Briar: Peer-to-Peer Encrypted Messaging

Post by Tijdreiziger » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 4:15 AM UTC

KennyBlanken wrote: post #37

californiadreem wrote: post #18

My wife and I use Briar for household communication because of subsidiarity rather than any direct privacy concerns. Out of all the messenger projects that we've tried, Briar actually works for local communication. It's actually instant messaging without any client hiccups or latency (looking at you, Signal). We've tried a ton of other options, but we keep ending up back at Briar. There are points of UX friction in t…

> It's actually instant messaging without any client hiccups or latency (looking at you, Signal). This is almost certainly poor wifi / cell coverage, not Signal having "hiccups" or "latency." I routinely have real-time texting conversations with friends and I can see the messages are "seen" almost instantaneously, half-way across the US. I've also never had an issue with voice chat. It's been flawless, and very high…

Post by Tijdreiziger » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #35

kevinfiol wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I may have communicated this poorly. We were connected to the local area network, but we had no Internet access (which was behind a paywall). However, only being connected to the local network was sufficient for Briar -- no Internet needed!

To be fair, it would absolutely be possible to set up a hotspot where all the clients were jailed and invisible to each other, had IPs in different subnets, whatever. Conventionally, I guess that sort of isolation doesn't typically happen as it's more work to set up and only really benefits users (privacy from each other), but maybe if more apps figure out how to take advantage of this things could change.

Post by simfree » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 4:51 AM UTC

Semaphor wrote: post #42

KennyBlanken wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's actually instant messaging without any client hiccups or latency (looking at you, Signal). This is almost certainly poor wifi / cell coverage, not Signal having "hiccups" or "latency." I routinely have real-time texting conversations with friends and I can see the messages are "seen" almost instantaneously, half-way across the US. I've also never had an issue with voice chat. It's been flawless, and very high…

> This is almost certainly poor wifi / cell coverage, not Signal having "hiccups" or "latency." Signal is very finicky about that, though. I have friends who prefer Whatsapp simply because they don’t have to worry about connection stability. With Signal, you sometimes don’t even know if messages actually arrived or not.

Post by sixstringtheory » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 5:28 AM UTC

snoopy_telex wrote: post #15

bawolff wrote: post #3

> The adversary has a limited ability to monitor short-range communication channels (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc). That seems like a pretty big assumption. From what i understand there already exists deployment of wifi hot spots to track people (both for advertising purposes and for spying purposes) to the extent that phone providers started radomizing MAC addresses.

Cisco’s meraki has that built into their devices. I run meraki in my home and have it enabled and it’s pretty powerful. If you see a wifi network, it most certainly can track you and if it’s not a residential network, I assume it is.

Post by lelandfe » Mon, Nov 21, 2022, 5:37 AM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #36

zikduruqe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out https://berty.tech for direct off network communications when you do not have internet.

How does this work? Do the two devices still need to be on some sort of net work accessible to each other? Two cell phones not on the same Wi-Fi are going to have a hard time talking to each other buy anything other than Bluetooth, no?