palestinians to the point that just hinting on the fact that they might have a right to resist it completely taboo. Like you don't have to agree with their methods but expecting them to do nothing while Israel murders them and the world looks away is such a cruelty that is hard to comprehend.
I don't know about that, if settlers in the West Bank cop some violence then that's going to be considered well deserved.
Soldiers of 'a government' committing murder, rape and hostage taking on a music festival is going to earn you a bit of looking away to the consequences.
I don't expect them to do nothing, I expect them to come to a deal not sacrifice everything in an eternal and vain attempt to remove Israel from the map.
> I don't expect them to do nothing, I expect them to come to a deal
Well that is what they did. People like you told shite like "The war ends if they release the hostages".
They agreed to the first step of the peace plan. They released the hostages. They are keeping the truce. (Israel claims they killed a few soldiers but that seem to be a lie, they probably died from explosive that were already lying around).
So what did it gain them? Israels keeps murdering them. People are still starving in Gaza because Israel refuses to let food in.
> committing murder, rape and hostage taking
This is what Israel has been doing for decades. We just call the hostages prisoners.
While the Palestinians have treated their hostages as well as they could even when Gaza was starving, the bodies of the dead political prisoners Israel gave back were so mutilated from systemic torture that not even family members are able to recognize them.
As for the accusation of the resistance committing systemic rape, that is just racist propaganda. Same when they justified the lynching of black people in the US with saying they raped white women. We would have video evidence if something like that had happened.
> Palestinians have treated their hostages as well as they could
82 of the 251 hostages taken by Hamas on Oct 7th were killed.
Give ‘em hell Netanyahu.
Who killed them? Israeli bombs.
Netanyahu cares more about murdering Palestinians than saving his own people.
It's either a gross ignorance or gross deceit to compare those numbers to the amount of civilians who have been killed during the Palestinian genocide. A terrorist attack doesn't give you the right to ignore human rights.
The international criminal court has an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. He is a war criminal. Get your facts straight.
What about a society glorifying children murder and rape on prisoners of war ?
> but as German if I made that point publicly in regards to Palestine I would get arrested. I am not exaggerating
What are you talking about? I'm also German but nobody is getting arrested here for that. I literally walked past a pro Palestine protests 1h ago.
They are regularly arresting people and police brutality has gotten so bad that even the international press is taking note:
> Irish officials express 'concern' after Irish protestor left bloodied by police in Berlin
https://www.irishpost.com/news/irish-officials-express-conce...
> Footage circulating on X shows police using brute force to push back protesters, with at least 28 people arrested, according to police reports.
https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/crackdown-on-pro-pa...
> Udi Raz, 34, is sitting in a cafe in Berlin, where he lives, reflecting on a turbulent six months. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October, Raz, an Israeli Jew raised in Haifa, has been fired from his job and had the activist group he’s part of labelled antisemitic by Germany’s official antisemitism commissioner.
> Last Friday, German authorities arrested Raz, a board member of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, after they cancelled and then banned the group’s three-day conference on Palestine.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-crackdown-israel-...
Yes, even Jewish people are labeled anti-semites, it is that insane.
>I would get arrested
Have you considered getting a gun? Why or why not?
"they might have a right to resist "
How do you define this?
Killing Israel soldiers.
Or killing hundreds of civilians at a concert and parading the dead body of a young woman around like a hunting trophy like Hamas did on Oct 7 2023?
The main problem is that Palestinians think they can defeat Israel with force but they can't.
> How do you define this?
Would you not try to resist if you were to live in an open-air prison like Gaza?
What if you lived in the West Bank and someone came to knock on your door and tell you that settlers were now taking over your land your family has lived in for hundreds of years and the bulldozer was coming the same afternoon to destroy your house, how would you react?
I never condone attacking civilians, but i can't reasonably understand what those people had to live through for decades while their neighbour get to go to the beach every weekend.
> Like you don't have to agree with their methods but expecting them to do nothing while Israel murders them
But Israel's not murdering them. The war has a very low civilian to combatant death ratio.
According to the UN 70% of the dead are women and children
There are children with sniper bullets in their bodies.
This is not war, this is ethnic cleansing.
>80% of the dead are civilians. What world are you living in?
https://www.972mag.com/israeli-intelligence-database-83-perc...
(Journalist from Israel)
Do you have a source for "very low"? It seems liks a hard thing to measure well but as far as I can see it looks very average.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio
Use that gun and Israel defends itself. By killing 100 civilians in an appartment complex with an Americian bomb.
Sadly most repressive states and apartheid systems control who has a gun.
You can see that in Russia (as one example of many more, mind you), where officials search through your apps on the smartphone, or worse, people being carried away by cops merely for holding up a blank piece of paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbzV1it1YPY
Exactly when a group like Hamas controls your home and brutally executes any dissidents or even suspected dissidents in public on a routine basis it’s difficult for any individual to fight back [1], almost worse is torture and maiming of anyone who even hints at “disloyalty” [2].
In such situations though encrypted messaging becomes crucial, but it’d be hard to hide.
Note: links are rather disturbing.
1: https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/15/world/video/hamas-killings-ga... 2: https://x.com/afalkhatib/status/1979752415973834965
Yeah, it must suck to get brutally JDAM'd (along with your whole family [0]), sniper-droned (seeking to main and kill [1]) and mown down by "gaza humanitarian foundation" machine-gun fire (while queueing for food) [2] in Palestine, just for disagreeing with israel's position that your land now belongs to them. If you're lucky, you won't be thrown into one of israel's rape-and-torture-camps [3][4].
But anyways, great submission and great work. Remember though, your cell phone signals will earn you a JDAM, because you might be a terrorist for using a cell phone. So stay on the move.
Warning: links are very disturbing:
0: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
1: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19/nx-s1-5195171/witnesses-say-i...
2: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/08/1165552
3: https://theintercept.com/2024/08/09/israel-prison-sde-teiman...
4: https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell
Hamas is is a totalitarian theocracy that kills opponents to it.
Hamas is killing traitors from criminal gangs who aligned with Israel during the conflict in the hopes of getting their 30 pieces of silver.
sounds like israel but with less torturing, killing, and genocide
It’s different situation in Gaza tho, unlike protests where you might need to hide your identity going there to participate so having that app will expose you, in gaza it’s more of a concentration camp where the main resources are controlled but on the ground, not really, so no police will stop you there because you have an app, bitchat might be the perfect solution.
I think in these kinds of places they beat you dead for being the wrong skin colour if they're in a bad mood. I'm not sure how much your installed apps are relevant to the decision.
The "wrong skin color" is projection of western ideologies to Israel/Gaza conflict.
Israelis have lighter skin Ashkenazi Jews, darker skin Mizrahi Jews(majority of hte jews in Israel now) and black Ethiopian jews. And of course 20%+ Arabs living in the country.
Gazan Palestinians skin color varies as well, some have light skin, while others have darker skin tones.
For example, does this woman have the right skin color or the wrong one:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Ah...
The colonization of Gaza and the West Bank is entirely driven by western interests and ideology. Namely Zionism[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism
Zionism was what pushed Jews to accept the Partition Plan[0], and later the disengagement plan[1], both rejecting the idea of Gaza as an Israeli territory.
The colonization of Gaza is entirely driven by Hamas's attack on Israel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_the...
Acting like the dominant political stream in Israel has not been interested in occupying Gaza since at least 1967 to this day is a bald faced and shameless misdirection.
So that interest was actualized through removing all Jews -- living and dead -- from Gaza in 2005?
Sure. Just look at how they're doing now: they have the full support of the world to re-invade Gaza, and this can be justified by the fact that no Jews live there (Just look three comments above yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932249 )
If there were Israeli Jews (I am not referring to the religious group, but by which side of the conflict people are on) living in Gaza, such arguments wouldn't work, just like they don't work for the West Bank (which is also getting genocided but we're not talking about it, so maybe that strategy works too).
colonization? How many western zionists live in Gaza today?
No Jews live in Gaza.
Israelis live in Palestine though - it's just that any area they live gets renamed from "Palestine" to "Israel", usually accompanied by heavily artillery fire and drone strikes, to clear out the natives.
There are also black people in Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Palestinians
> racism within Palestinian communities.
Of course
Projection? Really? ... Do a little research into how black Ethiopian Jews were given birth control shots without their consent or knowledge.
Despite that, isn't there a history of compulsive violence based on skin-based profiling? These are facts, not ideology.
2 off-duty soldiers assaulted after being mistaken for Arabs https://www.timesofisrael.com/2-off-duty-soldiers-assaulted-...
Live TV shows Israeli mob attack motorist they believed to be an Arab https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/13/live-tv-shows-...
Israeli soldier kills Jewish civilian in 'identity mishap' https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34602287
3 hostages killed by Israeli soldier in Gaza were waving a white flag, Israel says https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219695220/israel-soldiers-mi...
Israeli Civilian Killed by Israeli Soldier after Being Mistaken for Palestinian https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-civilian-killed-b...
And from Wikipedia: > The Israeli Security Forces use racial profiling at military checkpoints and during some of the duties they perform. In August 2017 Haaretz reported that security guards working for a company which provides security at Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station said they were instructed to demand ID from people who look Arab and detain those who do not have an ID with them.
OP said that Israelis beat people up for having the wrong skin color. The one I replied to said that is wrong and is a projection of western ideology. But it does not appear to be wrong in reality - OP was correct.
Dont these show that skin-based profiling doesnt work in Israel -- Jews and Arabs are being mistaken for each other.
Not sure what the Florida example has to do with anything though.
Here are some similar headlines:
Palestinians remove Muslim from al-Aqsa after confusing him for a Jew https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-692563
Palestinian stabs Arab Israeli bus driver thinking he was a Jew https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-charged-over-petah...
Too often the results of these efforts (like the HK protests just using Airdrop) are never really called out anywhere so these tools become nerd catnip and nerds continue to build solutions that nobody ends up using. It would be cool to maybe collect a list of situations where comms infra was disturbed and what ended up being used (if anything) in those situations to help guide future efforts.
This is a great point. Being able to run in a browser with airdropped code makes sense. Using Bluetooth and no central server does this mean getting messages out to a world wide audience isn't possible with the app?
A lot of Meshcore/Meshtastic stations popping up lately too all over the world too.
Repeaters/Router can, if you put a bit of love in to highly efficient 3.3V generation, forever an a 6V solar cell and a 18650 LiPo.
I've tested 60km with a 868MHz LoRa station using a shabby 5dBi omni antenna. Just run out of hills to test more.
But not as easy to use as BLE(+BLE Meshing) which is basically integrated into every smartphone.
I looked into Meshtastic a while ago and they use AES with no authentication tags. Also decryption happens on the LoRa device, which is a lot easier to crack with physical access compared to my phone. Even if you delete the messages it's still possible to decrypt sniffed LoRa traffic if, at some point in the future, one device gets captured.
I'd rather the protocol gets updated so the crypto key can stay on the phone.
There's a few issues that have been brought to light in the last couple years at Hackfest and other events related to LoRaWAN / Meshtastic (and derivatives). I think most notably was the failure in entropy generated during the flashing process, detailed here - https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-52464
I think we're a bit past the initial AES issues, at least the Meshtastic project promptly alerted people to their crypto issues and encouraged everyone to update firmware asap.
It's not too hard to use, as long as the hardware is flashed and ready. For the end user, it's an app that connects to a bluetooth connection. I think it would very trivial to have a few good LoRaWAN ops in the community, flashing nodes en masse and handing them out to peers.
Agreed – and MeshCore follows a similar "security on the radio" design.
With the "cell phone + companion radio" setup which is currently very popular, it would seem the correct solution is to perform encryption on the phone – using the Signal protocol – and use the companion radio only to send/receive these blobs.
This has the added benefit that you can pair with _any_ arbitrary companion radio, rather than your identity being tied to one specific radio you own.
Other than the cold start problem which isn't discussed (what's the userbase size in Gaza?), the main argument for Bitchat (or any other off-grid network such as Meshtastic, Briar, etc.) in Gaza when mainstream E2E encrypted messaging apps already exist and are widely used, is to not be dependent on Israel for cell service.
While I do really like the idea of off-grid networks in general but for this use case, is it really that hard for a state actor to jam Bluetooth (or all ~2.4GHz communication) on a large scale?
I feel like the idea here is cute; but does it realistically work at scale? Of course, a messaging app like this—if it's going to work anywhere, is going to work in Gaza, one of the (at least formerly) most densely populated areas in the world. But bluetooth was not designed for this type of communication whatsoever; phones can only establish bluetooth connections between devices at the very most 100ft under the most ideal conditions; and is probably much lower than that in practice.
Even if people are living in open-air conditions I can imagine messages getting stuck or being delivered very late; especially at night when there may not be a lot of human movement. How well does this actually work in practice?
A disaster, cyberattack, or prolonged blackout could take down cell towers in a broad area, this could be useful in that case. And in a civil emergency a government may be able to shut down cell towers centrally, but not have the resources to jam the entire country.
The user base size is huge. This is actively being used by tens of thousands
Tens of thousands of users? Globally you mean? I doubt it's the user base size in Gaza but if that is actually what you meant, where did you pull that estimate from?
We are probably all on a list for just commenting on this post :-/
Source code is MIT: https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat-android
I guess if a serious audit is done then it could be a nice solution. I would love to read more technical details about it, especially how it can be sure the messages are transmitted to the good person.
What an awesome piece of technology. I've been wanting to create something similar, just on the technical merits. We have some pretty amazingly capable technology these days, but so much of it relies on IP infrastructure, which is fine when things work and you are either aligned with your government, or live in a society where there are strong checks and balances on government overreach.
Exactly. With Chat Control being revived again in the EU, various VPN bans being proposed in US states, and ID verification rolling out seemingly everywhere, this kind of tech may end up being more useful than people expect. If it works in the extremely adversarial environment of a warzone, it should work fine here.
Why is chat control controversial? It seems like the same people afraid of this are the same people outraged when people then use private chat to do bad things.
How is this a solution to Chat Control and EU law? If this is used, governments will simply demand Apple and Google get the app declared forbidden, which both have done to apps for many reasons.
Worse: they might demand a list of people who have it installed (and this violates the Chat Control law of course).
Even worse: this app turns out to be written by a security agency or scammers and starts exploiting people.
The thing that I really like about the approach taken by OP is that it AFAIK is broadcast-only, up to a certain radius. The hard part in mesh networking is routing, and broadcast sidesteps that
Is it actually being used in Palestine?
My problem is that when you are actually locally near someone you don't really need live chat; and if you're far, it might become too unstable to use.
But I might be wrong!
I guess if even one or two people use it that's a good thing. BUT. It probably would struggle with RTL and LTR stuff regarding arabic script vs latin script (and people across the world are forgoing traditional scripts for latin characters ... seems bad)
it’s not just chat over Bluetooth, the message is relayed over a mesh so you can chat with people much further than Bluetooth range.
BitChat can send messages over Bluetooth, and it uses a mesh network to relay messages across nearby devices. This allows messages to hop from one phone to another, extending coverage beyond the normal Bluetooth range, though the number of hops is limited and depends on nearby devices. When a device in the mesh has an internet connection, certain messages can be published to Nostr, allowing them to move from the local mesh to the global network. Not all messages are automatically sent online, and purely mesh-local chats remain local. Messages sent via Nostr can also be accessed through clients like NYM (Nostr Ynstant Messenger). BitChat combines offline mesh networking with a decentralized protocol to enable both local and global communication.
Related. Others?
Ask HN: Does Anyone Use Bitchat? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44944414 - Aug 2025 (5 comments)
Testing Bitchat at the music festival - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44815164 - Aug 2025 (55 comments)
MitM Flaw in Bitchat: Identity Is a Bitchat Challenge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44497622 - July 2025 (6 comments)
Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485342 - July 2025 (424 comments)
I never thought I'd see FidoNet again.
Watching news coverage I am amazed if many are able to get their phone working (as in not broken by the war) and charged.
Perhaps that is an indictment of the news source you take in.
> /pass [password] - Set/change channel password (owner only)
I assume to unset it just have to use /pass without arguments?
Like Briar?
Was thinking the same thing. This seems better suited for chatting with arbitrary people nearby, but with zero verification of who you're talking to. You don't have to set up an account at all, just install the app and start chatting as @anon<number> or change the username to whatever you want.
I was wondering about Briar... seems maybe like reinventing the same thing over again although I assume there's some important functional difference I'm not thinking of.
And Berty on iOS?
Wasn't Jack Dorsey working on this as well?
I’m pretty sure he vibe coded the thing, or at least the prototype
fast and reliable (and encrypted) communication is so important in such conditions.
not sure how important that is next to not dying of hunger, being blown up, loosing friends, family and strangers, being erased and treated like an animal, but, you know. it's a start...
This is pretty cool. I could see the use in other disaster hit areas or even just large public gatherings like sports events or festivals where network coverage is temporarily a bit patchy.
I wish phones supported 802.11ah for things like this.
802.11ah hardware is sadly still rather expensive. The cheapest thing I could find is a $40 PCIe card (M.2 form factor); USB dongles for it are still $100+.
At this point, it's probably worth abandoning 802.11ah as an idea and trying some different RF standard.
Most phone radios have RX/TX around the 40-30cm band already. It's just a question of having arbitrary send/receive, and I guarantee you the hardware is designed to make that as impossible as they can.
Bitch about things on bitchat.
How does that translate to local vernacular?
whats going to happen when adversarial entities perform a supply chain attack and booby trap these devices with c4 and kill all the users (men, women and children). we already know there are parties that are perfectly happy to make no distinction when killing them.
> and booby trap these devices with c4
bit-chat is a piece of software, it's not a hardware device
in the context of some encrypted vhf military radio, whats going to happen when adversarial entities use an anti-radiation missile to home in and blow the soldier up? like it's not that you're wrong, but that's not really in the scope of the problem being solved.
...except that he is definitely wrong about the targeting aspect as well. Almost all of the people hit by the pager explosions were legit military targets. In the videos of the explosions, you can see people unharmed who were standing within meters of the targets. It was one of the most well-targeted anti-terrorist strikes in history.
IMO, I think the decentralized tech is the next big thing, and I probably mentioned it before, but the current state of hyper surveillance especially now with AI and digital ID, plus the privacy violating companies like flock and ring, will push people further into ditching centralized to decentralized, or technology completely!
Learning curve is probably an obstacle
I think cellphones should come with LoRa, ZigBee, or Sub-GHz FSK modules. It would reshape the communication we have today.
I never see anyone on bitchat. Do people use it? I think the bluetooth limitation is gone, right? You can connect to users without being in proximity.
Read it as bitch-at the first time :(
Same. I once registered bithole.com because I wanted a better email address then what I had at yahoo.com...and I realized my mistake as I was typing it on my resume. This feels like a similar mistake.
I don’t think that’s unintentional or undesired
Exactly, it says Bitch@
HERE is the techforpalestine github that is worth focusing on
https://github.com/TechForPalestine/boycott-israeli-consumer...
This gives me the same vibe as OLPC. We had these places where people didn't even have electricity, running water, or public sanitation, yet some nerds at MIT thought (?) to themselves, "Hey, you know what these people need? Laptops!"
But even worse, you can install it from App Store or Google Play! Israeli territory or Israeli territory! What will these dipshits do next? Send the Palestinians some more pagers out of Budapest?
This in turn reminds me to a meme where a guy was complaining that he got an empty package from Amazon, even though he didn't order anything. The quote retweet then wondered: what's his problem then?
The name choice is unfortunate. I read it incorrectly the first time.
I read it correctly, but got a laugh after reading your comment. Maybe it could be marketable to two very different demographics
Same here. Imagining now bitch@ as the logo.
EDIT: Name aside, what an awesome project.
Anything with "bit" in (with the T pronounced) is a bit unfortunate for French speakers: https://context.reverso.net/translation/french-english/la+bi... .
Also anything with chat (chatte). Unfortunate or intentional..
"Pour info, j'ai pas la bite qui fouette."
Or intentional and awesome.
Pick better names people. I can't bring myself to use "CockroachDB" for example.
Its almost better when you read it that way. Its at least coherent.
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The primary threat to Palestinian civilians in Gaza remains the IDF. And in the West Bank, it's the Israeli settlers.
How do Google and Microsoft prevent their tech from being used toward genocidal/settler ends against civilians?
Umm they don’t sell to Hamas but I could be wrong.
They do sell to Israel, which uses the tech to commit mass-atrocities against civilians.
Is it their job to do that?
> Is it their job to do that?
Not that. But it should be someone’s job to monitor if Hamas adopts it.
That is an external problem to the bitchat app.
> That is an external problem to the bitchat app
Not really. If it becomes a tool of terrorist communication, it will get shut down. Legally, technically and/or kinetically.
> If it becomes a tool of terrorist communication, it will get shut down.
You mean like how they shut down cell phone networks?
Does it work in tunnels? Say, 65 feet underground.
Eden Yerushalmi and Almog Sarusi were executed by Hamas on August 29th 2024. Their bodies were found with gunshots to the head deep inside the tunnel system.
So standing soldiers of the occupying army taken from a military kibbutz mere miles from the world's largest open air concentration camp? Hind al-Rajab was 6 years old and was found with hundreds of bullets inside her body. This is not a game Israel can afford to play, so let's just rewind to the beginning and ask how many the Irgun and Haganah killed and bombed to strong-arm the British into giving them Palestine? Or we can skip ahead a few decades and start here: https://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and.... It's almost like Europeans have no business occupying the Middle East.
False. Eden was bartending at a music festival when she was taken. She was not taken from a military base.
Kfir Bibas was 9 months old when he was taken and Ariel Bibas was 4 years old when he was taken. Neither had been in the military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_and_killing_of_the_...