Tech Explained: What Survives an Internet Shutdown?

Posted under Tech Explained on July 26th, 2026 by

The protest in Jantar Mantar, Delhi, ended after Education Minister resigned. But internet shutdowns during the protest, followed by a Govt direction asking GitHub to remove opensource BitChat, concern me as a technologist. Privacy is a fundamental right in India, and personal communication cannot be held hostage to the whims of Govts. Alternate decentralized routes exist, I want to talk about that today.

When mobile data is blocked, your phone still has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. BitChat uses Bluetooth Low Energy to discover nearby phones. Each phone relays packets, so a message can cross several people without towers or a central server. It works best in a dense crowd. Encrypted messages can be stored temporarily on nearby phones and delivered when one later encounters the recipient.

A local Wi-Fi network is another option for a confined site. A RPi Zero 2W can act as both an access point and a local chat server. Even a normal home router can provide the network while phone apps exchange messages directly between connected devices. Several battery-powered portable nodes can widen coverage, but they need a Wi-Fi mesh backhaul that synchronizes messages between them.

For longer range, an engineering option is Meshtastic. Your phone connects over Bluetooth to a LoRa radio, while those radios relay short packets across a wider area. It works well for text, location and coordination. However, every person in the network needs extra hardware, making it harder to deploy spontaneously, and LoRa has too little bandwidth for images or video.

These systems provide local messaging, not internet access. They reach the wider internet only when one node has an external connection. A jammer aimed only at cellular bands would leave Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or LoRa working unless its super wideband(highly unlikely).

Any tool/tech can be misused. That is true of phones, cash and encryption too. That does not justify banning it. When the Govt blocks private communication because it cannot monitor every message, it is actively pursuing surveillance power. The protest may be over, but the precedent remains. Hope this doesn’t repeat again.

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Advanced Tech: X-ray Lithography

Posted under Advanced Tech on July 19th, 2026 by

Earlier this week, I watched a fascinating TechTechPotato deep dive on advanced lithography. I recommend it if you have the time. Researchers have explored X-ray lithography for more than five decades, yet it has never entered mainstream chip production. Let me try throwing some light there.

Lithography transfers circuit patterns onto a light-sensitive resist on a silicon wafer. Today’s leading-edge systems use extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, light at 13.5nm. Conventional EUV optics have a numerical aperture of 0.33. High-NA EUV raises this to 0.55 and can resolve features around 8nm, but the scanner, masks and process control become harder. As features shrink further, manufacturers may again need multiple exposures for one layer. Shorter wavelengths provide another route. Moving towards 6-7nm radiation(called the Xray range) could offer finer resolution at the same numerical aperture and reduce some multi-patterning.

The trade-off starts with photon energy. A 13.5nm EUV photon carries about 92eV, while a 6.7nm photon carries about 185eV. At the same exposure dose, you therefore receive roughly half as many photons. That increases random variations in exposure, while higher-energy secondary electrons can spread through the resist and blur feature edges. The system also needs a powerful, stable source, efficient reflective optics, durable masks and near-nanometre overlay across many layers.

X-ray lithography has produced fine patterns and even functional circuits in research settings, but production tool must repeat the process across full 300mm wafers with extremely low defect density, precise overlay, high uptime and competitive throughput. Current EUV systems output around 230 wafers/hour. No commercial X-ray lithography platform currently operates in high-volume chip manufacturing. I think it remains a credible long-term frontier, but breakthroughs are still required across the board. For now, ASML’s EUV platform still remains the production benchmark.

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