Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

This should be a lesson for all of us. We should start building and maintaining lightweight mesh networks, just in case. We shouldn't take the world of cooperating ISPs and Meta and Cloudflare and Google and AWS for granted.

Take heed, Americaneez -- and prepare, because this may be in your future sooner than prediction markets would have you believe [1].

LoRa mesh networking seems like the runner-up, but vague reports indicate (Meshtastic) doesn't handle crowds well.

I think Bitchat can use Meshtastic, so a LoRa radio paired with a phone could be a base for not just texting individuals, but community messaging.

1: https://polymarket.com/event/us-civil-war-before-2027

> Note: If you are not sure if your device is Android, check the Play Store app. If available, your device is Android

I wasn't able to resist smiling reading this :)

Does anyone remember yik-yak? It wasn't anonymous and resilient like briar, but it was great in its time to discover people near-by and start chatting.

Does anyone if briar relays traffic? like if at least one person in a wifi network has briar and they also connect by bluetooth to another person within an adjacent wifi network, does it relay messages from one end of the city to the other over dozens of devices?

I have Briar, but never had anyone to use it with. As an emergency text messaging tool, I guess it can be used, but not for any media transfer. The picture quality is abysmal. I also tried using it to sync some notes across devices, looking for a good use case of it all, but there was also some issue there. I believe once you created a "forum" you can no longer delete them. The desktop app is very slow. Sometimes had to wait for 10-20s for it to do something. I guess it is really just an emergency/offline text message tool.

Is this actually true? Is anyone in Iran using Briar?

When I tested all the p2p messengers I could get my hands on for Android and iOS about two years back, the only one that worked at all without having a router around was Briar. Glad to see it helping people.

Would ssb (secure scuttlebutt) with Yubikeys have a similar usecase? [0]

[0]: https://opencollective.com/secure-scuttlebutt-consortium/upd...

>> "The adversary has a limited ability to persuade users to trust the adversary’s agents - thus the number of social connections between the adversary’s agents and the rest of the network is limited." [1]

This assumption seems risky.

[1] https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/

I tried to set up Briar recently so my partner and I could text on the plane. We tried everything including manual exchange of the special links and QR code pairing and nothing worked. This was even while we still bad ground internet access.

I think meshtastic would be a lot more performant in mesh scenarios due to the added range of LoRa. But of course it's special hardware and thus suspicious during an insurrection. And probably just not available.

I doubt this will actually work though except in the densest city.

How does Briar work when a government shuts down the internet?

It mentions Bluetooth and Wifi. My guess is that it tries to find other Briar devices connected to the same Bluetooth and wifi hotspot but what if the users are not on the Bluetooth/wifi? Does it share ALL messages encrypted with every Briar user in the hope later they come in contact with the final user?

Whoa, I was just mentioning in another post how I have my family member install bitchat just in case for emergencies. This is a very interesting alternative. With a travel router, I can significantly expand the chat radius compared to bitchat's purely BLE approach.

Edit: Boo, no iOS app

What about Jack Dorsey's Bitchat . Could be useful in india (especially Kashmir) where govt shut down internet during protest

Minneapolis needs this now.

I'm curious about the iOS situation

Hooray! As a Rabin fan, I love Briar and so tremendously excited to be reading this. Thank you, all who are involved with this magnificent project!!

Just the default web-layout shown here is ... awful. How can people use that? That design is like 1990 ... but worse.

I like briar for the fact that i already have the hardware...

I like meshtastic for not needing the network related devices for their hardware

What I'd like is something that is platform agnostic... I want an app that i can install, a (tor like) server i can setup that will anonymously route and fwd messages and really cheap and easy hardware that will let me pop up mini repeaters on demand. Would also like to be able to send images and maybe videos, but for the network to be smart enough to only send them when the bandwidth is there

I may just stick with briar in the mean time, but seriously none of them seem to offer what i want.

I'm still unclear how the stated goal of the title is achieved. My first assumption reading the title that it works something like airtags, but that is obviously nonsense. unless you are standing right next to the guy you want to message, how exactly does it work?

Perhaps Americans should start preparing with Meshtastic / Meshcore, just in case....... ..,..the Emperor seems hellbent on bringing martial law into effect.

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Good