Anonymous, guerrilla publishing with a Raspberry Pi Pico and a library for WLAN Captive portal / Hotspot creation.
Why the name?
According to Wikipedia a samizdat is a "self-published work of dissident literature, which was clandestinely distributed in the former Soviet bloc countries."
This project is inspired by an article in C't (a German computer magazine) 23/2033.
It will turn a Raspberry Pi Pico W into a WLAN Hotspot with a captive portal. The possible uses are many, but the one proposed in the article was to use it for a sort of "Guerilla publishing".
A Raspberry Pi Pico W is a cheap device, at way under 10$/€ so if you are unable to retrieve your device after the battery has run out or if it gets lost, it won't be a big financial expense or loss. It can run for a couple of days on an 18650 Li-ion rechargeable battery or on 3 1,5V primary cells.
It will also work on other microcontrollers with WLAN and MicroPython available without changes, like an ESP32, ESP8266...
A quick summary:
- A Raspberry Pi Pico (or chosen device) creates a WLAN.
- Once a client connects to it, it will set itself as the destination of any DNS requests.
- The index.html page is displayed, both on first connection or on any web request.
Possible uses (legality aside ;) ):
- Informational WLAN in a public location.
- Provide information in case of news and media outages or strict censorship.
- Dead Letter Box (with encrypted content, of course) for intelligence agents.
- Fun and guerrilla way of publishing something.
Quick Start:
- Clone this repo.
- Open in Thonny.
- Edit htdocs/index.html to show your desired information.
- Install micrpython-phew library/package to Raspberry Pi Pico W (I use Thonny, makes this quick and easy).
- Copy all files to your Raspberry Pi Pico W.
- Power it up however you like, have fun in your neighborhood or some public place.
"Without privacy, you can't have anything for yourself. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
Edward Snowden