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Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

briarproject.org

221–230 of 390 posts

Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't get to vote to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.

If they're in the country illegally are they citizens?

That's an easy one. They're people, and still have rights. That's non-negotiable.

Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't get to vote to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.

If they're in the country illegally are they citizens?

They are human, that's all you need to know.

Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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 h…

You are exactly not answering the question though.

It is easy to complain about energy dependence, struggles with immigration/integration and precarious national budgets, but the conditions for those weren't caused by recent decision in my view (instead, namely, lack of local oil/gas, unstable north africa/middle east and bad demographics with too many old people).

All those problems are really costly and difficult to solve. Sure, the EU could've tried a super-scale Messmer plan 20 years ago, and could then maybe rival current renewable power with nuclear output, but this would have been orders of magnitude more costly.

Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).

It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).

I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum. If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.

Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

#224

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.

I think it's not a great submission due to the poorly editiorialized title which is not representative of the content (user manual of Briar).

Not sure what you meam about "advertising" as OP doesn't seem to have any relation to Briar but just a person in Iran trying to cope and help.

Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A week ago. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/cloudflare-may-p...

How much of internet can Cloudflare turn off in italy? They picked a fight with the cloud gorilla.

About 20% of sites, and there’s some big services behind Cloudflare so that percentage doesn’t even tell the full story.

Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

#227
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boo, native apps.

If it's not native then we need to give powerful Bluetooth capabilities to web pages which isn't very good.

I don't know why you think it's not good, but it seems it will happen: https://webbluetoothcg.github.io/web-bluetooth/#introduction

Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

#228

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

How could people in 1990 use their stuff? They just did.

Design is not so important for getting information across

Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

#229

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.

There is Mesh(core|tastic) around. Both use LoRa.

With tiny solar repeater that placed on a strategic hill you can cover lots of kilometers. Being sensitive down to -145dBm opens a lot of doors.

I was able to build energy harvester nodes that fit into 5cm x 5cm x 4cm boxes that roughly cost around 20€. Without energy harvesting capability with a normal TI BQ wide range charge controllers (that stuff costs $1.5-2.5@pcs and eats every power source up to 18V! With pseudo-MPPT!) you can bring the entire thing down to Currently available LoRa-gear is either USB-power optimized (looking at you Heltec) or just awfully overpriced as soon as a solar panel is attached to it.

Re: Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is really a civil war, won't these frequencies just get jammed?

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.

All Semtech LoRa modems are wide-range modems. You can switch to basically every other frequency.

An idea would be to move to SX128x modems with work around 2.4GHz. You recycle Wifi-gear for directional stuff. This also enabled you to hide below Wifi traffic.

Still jammable - but much much more difficult.

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