Briar 1.4 – Offline sharing, message transfer via SD cards and USB sticks

Presumably sd cards are safer to connect rather than unsolicited usb drives.

Peer to Peer data transfer via computing devices is something I wish was be more mainstream. It's not, because the commercial cloud storage mafia has invested heavily in telling people that your data has to traverse their toll roads first.

I recently discovered Syncthing Fork which was customizable in a way Google Drive or alternatives were not. And it's entirely P2P, transmitting files between my laptop and my phone, in either direction pretty seamlessly.

I'm now interested in learning about Bluetooth transfer as well as it works without Internet access. I've heard transfer speeds are slow though.

I generally lean more toward “i like that iOS is locked down”, but this offline-app-sharing feature is one of the best arguments I’ve seen against that. That said, either I’d want peer-to-peer-shared apps to be signed by an entity I already highly trust, or that the sandbox containing the app was extremely solid (and preferably both of course).

Safer how? On PC at least, SD card readers, both internal and external are attached via the USB protocol and are seen by the OS like mass storage devices, just like USB drives, including being bootable, so whatever malware you have for a specific PC target, the payload should basically work the same from SD cards as via USB drives.

OMG yes, being able to share jpgs, mp3s and even java apps from one phone to another via Irda then Bluetooth felt mind blowing in the early to mid 00's, considering that most people didn't have internet on their phones (2G/3G data plans were eye-watering at the time, hell, even texts were expensive) but their phones had this short range wireless sort-of-WiFi-ish capability on their phones for sending and receiving files from other phones or even desktop computers. For FREE!

I remember I would spend hours after school in Photoshop to turn an image I like into the perfect wallpaper for my phone, tuning the resolution and color gradient until it looked perfect on the phone's low resolution display, and using bluetooth to upload them.

Same with mp3s. Due to the low amount of storage on the early phones amounting to only a few MB, I spent a lot of time experimenting with aggressive compression to make sure I could fit as many songs on my phone as possible. Therefore they sounded pretty bad on the cheapo wired hands-free earphones that came in the box, but I didn't care or didn't bother to notice as I now had my favorite bands always with me in my pocket before MP3 players became affordable and I would just get lost in the lyrics on the bus to school.

On an old Symbian Nokia I had, once you paired it to your PC via Bluetooth, you could send and read SMS texts off it directly from windows just like I can now use Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp desktop clients. I didn't think this would be so mind blowing until I found that Android had no similar functionality built in at the time for SMS on desktop via Bluetooth (and still doesn't AFAIK) which really bummed me out that such a powerful OS with such powerful HW was so lacking in features compared to the dying Symbian.

Another fun anecdote, digging around my parents house this year, I found my ancient 2003 vintage NEC phone which had some VGA photos I took with it of me and my old school mates on it. When I saw that I could pull the photos off it in a pinch to my modern Android phone using Bluetooth, and immediately share them online with my former schoolmates from the photos, it was pretty mind blowing to say the least. Bluetooth gets a lot of hate today for connectivity issues some people face, but seeing it work reliably between vastly different devices almost 20 years apart is an amazing feat in my book and should at least deserve some praise.