If the internet is turned off

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Stanislav Shalunov. Photos from social networks --

Stanislav Shalunov has released a new messenger Fireside. “Something like that already happened,” some will say, trying to remember, and we’ll tell you: Shalunov had a Firechat messenger , which became famous during the events in one of the financial centers of the world, when hundreds of thousands of people installed it, and the whole city became one huge mesh network. But not only them and not only there: this lightweight decentralized messenger was used by many everywhere.

A mesh network is when devices in the absence of the Internet via bluetooth or another similar protocol directly connect to each other. Each device acts as a repeater, relaying your messages until they reach the destination. The new Fireside does this too.

Now a few words for those who are trying to remember who Shalunov is. He is a graduate of Moscow State University, who went to America in the nineties and worked for the BitTorrent company. He created the LEDBAT protocol there, which is often unknown to those who use it. LEDBAT stands for Low Extra Delay Background Transport and is briefly explained as a protocol that allows optimal transmission of gigantic amounts of information on the Web. Without LEDBAT, the modern Internet is impossible, to which billions of devices are connected and through which gigabytes, terabytes and even petabytes of information are poured every second. Our favorite torrents could not work without the naughty protocol. It is used by Microsoft and Amazon. When you, the owner of an iPad, iPhone or Mac, without ceasing to play or work, update your software without any problems by downloading new versions from Apple servers,

The famous Firechat, about which so much was written and talked about in 2019-2020, Shalunov stopped developing and sold. Fireside is a development of Firechat - it also works p2p and connects devices into a mesh network. But he goes further and knows how to do what Fireside could not: bypass blocking. It finds access to blocked sites using devices in the mesh network that are located in countries and regions where there is no blocking. Of course, the messenger uses end-to-end encryption - this is now the standard; but it differs from others in that it does not have a central server that explicitly or secretly saves or even reads your messages. In the absence of a server, encrypted messages are stored only on the smartphones of the participants in the conversation. But that is not all.

Fireside runs on the open source NewNode protocol, a new invention by Shalunov. On Github, where the code is posted for everyone to see, the protocol is described as “a method for decentralized content delivery.” This smart p2p protocol frees the user from headaches with connection settings - he decides when to work on wi-fi and when not. It connects devices with different connection and connectivity options into a single network: some have bluetooth, others have WiFi-Direct ... And it connects all of them into a single network - I want to say “global”, but it depends on the number of devices on which Fireside and New Node.

In the extreme, ideal case, when millions or - why not dream? - Billions of people have installed Shalunov's new messenger on their smartphones and tablets, a global network based on the NewNode protocol is emerging, which does not need the Internet and which cannot be closed, banned or destroyed. As long as at least one device in this network has access to the Internet, it will share this output with all devices.

Stanislav Shalunov is a high-tech man that Russia could be proud of. Between 15 and 20 percent of all world traffic on the Web is carried using its LEDBAT protocol. His new open-source Fireside messenger is not just a remake of already existing messengers, but a door to a new, interesting world where, with an abundance of smartphones and tablets, the possibility of a giant mesh network arises that no shutdown and no state with its censorship and threats of disconnection can destroy.

Shalunov knows about these threats. In an amazing way, he predicted the future in an interview he gave in October 2020 on the Reforum network site. “Now the Russian government is again trying to tighten the screws, reducing the percentage of those who will have access to a view of what is happening that is different from the official one. His task is to make such a minority very tiny, insignificant and eventually turn into dissidents. One of the consequences for Russia will be a further loss of competitiveness in all areas, and the technological side will not be an exception. For successful competition, you need more, not less integration, you need to understand what kind of people around you are, what their needs are. But even now there are very few people in Russia who understand the needs of the global market.

It is counterproductive for Russia and for the rest of the world.”

And we are living in it now.

Russian American Stanislav Shalunov looks towards Russia with excitement and pain. What is happening in Ukraine horrifies him. In the blog of his Fireside messenger, the last post is about Marina Ovsyannikova.

Among the reviews on NewNode, I found this: “It works, it’s tested, I downloaded it in reserve, because I live in Russia. I hope that for its intended purpose, this application will never be useful to me. This was written by our compatriot in September 2021, very little time has passed since then, and now it seems that decentralized, secure, able to work in conditions of blocking and disconnected Internet Fireside and NewNode can be very useful for us to keep contacts with each other, precisely because we live in Russia.

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