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

briarproject.org

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

#241

Post by digiown »

amelius wrote: post #237
NoiseBert69 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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@pc…

I guess if you're protesting against the government, you don't have to comply with regulations and can use more power and basically the entire spectrum :)

If you have the government as adversary and no military force to back it up, you might want to reconsider doing that as it makes you very detectable from far away.

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

#242

Post by grosswait »

nsvd2 wrote: post #145
throwaway2037 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to side track too much from this discussion, but I looked at that PolyMarket event: "US civil war before 2027?" Currently, it is priced at 91.3 USD cents for No. If you bet 100 USD, the payout for No will be 109.43. That is very good return -- ~9.5% for 12 months of lending (as PolyMarket required full payment at the time of trade). That is twice the (retail) risk free rate at the moment. I am actually tempted to…

If you haven't been paying attention to American politics, there are currently widespread protests due to a woman being shot by ICE last week. It looks like the current administration may be seeking violent unrest in the hopes of delaying elections.

Or is it the financial backers of the protests that want a civil war?

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

#243

Post by upofadown »

vegabook wrote: post #62

>> "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/

This seems like a fairly reasonable assumption for the Briar case. An adversary would have to get a user accept a Briar link in error. Contrast with things like Signal[1] that base their trust on phone numbers.

Note that Briar groups are controlled by one moderator. Other participants of the group can not add members. Note also that Briar has the concept of introductions. So it is easy to avoid making the sort of identity errors commonly made by other schemes.

[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg

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

#244

Post by zoobab »

wolvoleo wrote: post #111
gh02t wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need 2 kind of networks: one stable with fixed nodes, with very low refresh rates of the routes, and another one for mobile nodes.

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

#245

Post by john61 »

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.

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

#246

Post by grosswait »

_def wrote: post #222
ChocolateGod wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

No sane country recognizes all the same rights and privileges of a citizen in a non-citizen.

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

#247

Post by ajb »

agnishom wrote: post #166

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.

Is that the right threat model, though?

Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown. Thats' why it's happening in Iran. They want to disrupt the co-ordination of a coup, and their opponents only need to win in the short term after which it doesn't matter. In the US, the threat is censorship and tracking- suppression over the long term. Mesh networks are not great for that,because if you run a mesh network then you have declared yourself against the regime. Steganography may be better.

An amusing point is that secure steganography depends on redundancy with entropy- noise. A few years ago, it looked increasingly difficult because of lossy compression. Today, we're awash in randomly generated content, so it should be possible to make secure steganography quite high bandwidth. Although, it's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of it,because the randomness is the input to a diffusion model,not the output - you might need to run the model backwards to obtain your steganographic content. Which I guess is possible,although expensive.

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

#248

Post by danesparza »

NoiseBert69 wrote: post #229
agnishom wrote: post #166

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@pc…

You also make yourself a bright shining beacon to anybody looking for a resistance network because Lora operates on very specific frequencies. It would be easy to spot you with an RF scanner.

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

#249

Post by DicIfTEx »

LeratoAustini wrote: post #129
p0w3n3d wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To save others the search: Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters"

And for anything you really need to keep hidden, there's always culportage.

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

#250

Post by miroljub »

Alifatisk wrote: post #219
miroljub wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any source for this? Ever heard about Chat Control and CSAM?

Chat Control and CSAM will not ban E2E messengers Mandatory client-side scanning of encrypted messages has been removed from the proposal following opposition from the European Parliament and several member states, preserving E2EE integrity https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/after-years-controvers...

And you believe they won't try again and again until they push it through? All of these have already been rejected multiple times, and yet some parts of it are already enacted, some will be soon, and the rest will come after a few more tries.
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