CIA funding dried up. Briar had already started development when Starlink wasn't even a concept. Nowadays every CIA goat herder has their own Starlink terminal.
Briar is in maintenance mode
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: Briar is in maintenance mode
#32Briar will thrive once EU Chat Control 2.0 passes, P2P E2E encryption is the only way to bypass bullshit laws.
Briar is dead because it doesn't work on iPhones. It doesn't work on iPhones because iOS will only allow waking the app from background when there's a push notification. Push notifications have to go through Apple's servers, which defeats the purpose of a decentralized app where your messages (and metadata) can't be traced.
Re: Briar is in maintenance mode
#33> We considered completely rebuilding the application from the ground up, or even splitting it into separate applications for online and offline use This is actually non-trivial. There's an app I was working on where I wanted to have a local first mode that allowed people to use the app for free without an account and there was also a cloud hosted version that allowed for team collaboration, etc. For this kind of thi…
Is this still relevant in the age of LLMs? They can write it 5 times without sweating.
Re: Briar is in maintenance mode
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fighting complex technical and non-technical issues "with code" may be the most programmer way of thinking about things. To begin with, that 200 dollars need to come from somewhere. Are you going to personally contribute to that 200 dollars? If not, someone needs to find money from somewhere. Then, I can assure you it's going to be much more than 200 dollars before you realize it.
Who spent the time to make this? If those people spent countless hours doing it by hand, maybe they would be willing to spend an analogous resource? It seems reasonable to me if you've already invested so much and paid in time. But yeah that's why I was asking if this was a non-code issue? Because they're presenting it as hey, we couldn't figure out the battery life in this post.
$200 mean very different things to different people.
I would never say it's "reasonable" to expect anyone (including maintainers) to contribute money or code to an open source project.
Must be easy for you to type these things from your comfortable armchair.
Re: Briar is in maintenance mode
#35CIA funding dried up. Briar had already started development when Starlink wasn't even a concept. Nowadays every CIA goat herder has their own Starlink terminal.
Plus people at the top level of the current administration just use Signal for discussing ongoing military operations and other classified stuff, so they don't see the need for solutions like Briar either...
Re: Briar is in maintenance mode
#36Re: Briar is in maintenance mode
#37TIL Briar is text-only, per https://eylenburg.github.io/im_comparison.htm
Briar supports sending images. Source: user
Re: Briar is in maintenance mode
#38Sounds like it's basically dead. The issue with messenger apps is that they're a dime a dozen, there are so many of them and they offer so much variability in security, privacy, but most importantly usability and uptime. If your friends won't switch to them, there's almost no point in having them or using them.
For most IMs I agree, Briar is/was slightly different though, being P2P and E2E encrypted. There isn't many IMs out there supporting Bluetooth connections between users for example.
Bitchat is great, but I don't understand why it's Bluetooth only. I would think Wifi reaches further.
Re: Briar is in maintenance mode
#39Briar will thrive once EU Chat Control 2.0 passes, P2P E2E encryption is the only way to bypass bullshit laws.
only insofar as it is 1. not illegal to do so or 2. the cost-benefit of violating such laws makes sense for the majority of users, who are not doing things that are actually illegal
because without such a critical mass of normal users you get something like tor or grapheneos that the state begins to associate with people engaging in unsavoury activity
Re: Briar is in maintenance mode
#40It's really sad that both Apple and Google make it so difficult for background processes to run with user consent. The app wasn't even available for iOS because they don't allow apps to listen for messages outside the walled garden's polling service. Briar is a messenger app that worked on local networks, over Bluetooth, and over Tor if traveling the Internet. Fully encrypted and the purpose was decentralized, server…
> P.S. feature request! If Alice, Bob and Charlie are all contacts with each other, and Alice writes an offline message to Charlie, Alice should be able to opportunisticly hand the encrypted message to Bob on their shared network, and Bob can deliver it to Charlie.
This is intentionally only included in Forum-mode chats in Briar. Over direct message, leaking contacts is considered a breach of security. (Your definition of "leak" may differ.) In group messages, only the group admin is considered trusted, and every message must go directly to or come from them.
In every security tradeoff, Briar chose the option that maximizes security, even considering how the airwave transmission times might be fingerprintable as Briar traffic.
Not saying any of this is a good way to make a useable app for wide adoption, but it is intentional and highly opinionated.