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).
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.
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.
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"
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
>> "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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
"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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Perhaps Americans should start preparing with Meshtastic / Meshcore, just in case.......
..,..the Emperor seems hellbent on bringing martial law into effect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 -_(--)_-
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?
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).
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
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.
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.
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 :)
[0]: https://opencollective.com/secure-scuttlebutt-consortium/upd...
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.
After discovering the amount of pain involved with that API, I quickly discarded the idea though
This assumption seems risky.
[1] https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/
I doubt this will actually work though except in the densest city.
Edit: Boo, no iOS app
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!)
If you dont care about those things, I'd look at Scuttlebutt (SSB) protocol apps instead.
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.
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.
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...
https://www.crazyengineers.com/threads/netra-is-indian-gover...
Also, for something like this you don't want a platform that requires you to essentially use the App Store and nothing else.
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.
I guess too many links at the beginning, but other than that it looks like your average website, just RTL.
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.
Looks like clients re-host posts to their friends in a p2p fashion.
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.
These are great tools in American toolkit if it wants to do a regime change in other countries. Their effectiveness within America are questionable.
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!".
It'll blend in with background radiation from home routers.
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.
I was under the opposite impression, that meshtastic's whole problem is that it doesn't scale well at all.
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
Directional radios would still win out on p2p links.
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.
Great way to waste resources though.
Why don't the people in Minnesota go open carry and let ICE agents think twice before drawing their weapons on people?
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.
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.
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?
If you compromise sending or receiving node then sure, of course.
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
The death toll, especially of non-citizens, is piling up however.