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.

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.

1: https://polymarket.com/event/us-civil-war-before-2027

Please, sell me a USB-C device that gives me mesh networking on my phone.

I'd like a Small, Medium, and Large option. Ideally, each would have a passthrough charger, so I can charge my phone even with the device plugged in to my phone.

The Small is just the device, and I guess it would drain my phone's battery. The Large would have a 25,000mAh and be just small enough to legally take on an airplane in the United Stated. The Medium has a smallish battery, maybe?

Give me what you can. Wifi. FRS. CB. LoRa. The ability to switch between those? The ability to broadcast across all of those in some spread-spectrum broadcast?

Make me use your special App that I have to install on my phone.

Make the device also act like a storage device. The Small has usb storage big enough to store the APK for the app for me to side-load.

The Large has enough usb storage for, I dunno, all of Wikipedia and medical texts, and open maps, and a few other things, and the Kiwix app to side-load.

Make the Medium and the Large also be able to be a hotspot, for other people nearby to be able to connect to, so they can download the app and browse Kiwix, and send messages through my phone? Or just let my phone be that hotspot, I guess?

And most importantly, give me messaging. Secure point-to-point, exchanging keys by touching our phones together, or using QR codes, or something.

Or broadcast messaging. With configurable repeating.

And then make the Base Station version of this, which has solar panels, and a battery, and it's just a repeater. You install and forget.

If you're only going to build one thing, build the Small version I described. Next, I guess, would be the Base Station. Next would be the Large.

Where is the Kickstarter? I'll back it right now. I'll buy 2 Large, 6 Small, and 4 Base Stations. Right now.

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?

> 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 :)

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.

Mobile phones with "Mesh networking" built-in have now started to appear in the market. E.g Tecno Spark Go 3 - https://www.tecno-mobile.com/phones/product-detail/product/s... - recently launched in India has a feature called Freelink 2 that claims to connect with other Tecno phones to provide "connectivity" without wifi or cellular network up to a range of 1.5 kms. More here: https://www.intelregion.com/tech/how-to-use-your-techno-phon... .

(Personally, I don't think any government is going to allow this.)

During a hackathon 7 years ago, a team and I set out to make a decentralized blockchain messaging platform over Bluetooth Low Energy. It was intended for situations when the internet was out. We didn't finish the technicals in 24hr, but it was a fun challenge. I looked it up and there are a lot of solutions now, here is the top one on search: https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat

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.

Is this actually true? Is anyone in Iran using Briar?

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.

>> "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/

Would ssb (secure scuttlebutt) with Yubikeys have a similar usecase? [0]

[0]: https://opencollective.com/secure-scuttlebutt-consortium/upd...

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.

What about Jack Dorsey's Bitchat . Could be useful in india (especially Kashmir) where govt shut down internet during protest

Too bad Briar and similar anonymous E2E messengers would be banned soon across the EU and UK.

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!!

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

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.

I'm curious about the iOS situation

You 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.

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?

A relevant talk from 39C3 Congress regarding Russia:

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.

what'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)

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?

Minneapolis needs this now.

For iOS users, "Bitchat" from Jack Dorsey is pretty similar. I'm not sure whether it syncs with Wi-Fi though, only Bluetooth

Just the default web-layout shown here is ... awful. How can people use that? That design is like 1990 ... but worse.

Ehhhh... 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

Can 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.

still very risky

It'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/ .

In fact, (smartphone) software distribution over ad-hoc networks is itself of some importance.

So 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.

Perhaps Americans should start preparing with Meshtastic / Meshcore, just in case....... ..,..the Emperor seems hellbent on bringing martial law into effect.

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Good

Aggregated discussions for easier reading: https://hn-discussions.top/briar-mesh-iran/