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Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
- ukblewis 9mo agoGood
- 31337Logic 9mo agoHooray! 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!!
- electronsoup 9mo agoI'm curious about the iOS situation
- thomascountz 9mo agoBriar is available on Google Play for devices running Android. What situation do you mean?
- arcanemachiner 9mo agoThe one you just summarized perfectly.
- celsoazevedo 9mo agoI doubt iOS has a large market share in Iran. Also, for something like this you don't want a platform that requires you to essentially use the App Store and nothing else.
- dc396 9mo agoiOS is around 10%, Android around 90%. (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/iran/%20 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/iran/%20)
- bflesch 9mo agoUnfortunately, due to safety reasons Apple cannot allow you to leave the walled garden, it is only in your own best interest. All communication services on our iOS devices require at least one US-based NSA-integrated middleman. /s
- bb88 9mo agoSeriously though, given all the NSA has done: Could the NSA launch a "beach head" inside Apple?
- tamimio 9mo agoDon’t forget the horror stories of people relying on iCloud to have all their personal life there only to get locked out for silly reasons.
- sp0ck 9mo agoGoogle is no better here, I would say they are even worse since they are scanning your files actively. Remember story of Father who was asked by doctor to send his baby son private parts photos due to covid and Google not only locked him out but also notified Police. Even after getting statement from Law Enforcement there was no crime they didn't restore his access. Guy lost 20 years of live history due to algorithm.
- bflesch 9mo agoI feel the narrative on these kind of issues should be updated. We've been using their framing of "algorithms" but it is taking away all responsibility from the US tech workers who are actually designing and running Google. The guy lost 20 years of life history due to US tech workers at Google wrongfully blocking his account and then ignoring his pleads for reactivation. When US tech workers can show up to take cash and bonus payments from Google, they can also show up to take responsibility for Google's impact.
- DANmode 9mo ago10% of devices or less.
- subscribed 9mo agoPerhaps Americans should start preparing with Meshtastic / Meshcore, just in case....... ..,..the Emperor seems hellbent on bringing martial law into effect.
- codezero 9mo agoThe military can very easily find and eliminate repeaters very quickly and almost certainly would.
- torlok 9mo agoThen get more? Sounds like a fantastic way to waste military resources. I have no clue why this mythical US military might and efficiency idea persists after so many failed interventions.
- kingkawn 9mo agoThe interventions fail only after enormous slaughter, which people are understandably keen to not be subject to
- anigbrowl 9mo agoAs if compliance had such a great success rate.
- computerthings 9mo ago[dead]
- bb88 9mo agoNo, just blast the hell out of the ISM bands on which they operate. This seem certainly feasible for a military apparatus the size of the US.
- 9mo ago
- monkaiju 9mo ago[flagged]
- FridayoLeary 9mo ago[flagged]
- monkaiju 9mo agoWho am i scoring a cheap shot on? ICE?
- FridayoLeary 9mo agoCan you expand on that? I'm from a developing country and we're very worried about what's going on in America. Is the situation really as bad as Iran?
- macintux 9mo agoOur situation has disturbing echoes, but thankfully thousands of protesters haven't yet been murdered here. The death toll, especially of non-citizens, is piling up however.
- idiotsecant 9mo agoNo. It's nowhere near Iran, but it's bad by typical US standards.
- 1over137 9mo ago"domestic"? That could be anywhere, what do you mean?
- monkaiju 9mo agoI am in the US but I think the statement applies for >70% of the earth. China, Europe, the UK (big time), India, etc. Maybe not so bad in like, Japan -_(--)_-
- TacticalCoder 9mo ago[flagged]
- FridayoLeary 9mo agoI'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?
- jayd16 9mo agohttps://briarproject.org/how-it-works/ https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/ Looks like clients re-host posts to their friends in a p2p fashion.
- FridayoLeary 9mo agoThanks. Basically it depends on c travelling to another town. Also taking the risk of being caught with the content on it's phone. It looks like a great app and every little helps but hardly a game changer, unless i'm underestimating how bad it is in Iran? If it works via tor it's probably also slow, but that's a small price to pay for not relying on a central server for people with legitimate concerns or problems with connecting.
- aaravchen 9mo agoI suspect use cases are more likely community organizing and info sharing. It supports forums and private groups that are E2EE, and "blog" posts that can include RSS reblogging. The forums and private groups do bidirectional syncing and merging of all updates with anyone in the forum/group, so that gives you the equivalent of near-infinite multihop among trusted peers for large forums/groups. And it means every person has a complete copy, so it's nearly impossible to find all copies to censor it. With the blogging of reblogged RSS feeds, you can even have people acting like news carriers for viral-ike person-to-person information transfer as well. Even if that does require a little more manual curation by the "transmission vectors" than forum/group posts. Remember too that when things get bad enough people become ready to give up thier lives if necessary, and this may just be a way to reduce (but not eliminate) the need to actually sacrifice thier life for their cause. Large groups of people may collectively believe it's worth being individually captured and imprisoned or murdered to ensure the larger group is aware of what's happening.
- SoulMan 9mo agoWhat about Jack Dorsey's Bitchat . Could be useful in india (especially Kashmir) where govt shut down internet during protest
- stanislavb 9mo agoBitchat seems like a good solution. It will be even more effective once Bluetooth 6 becomes more widespread in a year or two.
- cboyardee 9mo agoI'm not sure so many Iranians have $1000 iphones to use hipster bitchat; cheaper android clients are more the norm.
- 2Gkashmiri 9mo agoDude. Back in 2014 when briar or something similar came up, we found the app.needed to signed in "online" first then it could be used offline. There were apps used in 2019 but it wasnt enough. The government "banned" 14 appps including element "because use by terrorists" meant anyone using element after the ban got a loud knock on the door by the stazi with 100-300 personnel, fully ready to engage in battle. Have seen horror stories. They used isp data to locate homes where element was used and then staked them out and made a big show of attacking at night. Then the usual. Phones are confiscated and literal spyware installed.
- dasyud 9mo ago
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- zelphirkalt 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoA 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 9mo agoBriar 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 9mo agoI 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
- hhh 9mo agoYou can just airdrop iOS apps to people. I don’t think the recipient needs network connectivity to receive it.
- 9mo ago
- dash2 9mo agoIs this actually true? Is anyone in Iran using Briar?
- shevy-java 9mo agoJust the layout seems so awful. As if noboy ever optimised this for real people.
- IshKebab 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoYeah, 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.
- pamcake 9mo agoPresumably OP is, at least.
- vegabook 9mo ago>> "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/ https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/
- upofadown 9mo agoThis seems like a fairly reasonable assumption for the Briar case. An adversary would have to get a user accept a Briar link in error. Contrast with things like Signal[1] that base their trust on phone numbers. Note that Briar groups are controlled by one moderator. Other participants of the group can not add members. Note also that Briar has the concept of introductions. So it is easy to avoid making the sort of identity errors commonly made by other schemes. [1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg
- syntaxing 9mo agoWhoa, 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
- DANmode 9mo agoBoo, native apps.
- Dylan16807 9mo agoIf it's not native then we need to give powerful Bluetooth capabilities to web pages which isn't very good.
- DANmode 9mo agoPeople said the same thing about allowing the browser to trigger the microphone and the camera. Use sane browser and or OS inherited permissions, and sane permission-promoting and gating, and it’s a non-issue. (Have you seen the prompts for Location, Microphone, WebUSB, and other “scary” features in the browser? There’s really not much room for misinterpretation!)
- master-lincoln 9mo agoI don't know why you think it's not good, but it seems it will happen: https://webbluetoothcg.github.io/web-bluetooth/#introduction https://webbluetoothcg.github.io/web-bluetooth/#introduction
- DANmode 9mo agoRight. Downvote all you want (native app developers, is that you? <3), the web is here, has been here, and will continue to flourish. > This specification takes several approaches to make such attacks more difficult: > Pairing individual devices instead of device classes requires at least a user action before a device can be exploited.
- notepad0x90 9mo agoDoes 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 9mo agoNo 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).
- darubedarob 9mo ago[dead]
- us321 9mo ago> 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?
- goda90 9mo agoJodel is a successor to yik-yak.
- shevy-java 9mo agoJust the default web-layout shown here is ... awful. How can people use that? That design is like 1990 ... but worse.
- bawolff 9mo agoWhat's wrong with it? I guess too many links at the beginning, but other than that it looks like your average website, just RTL.
- aaravchen 9mo agoIt's a manual for setup (in Farsi, you can click to other languages) that needs to be as accessible as possible to the least technology a literate people in the world as well as the ultra techy. Often people that have extremely limited data connection or no data connection as well. It has to be as simple as possible, and as clear as possible. Check the main landing page and you can see it's a relatively modern site, they just gave a very restricted target audience the manual needs to be available for.
- master-lincoln 9mo agoHow could people in 1990 use their stuff? They just did. Design is not so important for getting information across
- wolvoleo 9mo agoI 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.
- gh02t 9mo agoMeshtastic also struggles with high density and high traffic networks. Some modifications can be made to work better, but with the default settings it really grinds to a halt, and modifying the settings to be better suited requires some expertise and foresight. It works amazingly in off grid, relatively sparse networks, but it's got some major limitations.
- wolvoleo 9mo agoYeah I always wonder with these mobile ever changing mesh networks: how do they prevent messages from aimlessly looping around the network? With all the mobile devices they're too dynamic to make routing tables and broadcasting everything leads to network saturation really quickly. You could give them a very short TTL but then the reliability will suffer a lot.
- zoobab 9mo agoYou need 2 kind of networks: one stable with fixed nodes, with very low refresh rates of the routes, and another one for mobile nodes.
- linsomniac 9mo agoMeshtastic has a TTL of up to 7 and (from what I've been able to understand) uses flood routing largely. In Northern Colorado (where I'm at) we don't have a particularly dense mesh, but are turning down from 7 because of congestion. Meshcore seems to (I'm still learning on this) use a TTL of 64 and flood to find a route to a destination, then uses source routing for future packets, reverting to flooding again if that path fails (say a mobile repeater moves out of range).
- KnuthIsGod 9mo agoMinneapolis needs this now.
- jedahan 9mo agoWhen 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.
- btbuildem 9mo agoTake 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 https://polymarket.com/event/us-civil-war-before-2027
- darubedarob 9mo agoAll my life ive heard this, yelled at me by deeply anti democratic anti socials. People voted for trumps policies. Again, yes even after jan 6. Better luck next time, but for 4 years this is what they ordered. ICE going after fraud and illegals. Voted for. Closed borders. Voted for. Isolationist imperialism and a end of the western free trade world order.Voted for. A loose Canon. Voted for. A screeching social priest caste driven ou the door. Voted for. The people have spoken and the reject progressive policies (more accurately they dont care, but reject the package it comes in). Se la vi. Trump has a ton of work todo before he reaches the starting point of the mullahs. 12000 dead in 3 days. Thats ice shooting 8 people trying to run them over every day. Politics has not platform here, including rejected by the masses cosplay revolutionaries hijacking real disasters. Do something good, help iranian civilization recover.
- mrtesthah 9mo agoPeople don't get to vote to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.
- ChocolateGod 9mo agoIf they're in the country illegally are they citizens?
- jasonjayr 9mo agoThat's an easy one. They're people, and still have rights. That's non-negotiable.
- senectus1 9mo agoI 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.
- aaravchen 9mo agoBriar mentions "mailboxes", where you can stick up collectors wherever you want. It's not as nice as repeaters that would build a multihop mesh network for you, but one advantage of not doing multihop is that you get at least initial insecure identification before any identifiable secure communication is attempted so even if the Military Police are watching you, they won't be able to tell you even have Briar unless they can spoof a device for someone you have as a contact and have a waiting message for (or the BLE device ID of one of your mailbox devices). Those aren't hard to spoof, but learning what they are can be more difficult than if you're broadcasting to anyone that will listen like multihop requires.
- rolandog 9mo agoWould ssb (secure scuttlebutt) with Yubikeys have a similar usecase? [0] [0]: https://opencollective.com/secure-scuttlebutt-consortium/updates/scuttleverse-newsletter-18-winter-edition https://opencollective.com/secure-scuttlebutt-consortium/upd...
- hindustanuday 9mo ago[dead]
- emptysongglass 9mo agoI 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.
- giorgioz 9mo agoHow 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?
- giorgioz 9mo agoOkay I saw the link below: https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/ https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/ So it seems it's more effective for blog posts because everyone is sharing the same blog post. I'm not sure what happens with direct messages.
- assaddayinh 9mo agoYou could route by annonimized habbit. Knows a social construct called market every day at 8:00, means i can route via the social constructs permanent residents, e.g. a trader, who stores it and is closer onion of habbits wise to the goal. He knows a social organism called bus7 who is composed of one permanent changing on daily basis, many transient but always by habbit part of that moving org. These drive by a home router who knows the family, recipients he sees every day. If you are patient you can route via habbits of social organisms. Takes half a day of wait and burst hop to get there though. No idea how to annonymise that routing. No idea how to handles one offs like tourist travels for data smuggling.
- redbell 9mo ago> 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 :)
- agnishom 9mo agoThis 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.
- 0xEF 9mo agoBut 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.
- elAhmo 9mo agoGiven 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.
- aduwah 9mo agoWhen did CF do this?
- cirelli94 9mo agoA week ago. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/cloudflare-may-pull-servers-out-of-italy-over-order-that-it-block-pirate-sites/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/cloudflare-may-p...
- countWSS 9mo agoHow much of internet can Cloudflare turn off in italy? They picked a fight with the cloud gorilla.
- jonasdegendt 9mo agoAbout 20% of sites, and there’s some big services behind Cloudflare so that percentage doesn’t even tell the full story.
- miroljub 9mo agoToo bad Briar and similar anonymous E2E messengers would be banned soon across the EU and UK.
- joe_mamba 9mo ago"We can't have the tax-cattle talking behind our backs about our failures and corruption that fucked up their living standards .. err I mean think of what the far right, pedos and russian spies could do with anonymous messaging, so we'll be banning it to protect our democratic values." - EU & UK leadership
- myrmidon 9mo agoI completely disagree with your base premise: I think EU leadership (national + EU) performed on an average level over the last three decades, and the EU as an insitution did even better than I would've expected given its limitations/constraints. If you could pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years?
- joe_mamba 9mo agoI actually don't think they performed very well. I just look at the EU GDP that's now half the size of the US compared to bigger than US 20 years ago, and at standard of living of middle working class, which has slowly been going downhill in the last 15-20 or so years for a lot of people(worst of all southern europe) and at a more accelerated rate in the last 3-4 years. All due to their decisions and policies and I hold them accountable for it. Like you don't need the unfair power of hindsight to know that tying your energy independence to Russia (your military adversary and the reason NATO exists) was a bad decision back then, or that staying dependent on US military and tech was bad for sovereignty, or that pursuing unrealistic climate goals was a bad decision, or that opening your borders to millions of unvetted people from unstable regions with high crime and low education was bad, since many people have been saying all these were bad decisions 20 years ago but they were ignored because the gravy train was still running and the EU political elite never game much of a shit about what the peasants though anyway. And now that the gravy train has stopped and the piper has to be paid, our leadership class are trying to gaslight us and deflect the blame for their recklessness at best or just suppress voices of dissent at worst. And even if we were to assume they performed super well, that doesn't mean I should now swallow tyrannical laws designed to suppress our freedoms while they give themselves exemptions, just because different people from a different era who are no longer in power made some good decisions 30 years ago under the same umbrella of the EU since the EU-EC of today as an org is a vastly different beast than the EU of 30 years ago. There wasn't even a common currency and central bank 30 years ago.
- torginus 9mo agoIsn'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 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoI 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 9mo agoWhy 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592912) This should be reported (to dang).
- freakynit 9mo agoAggregated discussions for easier reading: https://hn-discussions.top/briar-mesh-iran/ https://hn-discussions.top/briar-mesh-iran/
- ts0711 9mo agostill very risky
- dominojab 9mo ago[dead]
- john61 9mo agoA relevant talk from 39C3 Congress regarding Russia: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-coding-dissent-art-technology-and-tactical-media https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-coding-dissent-art-technology-an... Coding Dissent: Art, Technology, and Tactical Media This presentation examines artistic practices that engage with sociotechnical systems through tactical interventions. The talk proposes art as a form of infrastructural critique and counter-technology. It also introduces a forthcoming HackLab designed to foster collaborative development of open-source tools addressing digital authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, propaganda infrastructures, and ideological warfare. In this talk, media artist and curator Helena Nikonole presents her work at the intersection of art, activism, and tactical technology — including interventions into surveillance systems, wearable mesh networks for off-grid communication, and AI-generated propaganda sabotage. Featuring projects like Antiwar AI, the 868labs initiative, and the curatorial project Digital Resistance, the talk explores how art can do more than just comment on sociotechnical systems — it can interfere, infiltrate, and subvert them. This is about prototypes as politics, networked interventions as civil disobedience, and media hacks as tools of strategic refusal. The talk asks: what happens when art stops decorating crisis and starts debugging it? The talk will also introduce an upcoming HackLab initiative — a collaboration-in-progress that brings together artists, hackers, and activists to develop open-source tools for disruption, resilience, and collective agency — and invites potential collaborators to get involved.
- thisislife2 9mo agoMobile 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/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-phone-to-make-free-calls-without-sim-card https://www.intelregion.com/tech/how-to-use-your-techno-phon... . (Personally, I don't think any government is going to allow this.)
- stavros 9mo ago> (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 9mo agoAs 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 9mo agoIsn't it well known that the "protestors are foreign agents" line is just extremely transparent bs that governments use to silence dissent?
- lazide 9mo agoa great many countries ban satellite phones too.
- hopelite 9mo agoSo this is a sabotage agency operation? I am old enough to remember the "Arab spring" "intelligence" operation. Are people really naive about these types of Sabotage Agency supported projects and entities, regardless of the interest and curiosity about the technology? And no, I know these things as a matter of fact for reasons that will need to remain my own.
- rexpop 9mo agoBriar is a peer-to-peer encrypted messaging app that has received funding from multiple organizations, including the Open Technology Fund (OTF), which is financed by the U.S. government through the Agency for Global Media [1][2][3]. The OTF was established in 2012 as a program of Radio Free Asia, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, and became independent in 2019 while continuing to receive congressional appropriations [3]. ## Government Funding and Transparency Briar openly discloses its funding sources on its website, listing support from the Open Technology Fund alongside other organizations like NLnet Foundation, the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, Access Now, Internews, and others [1][4]. This transparency is notable—the project does not hide its connection to U.S. government-funded initiatives. The OTF itself supports numerous widely-used internet freedom tools, with over two billion people worldwide reportedly using OTF-supported technologies daily [5]. ## The Security Trade-off Question Your skepticism about government-funded privacy tools reflects a legitimate concern that civil liberties advocates have raised [6]. However, Briar's open-source nature allows independent security audits—it was examined by Cure53 in 2017 and received positive assessments [2]. The project was developed by researchers and activists including Michael Rogers and Eleanor Saitta starting in 2011, with stated motivations around supporting freedom of expression and protecting activists and journalists [4][7]. ## Technical Design vs. Political Origins The technical architecture of Briar—peer-to-peer encryption, mesh networking capability, and operation over Tor—represents genuine attempts to resist surveillance regardless of funding sources [8]. Unlike some mesh networking apps that researchers have found vulnerable (such as Bridgefy, which had serious security flaws allowing impersonation and surveillance), Briar's design philosophy emphasizes decentralization [9]. The question becomes whether government funding necessarily compromises such tools, or whether open-source transparency and independent auditing can mitigate such concerns. Citations: [1] About - Briar https://briarproject.org/about/ https://briarproject.org/about/ [2] Briar (software) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briar_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briar_(software) [3] Open Technology Fund - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund [4] About Us - Briar https://briarproject.org/about-us/ https://briarproject.org/about-us/ [5] Trump's Reshuffling of US Foreign Aid Endangers Internet Freedom https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/trumps-reshuffling-us-foreign-aid-endangers-internet-freedom https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/trumps-reshuffling... [6] US: Fight Continues for Open Technology Fund's Independence https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/08/20/us-fight-continues-open-technology-funds-independence https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/08/20/us-fight-continues-open-... [7] 3 - Concealing for Freedom – Mattering Press https://www.matteringpress.org/books/concealing-for-freedom/read/concealing-for-freedom-12.xhtml https://www.matteringpress.org/books/concealing-for-freedom/... [8] Briar Desktop got another round of funding https://briarproject.org/news/2022-briar-desktop-nlnet-funding/ https://briarproject.org/news/2022-briar-desktop-nlnet-fundi... [9] The privacy perils of using a mesh network – and why we urgently ... https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/the-privacy-perils-of-using-a-mesh-network-and-why-we-urgently-need-one-that-is-robust-and-open-source/ https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/the-privacy-peril... [10] Briar - NLnet Foundation https://nlnet.nl/project/Briar/ https://nlnet.nl/project/Briar/ [11] Briar Darknet Messenger Client For Android Secures Chats With ... https://hothardware.com/news/briar-darknet-messenger-client-for-android-secures-chats-with-direct-peer-to-peer-connectivity https://hothardware.com/news/briar-darknet-messenger-client-... [12] History · changelog · Wiki - briar https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/changelog/history https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/changelog/... [13] Mesh Networks Won't Fix Internet Security - CITP Blog https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2014/04/22/mesh-networks-wont-fix-internet-security/ https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2014/04/22/mesh-networks-won... [14] Congressional Remit | OTF - Open Tech Fund https://www.opentech.fund/about/congressional-remit/ https://www.opentech.fund/about/congressional-remit/ [15] Radio Free Asia | OTF - Open Tech Fund https://www.opentech.fund/security-safety-audits/radio-free-asia/ https://www.opentech.fund/security-safety-audits/radio-free-... [16] RCFP supports Radio Free Asia's lawsuit challenging funding cuts https://www.rcfp.org/briefs-comments/radio-free-asia-v-united-states/ https://www.rcfp.org/briefs-comments/radio-free-asia-v-unite... [17] The Trouble With the Open Technology Fund https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/the-trouble-with-the-open-technology-fund https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/the-trouble-with-... [18] Trump restores funding for Radio Free Europe, Tech Fund - The Hill https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5217360-trump-admin-radio-free-europe-open-technology-fund-voice-of-america/ https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5217360-trump-a... [19] Trump administration under pressure to restore funding to groups ... https://kesq.com/news/national-politics/cnn-us-politics/2026/01/12/trump-administration-under-pressure-to-restore-funding-to-groups-supporting-internet-freedom-in-iran/ https://kesq.com/news/national-politics/cnn-us-politics/2026... [20] Supporting the Open Technology Fund https://www.thefai.org/posts/supporting-the-open-technology-fund https://www.thefai.org/posts/supporting-the-open-technology-...
- Poudlardo 9mo agoFor iOS users, "Bitchat" from Jack Dorsey is pretty similar. I'm not sure whether it syncs with Wi-Fi though, only Bluetooth
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo agoCan anyone vouch what is most useful to the protestors that we can support? What's actually being used? What do they need for communication? Does anyone there actually use Briar? I worry that some of these things are well meaning but ultimately a waste of time like Elon's submarine doodad.
- nmaleki 9mo agoDuring 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 https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
- VikingCoder 9mo agoPlease, 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.
- Refefer 9mo agoPragmatically, 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 9mo agoI'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.
- miduil 9mo agowhat's still missing is encrypted stealth radio communication. something that uses a wide range of frequencies, low power with big timing windows to be indistinguishable from other things happening on air. It should look like noise and regular signals (like non-decryptable LTE packages combined with noise that could also as well just come from a power-supply)
- The_President 9mo agoQuantum may surpass this, as legal restrictions exist for general public broadcasting encrypted radio. What you describe probably already exists in implementation in use cases where it is legally protected and judiciously implemented.
- einpoklum 9mo agoIt's important for mobile apps to be available outside of Google and Apple's app store, so kudos to briar for being on F-Droid as well: https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/ . In fact, (smartphone) software distribution over ad-hoc networks is itself of some importance.
- DefundPortland 9mo ago[flagged]
- Moldoteck 9mo agoEhhhh... To me Briar has great potential that is dwarfed by limitations... It's trying to be sort of like FireChat [1] but with less or subpar features... For real, someone should make a fire chat OSS project with some proprietary E2EE on top of the the OSS one based on Signal protocol. Maybe add some duress mode on top [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireChat