5 ms·

A bunch of countries turn off the internet at the first sign of protests, hell sometimes they just turn it off to stop "a bunch of college kids from cheating du

A bunch of countries turn off the internet at the first sign of protests, hell sometimes they just turn it off to stop "a bunch of college kids from cheating during test week" Coming to a country near you soon

DonsDiscountGas 2y ago
Right but Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi are very short range so it doesn't actually solve that problem
- Charon77 2y ago
  It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay. This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues. Airtags have a totally different architecture than what this protocol is describing, I think.
    - dlenski 2y ago
      > I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues. Yes indeed. I don't understand how the peer-to-peer relaying can possibly scale without some directed routing algorithm. If my phone running Briar is literally handing off every as-yet-undelivered message to every other phone running Briar, we're going to pretty quickly become overwhelmed. It'll have all the routing issues of a Wi-Fi mesh network, except at a vast scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network#Briar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network#Briar
  - dlenski 2y ago
    > It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay. Let's think this through. Imagine civil war breaks out in Australia, and communications infrastructure is destroyed or shut off. I'm in Sydney and want to transmit a message to a friend in Perth. How exactly is "everyone acts as a relay" going to work? In particular, how is it going to scale when everyone in the country is trying to do the same things? > This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby. This is incorrect. Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think. Those nearby Internet-connected devices send the airtag's location to a server. Nothing about this would work without the Internet.
    - traceroute66 2y ago
      > Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think Yes, exactly (BLE, UWB, NFC). First, Airtags only have a coin-cell battery. It is not remotely viable for them to be doing any sort of serious "communicating" because the battery would die in seconds. Second, making the Airtag effectively a dumb device means you gain the various security and privacy benefits, and means everything needed to make the magic happen can be transmitted in a single BLE/UWB/NFC packet (bringing us back to the battery life aspect already mentioned). 30,000ft view of how it works: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sece994d0126/web https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sece994d0126/...
    - LikeBeans 2y ago
      Yeah, I think current tech assumes a server relay. However imo, and if I were to imagine a solution, in this case I think a message would need a ttl, say 24 hours. In a local mesh/hive everyone would store a copy of the undelivered messages. When people move between hives they would sync these undelivered messages where ttl didn't expire. With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. Undelivered means a destination user that didn't show in a hive. Wdyt?
      - fc417fc802 2y ago
        > With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. If you want this to scale you'd need a scheme to deal with limited cache per device. Something like having each device assign a random priority to each message it has in transit. That way everyone culls a different set when things fill up. > would need a ttl, say 24 hours Probably better off scaling priority by age. That way you deliver if at all possible, until it eventually falls out of cache. Some people will be able to dedicate much more storage than others.

DonsDiscountGas 2y ago

Right but Bluetooth and local Wi-Fi are very short range so it doesn't actually solve that problem

Charon77 2y ago
It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay. This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues. Airtags have a totally different architecture than what this protocol is describing, I think.
  - dlenski 2y ago
    > I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues. Yes indeed. I don't understand how the peer-to-peer relaying can possibly scale without some directed routing algorithm. If my phone running Briar is literally handing off every as-yet-undelivered message to every other phone running Briar, we're going to pretty quickly become overwhelmed. It'll have all the routing issues of a Wi-Fi mesh network, except at a vast scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network#Briar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network#Briar
- dlenski 2y ago
  > It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay. Let's think this through. Imagine civil war breaks out in Australia, and communications infrastructure is destroyed or shut off. I'm in Sydney and want to transmit a message to a friend in Perth. How exactly is "everyone acts as a relay" going to work? In particular, how is it going to scale when everyone in the country is trying to do the same things? > This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby. This is incorrect. Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think. Those nearby Internet-connected devices send the airtag's location to a server. Nothing about this would work without the Internet.
  - traceroute66 2y ago
    > Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think Yes, exactly (BLE, UWB, NFC). First, Airtags only have a coin-cell battery. It is not remotely viable for them to be doing any sort of serious "communicating" because the battery would die in seconds. Second, making the Airtag effectively a dumb device means you gain the various security and privacy benefits, and means everything needed to make the magic happen can be transmitted in a single BLE/UWB/NFC packet (bringing us back to the battery life aspect already mentioned). 30,000ft view of how it works: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sece994d0126/web https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sece994d0126/...
  - LikeBeans 2y ago
    Yeah, I think current tech assumes a server relay. However imo, and if I were to imagine a solution, in this case I think a message would need a ttl, say 24 hours. In a local mesh/hive everyone would store a copy of the undelivered messages. When people move between hives they would sync these undelivered messages where ttl didn't expire. With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. Undelivered means a destination user that didn't show in a hive. Wdyt?
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      > With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. If you want this to scale you'd need a scheme to deal with limited cache per device. Something like having each device assign a random priority to each message it has in transit. That way everyone culls a different set when things fill up. > would need a ttl, say 24 hours Probably better off scaling priority by age. That way you deliver if at all possible, until it eventually falls out of cache. Some people will be able to dedicate much more storage than others.