Meet the off-the-grid chatroom that fits in your pocket

What if instead of connecting to the phone company, we connected directly to each other’s phones? Called "mesh networking," the idea has been kicked around for years in hacker circles, but it got a major boost with iOS 8. Thanks to the new "Multipeer Connectivity Framework," iPhones were able to connect to each other directly over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, a minor software update with potentially major consequences.