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agnishom
NoiseBert69
There is Mesh(core|tastic) around. Both use LoRa.
With tiny solar repeater that placed on a strategic hill you can cover lots of kilometers. Being sensitive down to -145dBm opens a lot of doors.
I was able to build energy harvester nodes that fit into 5cm x 5cm x 4cm boxes that roughly cost around 20€. Without energy harvesting capability with a normal TI BQ wide range charge controllers (that stuff costs $1.5-2.5@pcs and eats every power source up to 18V! With pseudo-MPPT!) you can bring the entire thing down to <<15€. That's mass producable throw-away stuff.
Currently available LoRa-gear is either USB-power optimized (looking at you Heltec) or just awfully overpriced as soon as a solar panel is attached to it.
danesparza
You also make yourself a bright shining beacon to anybody looking for a resistance network because Lora operates on very specific frequencies. It would be easy to spot you with an RF scanner.
nine_k
Obviously, put that relay node on a hill, on some structure where you don't live. Or maybe on the roof of your tall apartment building, among all the satellite dishes and their associated boxes. Pretend to be one of those.
If it's a self-contained, solar-powered node, it needs not be next to you, or to anyone. It should be safe and secure, to be of use during a natural disaster, or an outburst of violence.
tastyfreeze
Any licensed wireless networking gear is going to operate in very specific frequencies. The government requires it! If we were going for "the best" gear for avoiding detection you would have frequency hopping with jumps far enough apart that a listener has a harder time pinpointing a transmitter. Making repeaters roving makes it even harder for your adversary.
ActorNightly
If the place you are at is at that point in the conflict, RF scanners are the least of your worries.
NoiseBert69
Semtech LoRa Modems are wide frequency range modems. Latest generation also supports (non-LoRa) frequency hopping.
The signals are difficult to spot once you are in some distance to the transmitter.
amelius
I guess if you're protesting against the government, you don't have to comply with regulations and can use more power and basically the entire spectrum :)
NoiseBert69
But better having the government shooting down your 10€ ballo.. node with a F-35 instead of a 50€ node.
digiown
If you have the government as adversary and no military force to back it up, you might want to reconsider doing that as it makes you very detectable from far away.
ajsnigrutin
And instead of "just" getting teargassed and sent home, you get thrown to a concentration camp for organizing communications for the domestic terrorists there to overthrow the government, attack ICE, <insert whatever you want here, something you're pro- or against>.
sneak
Meshtastic citywide nets use a single frequency. Jamming it is trivial.
exitb
Even more trivial to flood with garbage traffic, as the whole network will amplify your attack.
kaitocross
LoRa locally is often installed/managed by municipal governments.
NoiseBert69
It's mostly LoRaWAN which is great for very-low-rate telemetry and very simple control tasks.
ajb
Is that the right threat model, though?
Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown. Thats' why it's happening in Iran. They want to disrupt the co-ordination of a coup, and their opponents only need to win in the short term after which it doesn't matter. In the US, the threat is censorship and tracking- suppression over the long term. Mesh networks are not great for that,because if you run a mesh network then you have declared yourself against the regime. Steganography may be better.
An amusing point is that secure steganography depends on redundancy with entropy- noise. A few years ago, it looked increasingly difficult because of lossy compression. Today, we're awash in randomly generated content, so it should be possible to make secure steganography quite high bandwidth. Although, it's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of it,because the randomness is the input to a diffusion model,not the output - you might need to run the model backwards to obtain your steganographic content. Which I guess is possible,although expensive.
jfengel
There is concern that the US may also go from chronic concerns to acute ones. Opponents of the government accuse it of serious crimes, and are already perceiving violence used to suppress dissent. The administration is not popular and may lose a lot of power in the upcoming election.
It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters, but the point of the exercise is to prepare for the unimaginable.
swaits
Keeping things in perspective, no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term.
The places where this happens, like Iran now, are in extremely different situations than anything in the US, or any other Western country.
That shouldn’t discourage people running meshes though.
andix
> It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters
Do you really think an authoritarian government cares about what people think? If there is a majority that supports them? They don't.
sharperguy
Mesh networks like meshtastic have shown that they can be run on very low power meaning they can continue to route messages with the power from small solar panels. This makes them more useful in disaster or wide scale power outage scenarios than only as an anti-authority measaure.
amelius
In practice it seems that Meshtastic isn't really up to the task, unfortunately:
https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1inrm25/is_mesh...
https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1fy95kj/lets_ta...
ninalanyon
Who's going to pay to create all the nodes. You need a lot of them in normal times when it is just enthusiasts sending test messages and if large numbers of people start sending real messages you will need more.
rock_artist
Governmental blockout is one thing but…
Even without climate / natural disasters we need to have fallback infrastructures in general.
Just yesterday Verizon was down.
agnishom
You raise a good point, and I think USians should do all of it: generally encrypt communication, try to conceal as much metadata as they can AND put up mesh networks. It is not the right threat model until it is.
That said, I never said that my comment was about the US.
ajb
Ah, I did assume your were talking about the US; my apologies. My comment applies to the US, and perhaps other countries with the potential to enter a similar situation.
thisislife2
> Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown.
They also do so to prevent political violence from spreading, as social media does fan the flame of further violence. This is (in my opinion) a legitimate response to prevent hatred and mob violence from growing.
yubblegum
> Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown. Thats' why it's happening in Iran. They want to disrupt the co-ordination of a coup
You are, possibly innocently, carrying propaganda water for a repressive autocratic regime that has killed thousands of its own citizens in the past week alone.
IRI desposts, starting fro Ali Khamenei down to the rest of their ideological "brothers and sisters" in the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (note no "Iran" in that name ..) are scared shitless that a Mussolini style future awaits them and their parasitical clans.
IRI has cut off internet and phone networks for days now because they know that before they can yet again reach "a deal" with the despicable Western elite who were instrumental in their rise to power (and staying there for all these years) need Media Cover from the audiances in the rest of the civilized world who would be exposed to numerous images and videos of bodies piled in streets and morgues, ARAB ISIS Style goons on pickup trucks with machine guns, and scenes of Iranian men and women of all shapes and ages loudly expressing their utter hatred of this EVIL REGIME from all corners of Iran, and they would not be able to "make a deal".
I strongly suggest, specially if you in anyway believe in any sort of Cosmic Judgment (Karmic or Abrahamic), to not stick your ignorant nose into the Iranian Revolution.
The people of Iran want to remove the yoke of this EVIL REGIME masqurading as God's Government on Earth. Let that outlandish and ludicrous pretention sink in before you get up to be a useful idiot for the Islamic Republic occupying Iran, ok?
ajb
My message was in no way intended to comment on the legitimacy of either the government of Iran or of its potential overthrow. There are circumstances in which the overthrow of a government is justified.
You may be passionately in favour of one side, but hastily imputing motives to, and disparaging, people who you do not know, will not aid in convincing anyone of your claims; it merely undermines your credibility.
fahhem
Bro, relax, this rhetoric and your claims are so extreme and not backed up by reality. Killed thousands? According to the "Human Rights Activists" in London? Or the ones in Washington? Because none of that has actually come from Iran, and the few videos that have come out show people hit by hunting rifles (aka, non-police weapons) or shot in the back by other "protestors". We know Mossad has armed the rioters, nobody in the "civilized world" with an IQ over 80 is falling for your propaganda anymore. Take a chill pill, and stop instigating causing everyone to hate the Iranian expats
BatteryMountain
Yeah until google, apple & friends boot them from the stores and block side loading as well. Then we're all screwed, as they will have 100% grip and visibility on comms and won't allow third party encrypted comms. Just wait and see friends, that day is around the corner. Which means all sensitive comms will move back offline...
sneak
Apple is already blocking protest coordination apps in Hong Kong at the demand of the CCP, and ICE oversight/tracking apps in the USA.
3D30497420
I built a basic LoRa network so I could send data from my washing machine in the apartment cellar to my Home Assistant box in my apartment several floors up. It very much did occur to me that the technologies/skills I was learning would also be useful to create a decentralized mesh network for general communication.
reaperducer
I built a basic LoRa network so I could send data from my washing machine in the apartment cellar to my Home Assistant box in my apartment several floors up.
I have sensors in eight of my plants that use LoRa to transmit moisture levels to an SBC running Forth that lights up a single segment in an LED bar to let me know which ones should be watered.
I like to think the electricity has made the plants super-intelligent and now they talk to each over over LoRa and plot against the cat.
3D30497420
Love it.
> I like to think the electricity has made the plants super-intelligent and now they talk to each over over LoRa and plot against the cat.
This should be the next Pixar film.
0xEF
But we won't, because those are hard to maintain versus the convenience of letting providers do it for us, hence why we keep getting suckered into handing over control to these centralized powers.
Y_Y
But also because it seems fun in the meantime. In fact a state that doesn't plan to turn off the internet should probably want a cohort of amateur radio operators ready to turn into a signals corps.
Maybe in the battlefields of the future we'll be fighting with lorawan cyberdecks rescued from desk drawers, and meshtastic hackers will be the equivalent of fighter pilot aces.
On that topic, I'm in this thread hoping to hear about how anyone got into resilient mesh networks and what they're doing with them now (outside of overthrowing the Ayatollah).
thenthenthen
How I got into it was tiredness of centralised platforms that dictate how we use those platforms. Often archival, search functions are non-trivial in things like Whatsapp, Discord etc. We made our own mesh application based on wifi and batman but ofc we couldnt convince our friends and family to switch over.
salviati
> we couldnt convince our friends and family to switch over.
What was the deal breaker for them?
ajsnigrutin
Amateur radio is one of the first thing that gets banned in wars, including eg. WW2 in US and the start of ukraine war in ukraine.
Considering the age and political orientation of most people here in this thread, and the age and political orientation of most eg. US hams, the situation would be quite different than most here imagine.
elAhmo
Given the recent threats from Cloudflare against Italy and siding with Vance, Musk and co., this is definitely not a far-fetched reality. Big Tech has demonstrated which side they are going with.
freehorse
Not submitting to state censorship requests is not a great example of what is the problem with Big Tech as discussed here.
elAhmo
I wasn't referring to the state censorship request, but rather to the 'flocking' to self-proclaimed champions of free speech in the current Trump administrations as a cry for help.
aduwah
When did CF do this?
Findeton
It is more about government tax warfare. They fined CF because it didn’t censor what the italian government wanted them to censor, so they fined CF.
ActorNightly
Big Tech is going to optimize for profits. They are gonna bow down to whomever is in charge.
mlrtime
Not really, you are framing this issue and dropping key words to make it political, are you a bot farming for engagement, please stop.
ezst
Not OP but, oh common. This entire thing IS political. Big Tech IS in bed with the authoritarian US apparatus, they have been very transparent about it. What are you expecting to gain from your message? Pedantry points?
salviati
There were strong signals from the CF CEO that they align with the Trump administration.
They threatened to pull the plug on all Italian customers.
This is relevant to this conversation: CF recently acted in a way that makes some people think it might cut its services to people for political reasons.
I don't find your comment particularly well articulated or continaing anything besides name calling (the "bot farming"). Can you articulate your opinion on the matter?
ivanstepanovftw
You should not fight against companies, they do not have bad intention.
The government can block Bluetooth and Wi-Fi with jammers. Russian government already does this in schools during exams, and already doing it around important infrastructure.
Focus on fighting against governments.
btbuildem
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.
throwaway2037
Not to side track too much from this discussion, but I looked at that PolyMarket event: "US civil war before 2027?" Currently, it is priced at 91.3 USD cents for No. If you bet 100 USD, the payout for No will be 109.43. That is very good return -- ~9.5% for 12 months of lending (as PolyMarket required full payment at the time of trade). That is twice the (retail) risk free rate at the moment. I am actually tempted to buy a large part of the order book. Am I missing something obvious?
Also, if you enjoy troll humor, the comments section is very funny.
michaelt
> Am I missing something obvious?
Considering reports like "Polymarket refuses to pay bets that US would 'invade' Venezuela" [1] one risk is poorly written small print, meaning you might not actually be betting on the thing you think you're betting on. This could also err in your favour, of course - but it's still a source of risk.
There's also the risks involved in cryptocurrency generally - it's the wild west, rife with scams, hacks, unexpected fees, and paperwork.
And thirdly, prediction markets often lack market depth, so if you want to invest a non-trivial amount the price can move a lot. You want to gamble $2,000 to win $190? No problem. You want to gamble $200,000 maybe no-one will take your bet. Can you be bothered to go through all the KYC paperwork rigmarole for $190 ?
throwaway2037
> You want to gamble $200,000 maybe no-one will take your bet.
> Can you be bothered to go through all the KYC paperwork rigmarole for $190 ?
walletdrainer
> Am I missing something obvious?
The low volume places a rather disappointing cap on your profits.
cachius
PolyMarket bets are becoming ever more problematic the wider it gets known, carrying the manipulation incentives from stock markets into every bettable aspect of society.
> Total garbage. Spread by a $9bn company with a 1m-follower account, a post viewed by 4.5m people. Pure disinformation for financial gain, with serious consequences for actual human lives. Shashank Joshi - @shashj - Jan 12 - https://x.com/shashj/status/2010766014829478393
vagab0nd
> Am I missing something obvious?
To list a few: the risk of Polymarket going under, the risk of Polymarket mishandling your money, the risk of Polygon going under, the risk of Ethereum going under, the risk of USDC depegging, the risk of interests going up, and, most obvious of all, the risk of a civil war.
energy123
It's similar to selling options out of the money. You get compensated because nobody likes to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller.
mlrtime
I will when that bet is the steamroller taking out the entire country.
throwaway2037
Not at all. Do you really think there is a risk of civil war in the United States in 2026? To me: It sounds like crazy people. I will make that be all day long!
nsvd2
If you haven't been paying attention to American politics, there are currently widespread protests due to a woman being shot by ICE last week. It looks like the current administration may be seeking violent unrest in the hopes of delaying elections.
JumpCrisscross
> looks like the current administration may be seeking violent unrest in the hopes of delaying elections
Civil war requires two militaries. Tiananmen Square wasn’t a civil war.
johncolanduoni
But if there is a civil war, what were you going to be able to do with the USD anyway?
grosswait
Or is it the financial backers of the protests that want a civil war?
throwaway2037
I love comments like this. You pop out of your (presumably New Zealand) prepper bomb shelter to get enough WiFi signal to make a post. I will bet against people like you all day long and make lots of money. How much are you willing to bet that there will be civil war in the US in 2026? Let's meet on PolyMarket!
derektank
There were large protests in the wake of a law enforcement officer killing someone in 2020 too. Notably, there was not a civil war, even though the Trump administration used the protests as cover for bad behavior then too
GoblinSlayer
1. ban guns
2. start civil war
3. ???
4. civil war with stone axes
jddj
There are a few like this. You can bet on Jesus not coming back in the calendar year for a little pocket money.
Funny, because a bit like the yes side of the civil war scenario, if JC comes back and someone is the sort of person to bet that he will, then do they really need the payout in those circumstances; and will the gambling website be in a position to pay out?
isubkhankulov
Polymarket and other prediction markets dont take risk on the trades. Two sides are needed to make a market so you’re likely to get your payout. So all the people taking the “safe” bet lose their collateral and the winners get the proceeds if the unlikely event happens.
torginus
802.11s with BATMAN routing works very well - you can have commercial quality links with tons of nodes.
The problem is transmitter power, residential Wifi radios are limited to a very low transmit power, like 0.1W, if you do more than that, you're breaking the law, and you're very easy to find if they come looking.
killingtime74
If there is really a civil war, won't these frequencies just get jammed?
futuraperdita
The point to any preparation for any adverse event is to prepare more than one solution to a problem, and to have a solid understanding of your actual adversary. By asking that question, you have already defeated yourself on the sake of whomever you have decided is the dominant force. This is the sort of nihilism that stops us from meaningful change, because we destroy ourselves in either sloth or despair.
Won't they get jammed? Yes, absolutely, on local levels. This is electronic warfare and happens in any actual battlespace.
Does that mean it is completely useless in emergency situations (of which civil war is one)? No.
theshrike79
Meshtastic works on commercial frequencies. If they block those then a good number of non-wifi/bluetooth devices will just stop working.
Including, but not limited to: garage door openers, some (older) car key fobs, some RC equipment, wireless weather sensors, remotely readable metering devices (electricity, water) and a crapton of other things.
NoiseBert69
All Semtech LoRa modems are wide-range modems. You can switch to basically every other frequency.
An idea would be to move to SX128x modems with work around 2.4GHz. You recycle Wifi-gear for directional stuff. This also enabled you to hide below Wifi traffic.
Still jammable - but much much more difficult.
sneak
Nah. The citywide meshtastic grids that exist presently operate on one single frequency citywide.
If you shut off the internet and jam that frequency, nobody can talk to anyone else to coordinate about a new frequency (which is then also just trivially jammed).
u8080
You could just flood Meshtastic channel with valid traffic specifically
torginus
Jamming is a double-edged sword, there are common frequency bands used by everyones equipment like 2.4GHz, 5GHz or the ISM band. If you jam those indiscriminately, your own stuff stops working as well.
mrguyorama
Any actual adversarial situation is a constant back and forth of "This works, whoops now it's countered, well now we countered that" forever.
Things don't stand still in "war". There's no "Solution" that will not be attacked, and there's no attack that cannot be worked around.
zmgsabst
The US is huge — you can’t jam everything everywhere. Talking about just cities, you still can’t jam everything everywhere.
But yes, targeted suppression/oppression (depending on your allegiance) will almost certainly use jamming — in fact, I’ve spoken with some Antifa about how they jam EMS frequencies at their events.
p0w3n3d
This reminds me the way the software was distributed in eastern countries when there was no internet. People went to market to meet other people, and they were peddling/colporting (look up the term in French) cassettes with the software.
The same can happen now - people would walk down the streets to certain places, to become hubs of information, but with no physical contact. Of course those places would be were the jammers would head to.
Actually this sounds like a good theme for book... however as long as I live on this world, I've noticed that if I invent something, there are already two people on the internet who have invented it already, so... please give me the title :)
kyletns
Why would anti-fascists jam EMS frequencies?
derangedHorse
Yeah, someone recently made a fork of the meshtastic firmware to support bitchat:
atmosx
Iran doesn't have the ability to control what you see online. If BigCorps play along, the US can largely do that, to much much greater extend. So they don't really need to bring the internet down, they can just have LLMs create custom "reddit pages" on the fly.
ActorNightly
We won't have a Civil war. We need one for sure, but the problem is that most people lives are very comfortable right now, and the average person doesnt care enough to die over any of the stuff they believe in.
Its more likely that our economy will tank and you will have more civil unrest.
PeterStuer
Is market manipulation or insider trading even regulated on polymarket?
mlrtime
There is no insider trading on a bet, it's kind of the point.
Would you bet a large amount of money without some insider information?
ethmarks
Insider trading on prediction markets is the whole point. They don't exist to provide a fair platform for normal people to make money, they exist to create accurate predictions by providing a monetary incentive for people to be correct. Whether "correct" means that you were just lucky, that you had insider knowledge, or that you were able to influence the result, is irrelevant.
PeterStuer
If I know the outcome, why would I bet largw before the outcome is to be publicly revealed?
I just wait and bet only if the market is wrong when the reveal is imminent.
Isn't this a realy good money laundering avenue? I sell you guaranteed outcomes, for a fee ofc.
szundi
[dead]
VikingCoder
Please, sell me a USB-C device that gives me mesh networking on my phone.
I'd like a Small, Medium, and Large option. Ideally, each would have a passthrough charger, so I can charge my phone even with the device plugged in to my phone.
The Small is just the device, and I guess it would drain my phone's battery. The Large would have a 25,000mAh and be just small enough to legally take on an airplane in the United Stated. The Medium has a smallish battery, maybe?
Give me what you can. Wifi. FRS. CB. LoRa. The ability to switch between those? The ability to broadcast across all of those in some spread-spectrum broadcast?
Make me use your special App that I have to install on my phone.
Make the device also act like a storage device. The Small has usb storage big enough to store the APK for the app for me to side-load.
The Large has enough usb storage for, I dunno, all of Wikipedia and medical texts, and open maps, and a few other things, and the Kiwix app to side-load.
Make the Medium and the Large also be able to be a hotspot, for other people nearby to be able to connect to, so they can download the app and browse Kiwix, and send messages through my phone? Or just let my phone be that hotspot, I guess?
And most importantly, give me messaging. Secure point-to-point, exchanging keys by touching our phones together, or using QR codes, or something.
Or broadcast messaging. With configurable repeating.
And then make the Base Station version of this, which has solar panels, and a battery, and it's just a repeater. You install and forget.
If you're only going to build one thing, build the Small version I described. Next, I guess, would be the Base Station. Next would be the Large.
Where is the Kickstarter? I'll back it right now. I'll buy 2 Large, 6 Small, and 4 Base Stations. Right now.
sneak
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0F7LD3BQG
Meshtastic is the name. It works today. Many cities have them. They aren’t useful in antigovernment scenarios because they are trivial to jam and deny use of.
nuke-web3
Worth checking out meshtastic and their ecosystem of much longer range mesh tech.
Refefer
Pragmatically, cost and ease of access is especially important in suppressed countries or ones with unstable infrastructure. While the devices you're talking about has lots of conveniences, distribution and price dominate in lower income regions.
For a side project, sure. But in first world countries, the odds of infrastructure breakdown or suppression of Internet is incredibly rare. In Iran's case, suppression is a weapon so phone only makes a lot of sense.
VikingCoder
I'd like to start with something that works, and then make it affordable.
Rather than start with something free, that demonstrably doesn't work where it needs to.
notepad0x90
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?
cookiengineer
No they sadly don't have that, and that's the major issue of connectivity. All chat recipients have to be online/reachable to receive your messages, which is okay, but useless in mobile environments where you can't afford that constant traffic.
The broadcast type channels though are what the article talks about, they are great for off the grid and mesh environments.
Relaying and scattering traffic across neighboring peers (and handshakes via multicast DNS, for example) would fix a lot of the issues you'll get with Briar, but I guess that would imply a refactor of the codebase.
For these types of NAT breaking issues, a lot of protocols rely on STUN/TURN/TURTLE routing.
For my experimental software router I'm relying on broken firewall deep packet inspection, so I'm using exfil / smuggling protocols. Currently still works, according to my local setup of the great firewall (it's source leak was legit btw).
us321
> Relaying and scattering traffic across neighboring peers (and handshakes via multicast DNS, for example) would fix a lot of the issues you'll get with Briar, but I guess that would imply a refactor of the codebase.
Is this even technically possible?
darubedarob
[dead]
goda90
Jodel is a successor to yik-yak.
torginus
Isn't this borderline false advertising?
The title implies that this is instrumenta in evading the govt block and monitoring on messaging.
The truth is it's not being actively used, and this is just a proposal, and might not be that practical or safe to use when the bad guys come looking.
pamcake
I think it's not a great submission due to the poorly editiorialized title which is not representative of the content (user manual of Briar).
Not sure what you meam about "advertising" as OP doesn't seem to have any relation to Briar but just a person in Iran trying to cope and help.
torginus
I mean the whole thing is confusing - is OP actually Iranian? Do we have evidence that Briar is being used in Iran, and is effective? Why was the Farsi manual linked to an English website, when the English is next to it?
From a quick Google search it seems there's no reference to Briar having any connection to Iran other than this discussion, and other places linking to it.
HelloUsername
Why isn't your comment the top one? You're absolutely right. Where is the proof or study of the title? Or at least the title should be rephrased as a question to its users? (What I tried the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592912) This should be reported (to dang).
zelphirkalt
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.
ozfive
A good use of briar is having it on your phone already so that during a natural disaster you can connect with others that already have it at community relief spots. Keep it just in case and it will come in clutch when you need it most!
wafflemaker
Briar comes with ways of sharing it offline, so enough for one person to have it.
Most likely how they got it in Iran, as I doubt that critical mass of people had it installed in advance. Most likely doesn't work on iPhones though - no sideloading.
9dev
I looked into the iOS issue once, and in the EU at least, it should be possible to add a minimal implementation of the store API to an app, so other iPhones could download the app from an iPhone hosting it.
After discovering the amount of pain involved with that API, I quickly discarded the idea though
redbell
> 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 :)
thisislife2
Mobile phones with "Mesh networking" built-in have now started to appear in the market. E.g Tecno Spark Go 3 - https://www.tecno-mobile.com/phones/product-detail/product/s... - recently launched in India has a feature called Freelink 2 that claims to connect with other Tecno phones to provide "connectivity" without wifi or cellular network up to a range of 1.5 kms. More here: https://www.intelregion.com/tech/how-to-use-your-techno-phon... .
(Personally, I don't think any government is going to allow this.)
stavros
> (Personally, I don't think any government is going to allow this.)
Then that's a pretty clear signal for how free that government is.
thisislife2
As someone who lives in a democratic country, I am quite loathe to trust any foreign-controlled communication platform. I also do not support or endorse violent politics. Seeing how social media has triggered political riots in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and now in Iran (probably with the aid of foreign sponsors / agents) to destabilise these countries, I am fully in favour of governments clamping down hard on such kind of "dark networks" that they don't have oversight over. Note that this is nothing new - governments always have been mindful that foreign agents in their country should not have a way to communicate with their masters, and that is why everything from radios to satellite phones require some form of license to operate.
returningfory2
Isn't it well known that the "protestors are foreign agents" line is just extremely transparent bs that governments use to silence dissent?
lazide
a great many countries ban satellite phones too.
emptysongglass
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.
nmaleki
During a hackathon 7 years ago, a team and I set out to make a decentralized blockchain messaging platform over Bluetooth Low Energy. It was intended for situations when the internet was out. We didn't finish the technicals in 24hr, but it was a fun challenge. I looked it up and there are a lot of solutions now, here is the top one on search: https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
dash2
Is this actually true? Is anyone in Iran using Briar?
pamcake
Presumably OP is, at least.
IshKebab
I would be very surprised if they were. Bluetooth's range is far too limited for this to be useful or to make a workable mesh.
Seems like the GPG of comms.
torginus
Yeah, the problem with these mesh networks is that for them to work, you need high transmit powers typically not found in off the shelf stuf (because it would be illegal).
A would-be opressor can just have a van full of antennas drive through the neighborhood and triangulate all those transmitters, after which you'll get caught.
It's like using high-powered flashlights to covertly message each other.
shevy-java
Just the layout seems so awful. As if noboy ever optimised this for real people.
jedahan
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.
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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.