Skip to main content

Blocking Communication - Breaking Out


I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
If you have been following my previous post you will realize how quickly a state actor can just disrupt any kind of communication relying on a centralized telecom authority or Internet Service providers. Anything that can be threatened technically and legally can and will be used to block access to the Internet and communication mediums. Hence we need a solution that can circumvent these hurdles.
This blog post is inspired by the recent events happening at Kashmir, India and how repeatedly state actors in different parts of globes using laws to curb access to freedom of speech.

I present to you today: NoConnect

The idea first was envisioned at a Mozilla Leadership Summit back in 2015 at Singapore along with Priyanka Nag and a few more people(whom I don't remember anymore :( ). Then it took two years for it to come out to a prototype stage. And now this is in a stable enough stage where you can use this to reliably communicate with each other.

What is NoConnect

NoConnect is a real-time messaging application like WhatsApp which does not rely on any traditional GSM/CDMA network or any kind of internet service to communicate with each other unlike WhatsApp.

Motivation:

This was primarily envisioned to be used by NGO's and rescue workers and victims in areas where cellular and telecom communications have broken down. And the only way to connect and communicate is by Satelite Phones. This app could transform every mobile device to an off the grid communication device which does not need any kind of network.

The idea was heavily inspired by Gotenna Mesh without the need for any dedicated costly hardware.

Features

  • off the grid: NoConnect doesn't need any internet or mobile network to communicate. Each mobile device with the app installed acts as a node and connects with each other using wifi and Bluetooth p2p network
  • temp users: All the users and usernames are disposable. Since it's not stored in any server or network. It's bound only to the device
  • encrypted: data streams between devices are encrypted
  • p2p network support: if you are part of a p2p swarm. You can communicate with everyone in that swarm even if they are not within your Wifi/Bluetooth range
The swarm makes it perfect for communicating between communities. And the nature of the network makes it resilient to any kind of censorship or attacks on the interception of messages.
A short guide on how it works



This was later submitted to the Equal Rating Innovation challenge and listed under the Technology section.

India Version:

I have just released a prebuilt binary which you should be able to just install and use right now in any Android Device. The release note gives a few more specific features probably relevant to the present scenario. I will also list them out here:
  • Complete off the grid communication. Does not need any network (GSM/CDMA) or internet at all. Useful for situations where communication Blackdown is active
  • Supports message broadcast. Useful for quickly sharing information to everyone
  • Complete anonymous messaging. You choose your username and it doesn't have to be unique. Not tied to any phone number or any information. If you are concerned, just remove your sim card and then use it. Will work fine
  • Censorship Resistant: Communications are end to end encrypted and completely off the grid. No way to monitor, intercept or block communication
  • This version is backdated. You will manually change the date to two years back (2017) and it will work. The moment your network comes back alive and if you think you are under attack. the moment the date changes the app will lock itself regardless of if you give a password or not.

Download Here


This post will be updated with the technical specification of the mesh network and how NoConnect works. And also some more changes that are being worked on for the India version of the app.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Racecraft (Project Koru) · Prologue — The Origin Story

Racecraft · Prologue , The Origin Story It Started With a Wine List and a Question About Racing How a happy-hour conversation in the Bay Area turned into a trustable AI race coach , and then into a second version that runs entirely on a phone, on the NPU. This is the prologue to a five-part series. Two years ago(1st November, 2024) I was in the Bay Area for a GDE Summit. If you've never been: it's a couple of days of talks among Google Developer Experts, the kind of people who get unreasonably excited about a new on-device runtime, and then , mercifully , a happy hour where everyone stops performing and just eats. We ended up at a restaurant(Puesto Santa Clara), a long table of GDEs, and I was doing the most important engineering of the evening: trying to decide which wine to order. Across the table was Ajeet Mirwani . I don't even remember how the wine talk turned into racing talk , these things drift , but the moment the word "racing" ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Throughput Trap: Benchmarking vLLM on OpenXLA and the Reality of Production LLM Serving

vLLM Systems · DevLab 2026, Deep Dive I was recently invited by the Google TPU team to speak at the OpenXLA Summer DevLab 2026 . This post breaks down our deep-dive evaluation of the matured vLLM + OpenXLA stack, the fundamental engineering mismatches between CUDA and XLA serving paths, and why traditional capacity metrics are lying to you. If you are operating large language models at enterprise scale right now, your platform architecture team is likely staring at a massive infrastructure crossroads: Should we migrate our core serving workloads from GPUs to TPUs? Historically, NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem was the only serious option for user-facing, low-latency LLM generation. But here in 2026, the economics and infrastructure options have transformed. Google TPUs are highly available, cheaper per chip, and the open-source serving stack built around vLLM and OpenXLA has officially achieved absolute production readiness. Yet, when our infrast...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Split‑Brain Neuro‑Symbolic Training Method for High‑Velocity Autonomous Coaching from Telemetry

 Author: Rabimba Karanjai Scope: Problem statement + data methodology + model training (no deployment discussion) Abstract Real‑time coaching in motorsport is a safety‑critical learning problem : a system must map noisy, high‑frequency telemetry to short, actionable guidance that remains physically consistent and avoids hazardous recommendations . This paper proposes a “Split‑Brain” training formulation that separates (i) a semantic coaching target (what action/critique should be expressed) from (ii) a reflexive interface (how actions are represented as compact, verifiable tokens). The approach trains a Small Language Model (SLM) in the Gemma family [1] using QLoRA fine‑tuning [2] , and introduces a telemetry tokenizer plus teacher‑student synthesis pipeline to generate instruction‑action pairs at scale. Core contribution: a reproducible method to convert “ golden lap ” differential tel...
Post a Comment
Read more