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points by vladkens 12 hours ago | 0 comments

Wow. Sounds interesting. I also looked for a solution to talk to relatives in case the internet gets blocked. Ended up with XMPP, since it has independent servers in different countries that can talk to each other. But the XMPP clients I tried are pretty bad, with no images or audio/video calls.

Did video calls work during the blackout too? I think calls should work like in the good old Skype days, pure P2P.

[–] Giorgi 12 hours ago

I am going to bite - how would servers work in other country if you have internet blocked, what am i missing here?

[–] Bender 10 hours ago

Not the person you are asking but countries rarely block the internet for real. War torn countries will immediately block full MTU packets (bulk traffic packets, this will block streaming services), known social media platforms, known chat services. It will appear down. Cloudflare stats will give the appearance of being down but small unknown chat platforms may work for a little while. SSH may work even longer as they need SSH and even telnet to continue to manage infrastructure. That's why I keep an SSH chat server around. Feel free to play around with it. [1] When sharing with a person in a war torn country, give them the IP not the domain name. There will also be networks that allow leaders to bypass the "blocks".

[1] (customize username, paste into terminal, then type "chat") .:. This is a hardened private fork of devzat. shout-out to quackduck if he still logs in here.

    chat() ( saved=$(stty -g 2>/dev/null); trap 'stty "$saved" 2>/dev/null; printf "\033[?2004l\033[0m\033[?25h\033>"' EXIT INT HUP TERM
     [ -f /tmp/dc ] || ssh-keygen -qt ed25519 -f /tmp/dc -N ''; ssh -p 443 -i /tmp/dc -oIdentitiesOnly=yes anon@dropchat.net );

Useful commands to start with are "help", "cmds" and "rest". There is no censorship.