Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey • Hacker News Board

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#471

Post by justthehuman » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

Henchman21 wrote: post #406

wrycoder wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was Australia. In China, they welded the doors to their housing units shut.

Can we perhaps agree the that the response to COVID, worldwide, was essentially shit. When faced with a true crisis, the People in Charge fucking lost their minds. It’s laid bare for all to see: Our governments have failed us worldwide. I don’t know what we can do with that information. Feels both useless and that we’re helpless to fix it.

Agreed.

I was in the Philippines at the time, we got a repatriation flight to come back to the US but before we were allowed to fly, we had to go all over town, to several offices and get xrays, urinalysis, and basic health screening. The goal was some pointless health certificate required to travel. At the time there were no COVID tests so they somehow thought that having people go all over town interacting with countless people to get health checks that didn't matter or detect COVID made sense...

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#472

Post by anon291 » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 3:31 AM UTC

vivzkestrel wrote: post #464

anon291 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And like clockwork, a single terror attack in Berlin and you'll find redditors from western countries calling for solutions much worse than anything india has ever proposed. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1v6k8vq/several_injur...

- the sad part is when multiple attacks happen every year and most of them ignore it like "hey its not in my backyard" - the moment it comes to their backyard once in a while, they are willing to go full nuclear on it

Right. Here you go. France has decided to shut down radical mosques. Imagine if India did anything like that. You'd have the entire world telling them about religious freedom lol. People are retarded, and a lot of western assumptions on the whole thing is that if a country is in the third world developmentally, it means they don't understand 'freedom' or whatever. I'm not saying India is perfect, because it's not, but the idea that it's some great bastion of Islamophobia is dumb. If half the shit that happened in India happened in Europe, Europeans would have staged another genocide.

https://x.com/EYakoby/status/2082256548303102133/photo/1

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#473

Post by philipallstar » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

soulofmischief wrote: post #469

philipallstar wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of your examples were for the last 1300 years, so all your paragraphs are irrelevant.

I directly asked you to stop being evasive and to specifically name the ideologies you're speaking about. We can't even trace "death to the west" or "from the river to the sea" as ideologies or even phrases beyond 100 years ago. so I'm flabbergasted you would try to claim such ideologies have been occurring for 1300 years, and then turn around and try to get pedantic about whether the word is "for" or "within". Eithe…

The ideology is militant Islam. Which has been for 1300 years or so.

Not all of Islam, particularly as it rules places it doesn't need to be so militant (although it can turn to something at least as bad as a governing ideology), and also when Islam is a minority religion the majority of its adherents seem as normal as anyone else, but the militant aspect has been consistent over the centuries.

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#474

Post by soulofmischief » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

philipallstar wrote: post #473

soulofmischief wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I directly asked you to stop being evasive and to specifically name the ideologies you're speaking about. We can't even trace "death to the west" or "from the river to the sea" as ideologies or even phrases beyond 100 years ago. so I'm flabbergasted you would try to claim such ideologies have been occurring for 1300 years, and then turn around and try to get pedantic about whether the word is "for" or "within". Eithe…

The ideology is militant Islam. Which has been for 1300 years or so. Not all of Islam, particularly as it rules places it doesn't need to be so militant (although it can turn to something at least as bad as a governing ideology), and also when Islam is a minority religion the majority of its adherents seem as normal as anyone else, but the militant aspect has been consistent over the centuries.

900 years ago, Christians were crusading across Europe and slaughtering tens of thousands in religiously motivated militant action.

Furthermore, Christian European colonization of the Arab world is what led to any modern notion of resentment against Europe or the West. Prior to this, Muslim militant action was no different than all of the religiously-motivated conflicts of the rest of the world; nearly all conflict involved or invoked religion, and conflict at the time was dominated by large, oppressive empires; everyone was fighting.

Your world view is poisoned by centuries of this conflict and by the West's own perceived divine authority. US Generals were calling the war in Iran "God's divine plan". So your attempts to paint this ideology as belonging to Muslims, and to equate several distinct cultural issues as one, only belies the extreme level of ignorance in which you're operating.

And there are around ~2bil followers of both Christianity and Islam. Islam is not a "minority religion". Did you get your facts from the back of a Fox News-sponsored cereal box?

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#475

Post by aand16 » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

no_carrier wrote: post #457

aand16 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia just used police to move "close contacts" into "internment camps". Any wrong move inside would get punished by a $5000 fine. > Hayley Hodgson [...] was ordered to go to the facility after a friend of hers tested positive for the virus and she was identified as a “close contact” by the number plate on her scooter. > spent 14 days at the Howard Springs mandatory Covid-19 quarantine facility > "Police officers…

Your source is a site called "Unherd" and the story doesn't exist on any other platform.

And that's a good thing. We're taking back journalism from corporate media.

The story exists when somebody looks into it. UnHeard, which is a YouTube channel with 500k followers, found out about this woman because of the viral social media posts, and interviewed her.

What other platform would you prefer to see it on?

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#476

Post by dguest » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:28 AM UTC

upofadown wrote: post #364

dguest wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jack Dorsey is now using his clout to share about this app and bring some light on the situation Failed attempts at censorship are the best thing that could ever happen to Bitchat: free advertising for a vibcoded and questionably secure entry in a space with plenty of competitors. As others have commented it's basically impossible to shut down an open source app by blocking the source distributor, but press is pric…

To avoid a potential misunderstanding, the maintenance mode is intended to continue indefinitely. Briar project is not shutting down. * https://briarproject.org/news/2026-maintenance-mode/

Yeah and I should say it's still awesome! I just used the "share offline" feature to get it on my friend's phone last weekend (we were trying to chat on a mountain with no internet).

It works like a charm and isn't actually that hard to set up (you have to scan a few QR codes). I keep it on my phone even when people I use it with aren't around: having a resilient ecosystem of these apps seems like a good thing for the world.