Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark
briarproject.org388 points by us321 16 hours ago
388 points by us321 16 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> we couldnt convince our friends and family to switch over.
What was the deal breaker for them?
The ubiquity (network effect) and ‘convenience’ of other apps. This was more than a decade ago and our devices were an extra thing you needed to carry (travel router).
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.
Not submitting to state censorship requests is not a great example of what is the problem with Big Tech as discussed here.
When did CF do this?
How much of internet can Cloudflare turn off in italy? They picked a fight with the cloud gorilla.
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.
Not really, you are framing this issue and dropping key words to make it political, are you a bot farming for engagement, please stop.
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?
Except people also forget the part state police, and collaborators, play on running such meshes.
It isn't without peril for the admins and users.
How is Ukraine doing this? I suppose Starlink isn't available to everyone.
Ukraine is being assisted by NATO and commercial corporations based in US and Europe, that would not be a DIY start-from-nearly-nothing example which would be relevant to popular protest movements.
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.
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.
> 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 ?
> Am I missing something obvious?
The low volume places a rather disappointing cap on your profits.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Not wrong, but don't forget there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here, though admittedly some parties have more affiliated with them than others. It's not a stretch to assume should fighting in the streets escalate beyond ICE shenanigans that larger armies would not quickly congeal from the pocket groups and individuals.
> there are many militias with itchy trigger fingers all over the political spectrum here
That’s still not a civil war in the conventional sense. If it gets entrenched and coördinated it could be come something we’ll debate, e.g. the Troubles. But insurgency != civil war.
I believe there are plenty of weapons around in the US in general and the police and military is also not 100% behind Trump and MAGA.
But if there is a civil war, what were you going to be able to do with the USD anyway?
Interesting - I found this quantitative historical study [0] showing that while a civil war does significantly increase the likelihood of inflation, only 36% of countries analyzed which had a civil war between 1975-1999 ended up in an inflationary crisis. And with the USD having such a strong foundation, I would expect the risk to be significantly lower.
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
2020 was a single accidental case as the result of a poor system. Many people even from within the system on all levels agreed something went wrong and apologized. Today's situation is different, as the whole system is weaponized on purpose from one specific layer/group against the other layers/groups of the system. It's an internal conflict within the system itself, and a prime-example for justifying a civil war. And at the time Trump was still on the leash of his own adminstration.
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.
If there is really a civil war, won't these frequencies just get jammed?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
To save others the search: Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters"
"Colporter" is not an especially fancy word, it just means "to peddle" in English.
> look up the term in French
Wasn't that also called SneakerNet, back in the time? We used it in western Europe as well (both term and distribution method)
Also, amusingly, France is most definitively in Western Europe, so I’m a bit confused about GP’s link between Eastern Europe and “go look up this French word”.
Why would anti-fascists jam EMS frequencies?
To prevent coordinated police response during their assaults on police with bricks, frozen water bottles, and fireworks during so-called “direct action” while dressed in paramilitary “black bloc”. You know, like any other violent militia.
Also, Antifa are against fascism the way the DPRK is for democracy.
Is market manipulation or insider trading even regulated on polymarket?
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?
All 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.
People don't get to vote to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.
[flagged]
Perhaps heed the HN guidelines and avoid obviously false hyperbole.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kelly
seems better qualified to fight than, for example, the current day drinking daytime host self styled as head of "Dep. of War".
> the left cant even fight
New York and California have enough GDP, weapons factories and in-state fissile materials to make a civil war at least interesting. (They’re also both primed to land foreign armies on their shores and air strips).
In repression, guns and muscles count. In a civil war, they’re as effective as Maduro’s guard was.
Army of Karen in the front line would be funny
I'm sure the ICE agents swapping head-shot porn on their phones find that hilarious.
In history mothers against authoritarian rule, against the draft, raising awareness, etc. have been suprisingly effective at slowing violence, attracting press coverage, kick starting civil rights, etc.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_Plaza_de_Mayo
* https://libcom.org/article/1965-72-sos-australian-mothers-re...
* https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2025/0813/israel...
Not every soldier, not every weekend warrior LEO LARPing, is comfortable shooting women in the face.
????
it was self defense, its been debunk by countless video of different perspective that the officer is in fact got run over
maybe just maybe dont try to protect somalian pirates
> the officer is in fact got run over
The officer that shot through the front window, stepped to the side, shot twice more through the side window while on two feet, and stomped away unharmed muttering "fucking bitch" .. that officer?
Seems unlikely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viGhZkrbXjY
she literally try to run over law enforcement, its unfortunate situation but federal officer didn't doing wrong in here
Are you saying there is a vacuum? Because vacuum usually get filled with crazy militants
> 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 :)
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.
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?
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).
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.
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!
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.
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
You can just airdrop iOS apps to people. I don’t think the recipient needs network connectivity to receive it.
Too bad Briar and similar anonymous E2E messengers would be banned soon across the EU and UK.
"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
I 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?
I 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.
Best to download the *.apks now so you can help others sideload them and stay safe.
Any source for this?
> Any source for this?
Ever heard about Chat Control and CSAM?
Chat Control and CSAM will not ban E2E messengers
Mandatory client-side scanning of encrypted messages has been removed from the proposal following opposition from the European Parliament and several member states, preserving E2EE integrity
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...
Is this actually true? Is anyone in Iran using Briar?
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.
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.
Just the layout seems so awful. As if noboy ever optimised this for real people.
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.
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.
Meshtastic 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.
Yeah 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.
What about Jack Dorsey's Bitchat . Could be useful in india (especially Kashmir) where govt shut down internet during protest
Check the news from the past year. If you care about security or privacy, Bitchat doesn't actually have either according to !any independent security audits), so I'd stay away.
If you dont care about those things, I'd look at Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol apps instead.
Bitchat seems like a good solution. It will be even more effective once Bluetooth 6 becomes more widespread in a year or two.
Dude.
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.
That was Bridgefy that required initial online access to setup. Briar doesn't and never has.
Traceability of Briar users, if not the actual content, is certainly potentially worse than something like what Bitchat claims (don't use Bitchat it's provably not secure or private at all) with it's traffic obfuscation and multihop. However, the lack of multihop also makes it less promiscuous, so someone would have to be monitoring when you came in contact with the transfer source or destination, unlike multihop that just broadcasts to anyone so they can hopefully relay it.
that's why its difficult to trust these apps? i've been out of the game for years and i would rather be on the fence about the whole thing.
the problem i saw back in 2019 was adoption. it just happened suddenly and the scaremongering done by the government was top notch. literally any anti-government tweet or post was "deemed social media misuse", how dare you question the might of the great nation.
https://thewire.in/rights/kashmir-fir-vpn-social-media this is fresh "misuse".
what i am saying is, in that heated environment, no one wanted to be the one holding the short straw so this tech did not play out, simply out of personal safety.
few years ago we had clubhouse and https://kashmirlife.net/sleuths-silently-listen-to-clubhouse...
which someone like me knew "out of habit" so i didn't even try the app but people did and paid the price.
Wait really? Was this only in Kashmir? I've had Element on my laptop for years.
Why are people downvoting him? He's right (even though if his dream for "Azad" Kashmir came true, it would mean my family is Kishtwar would probably have to leave for Punjab or Himachal with only the clothes on their backs, but the current status quo means he might be detained indefinetly as well) - the DoT, Home Ministry, and State STFs have been rolling out fusions centers since the mid-2010s [0].
The rules are much more strict/draconian in JK [1]
[0] - https://www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/AdvNATGRIDCOT_151...
[1] - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/centre-blocks-14-mobi...
I'm not sure so many Iranians have $1000 iphones to use hipster bitchat; cheaper android clients are more the norm.
While bitchat was originally iOS only during release, they released the Android version shortly after https://bitchat.free/ (scroll down)
"Raliv, Tsaliv ya Galiv" didn't need the internet or fancy mesh networking - rabble-rousing Friday mosque-sessions were sufficient for ethnociding the native population over the course of many centuries.
still very risky
I'm curious about the iOS situation
I 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.
iOS is around 10%, Android around 90%. (https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/iran/%20)
Briar is available on Google Play for devices running Android.
Unfortunately, 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
Don’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.
Google 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.
I 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.
Seriously though, given all the NSA has done: Could the NSA launch a "beach head" inside Apple?
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?
Okay I saw the link below: 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.
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
It doesn't look likely that there will ever be an iOS app[1], unless Apple makes key changes in the way iOS works[2].
[1] https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#will-t...
You should definitely read the news about bitchat. It doesnt actually have basically any security or privacy from all the dozens of independent security audit findings. Jack even said it was vibe coded and never audited.
Boo, native apps.
If it's not native then we need to give powerful Bluetooth capabilities to web pages which isn't very good.
People 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!)
Minneapolis needs this now.
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.
It'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.
What's wrong with it?
I guess too many links at the beginning, but other than that it looks like your average website, just RTL.
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?
https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/
Looks like clients re-host posts to their friends in a p2p fashion.
Thanks. 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.
I 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.
Perhaps Americans should start preparing with Meshtastic / Meshcore, just in case....... ..,..the Emperor seems hellbent on bringing martial law into effect.
It seems very unlikely the US would take the approach of shutting down the internet to prevent communication. All the internet infrastructure is hardwired for US surveillance data collection, so it's already a perfect honeypot. Why shutdown your honey pot?
More likely to be useful in the US is communication that is actually private, secure, and not centralized, but the underlying communication channel if unlikely to be relevant. Signal for example would almost certainly have thier IP blocked in the area, or their servers taken down because their completely centralized and therefore easy to block. Realistically something that can leverage an adversarial network to implement mesh communication that can be obfuscated (so it's not easily detected and blocked) is more useful in the US.
Do you think the govt will not force Google to revoke developer certs once developer verification is in place to prevent sideloading or not order Google/Apple to forcibly uninstall them ?
These are great tools in American toolkit if it wants to do a regime change in other countries. Their effectiveness within America are questionable.
There are fully hardware based meshtastic devices: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/realizing-meshtastics...
The Government can't revoke the certs on those.
The government isn't going to hand to do that, that's already what Google's planning to do anyway. They'd just have to tell Google to take down certain apps so they're no longer on the Google "approved" list, which would deactivate them on your device during next network connection (like most Google "services" on Android, I'm sure these too would bypass the system VPN as well) as well as making them unavailable from the sole allowed download source. You know, like they did with ICE Block already.
The military can very easily find and eliminate repeaters very quickly and almost certainly would.
Then 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.
Here's a funny example of making it harder to find: https://youtu.be/W_F4rEaRduk?t=178
Triangulation is damn easy. If the US can put on bomb on a suspect satellite phone user back in the 2000's (and they did!), they can certainly send a bomb on that today.
Sat phones during the second gulf war (maybe even the first) became a liability. The transmission lit them up like a god damn beacon saying, "Bomb goes here!".
Triangulation, the math isn't the hard part. Where exactly on the continental United States are you proposing dropping ordinance? MOVE in 1985 was controversial even back then.
Good luck if your mesh network is on 2.4/5/6ghz.
It'll blend in with background radiation from home routers.
It can have challenges, but triangulation can be done with signals that have recognizable patterns or features -- even in a sea of other co-channel noise sources.
If you can observe the signal strength of your neighbor's home router while standing next to your own even if the signals differ in strength by some orders of magnitude (which is easy on Android; no idea bout iOS), then anyone else can also do the same.
>the more people who use it, the more robust and far-reaching and reliable it gets.
I was under the opposite impression, that meshtastic's whole problem is that it doesn't scale well at all.
Meshtastic uses naive flooding, which is fine for sparse networks (ie you and your three friends out hiking), but which doesn’t scale well at all.
I'm genuinely interested in learning more about the shortcomings of meshtastic if you have a link to share. Groups like the Anarchist Black Cross seem really supportive of the tech for disaster situations. Even Benn Jordan claimed it played an important role during the floods in NC
My understanding is that it relates to the flood routing in meshtastic. I haven't heard a real-world failure example, but another comment on this post mentioned defcon being a case (I don't know anything about that).
I did find this assessment:
https://www.disk91.com/2024/technology/lora/critical-analysi...
And here is Meshtastics explanation of the rationale behind 'managed flood routing':
https://meshtastic.org/blog/why-meshtastic-uses-managed-floo...
I think I first heard about the differences from Andy Kirby, one of the MeshCore creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNWf0Mh2fJw
The intervention part is an administrative problem the military isn't designed for. For the core mission of collecting intelligence, eliminating targets, and occupying land, the US has an unrivaled track record over the last 85 years.
You must have missed the S-tier op that went down January 3rd.
That was a single mission planned over months. We're talking about a continuous subjudagtion.
No, 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.
I'm sure everybody's going to stay on ISM bands to remain compliant with government regulations while being attacked by the government.
The economic impact of that would be massive re: business operational impact.
Directional radios would still win out on p2p links.
The interventions fail only after enormous slaughter, which people are understandably keen to not be subject to
Why would they bother? Super low bandwidth unencrypted communication they can triangulate if they really need to sounds like a perfect thing to let keep running and just monitor. Then you can triangulate just the "seditious" people who incriminate themselves.
I guess if you were relying on the meshtastic network as a backbone network replacement, which I'm not sure much of anyone is even currently setup for and I've heard isnt really feasible with the naive meshtastic toy implementation, you could be sending encrypted traffic. But then you have to have pre-shared encryption keys for participants and it will significantly lose it's usefulness for adding new adopters.
I don't think it's going to be military killing a Americans. As of now it more looks like federal government.
Nevertheless, sure, in the rural areas, but less so in the cities, reflections and bending of the waves make it much harder, and a single repeater with solar panel and battery could plausibly be made under $50.
A military won't be killing all Americans, just the ones it can label as "terrorists" to the people who elected them.
They are being made. I have a four node network already in my suburb. There is a software project that is written in Python that essentially turns lorawan nodes into BBSs similar to briar.
They're incredibly easy to build and even disguise as lawn ornaments as Benn Jordan showed in a recent video. When it costs us less money and time to build them than it costs the gov't to find/destroy them it's a worthy investment
At no time from 2001-2021 did the Taliban find themselves short on VHF repeaters. If one gets taken down, put up another one.
Maybe ham repeaters but when we are talking lorawan they will have a hell of a time taking the networks down that are already established. Just in my suburb we have more than 6000 nodes because of the helium network.
It would be futile. It's a big country full of 340,000,000 people.
Great way to waste resources though.
Isn't stopping abuses of the power of the military the reason for the 2nd Amendment?
Why don't the people in Minnesota go open carry and let ICE agents think twice before drawing their weapons on people?
Because the pro 2nd amendment people with "Don't tread on me" tattoos are going to "Tread on me harder, daddy!".
Renee Good was killed after dropping off her six-year-old child at school. I agree with you, but people like her have children and are not trying to die in the street just for looking at somebody the wrong way. And it's one thing to open carry, it's another thing to become a trained and confident marksmen.
And as someone who has had half a dozen police officers simultaneously pointing guns at my head, mistaking me for someone else in public, once you're in that situation, escalation is only going to lead to death. Out here, police shoot you if your hand goes anywhere near your waist.
>Isn't stopping abuses of the power of the military the reason for the 2nd Amendment?
It was for establishing well ordered militias. They could be used to help defend the country in a time of war.
> Why don't the people in Minnesota go open carry and let ICE agents think twice before drawing their weapons on people?
Most of the demonstrators believe that "the pen is mightier than the sword", and non-violence is the way to achieve political means. (Ghandi, MLK jr.)
When the peace-niks start amassing guns, that's when you have a tipping point in this country.
What's the definition of a well-ordered militia? A bunch of farmers that go shooting together?
Alexander Hamilton explains his definition of what "well-regulated" is - and the purpose of a citizen militia - in contrast to the standing army in the Federalist Papers, No. 29. Most of the idea has become much more federalized than intended with the National Guard, but it has long since been misused for its intended purpose.
A bunch of farmers that go shooting drunk. /s
Seriously though, everyone back in the 1700s realized that all Americans were American. I'm not sure that's true any more.
I think the most you can say is that they recognized that many male propertied white protestant Americans are American. Maybe some more qualifiers are necessary.
> Seriously though, everyone back in the 1700s realized that all Americans were American. I'm not sure that's true any more.
What was an American in the 1700s? A person born in America?
Repeater coupled with [autonomous] drone to change [hard-to-get-to rooftop, treetop and the likes] location every 10 minutes like in a combat zone.
Meshtastic is both extremely range limited and trivial to DDOS. It's a fun toy protocol but it's not resistant to nation state disruption at all.
It's only line-of-sight, but isn't the range 10s-100s of kilometres in open areas? Some repeaters on hills/mountains etc. could connect large areas potentially.
Nope. Uses only one frequency that quickly gets crowded and if you are in urban areas you'd be lucky to get more than 200 meters.
It is a toy. A cheap Quangsheng/Baofeng for 20 euros can reach a few kilometers in urban area, use multiple frequencies and go for 100 kilometers easily on LoS. They even reach Australia from Europe when using a wire antenna large enough.
It's trivially jammable, as evidenced by the network not working at popular events such as Defcon with default firmware settings.
I looked a bit into meshtastic and was told that if a node was physically compromised then messages could be intercepted. That cant be right, right?
From what I understand no, the relay node has no access to the messages.
If you compromise sending or receiving node then sure, of course.
Why bother? Just jam the fucking hell out of it. Most critical infrastructure is not on the ISM bands.
A lot of things are.
You could theoretically even shut down airplane printers in the cockpit if the jamming was strong enough.
You'd be surprised the things that are tied to ism wifi and bluetooth
There was a well known crypto weakness, CVE-2025-52464, that allowed man in the middle decryption of meshtastic traffic. It was fixed by a firmware patch that improved crypto discipline.
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.
Briar 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.
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"domestic"? That could be anywhere, what do you mean?
I 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 -_(--)_-
Can 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?
Our 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.
Good
Aggregated discussions for easier reading: https://hn-discussions.top/briar-mesh-iran/