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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

#231

Post by NoiseBert69 »

gh02t wrote: post #91
wolvoleo wrote: post #86

I think meshtastic would be a lot more performant in mesh scenarios due to the added range of LoRa. But of course it's special hardware and thus suspicious during an insurrection. And probably just not available. I doubt this will actually work though except in the densest city.

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.

The decision that every station is always a (delayed) router was a bad one. Also the old firmware was super chatty eating a lot of valuable ISM TX time.

They must clean up their role mess and switch to a "all clients are totally quiet - until they are set to a different mode for a reason"-strategy.

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

#232

Post by NoiseBert69 »

codezero wrote: post #8
subscribed wrote: post #7

Perhaps Americans should start preparing with Meshtastic / Meshcore, just in case....... ..,..the Emperor seems hellbent on bringing martial law into effect.

The military can very easily find and eliminate repeaters very quickly and almost certainly would.

You can build a Meshcore/-tastic station for less than 15€ if you are into PCB design. It's like fighting against off-the-shelf drones.

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

#233

Post by NoiseBert69 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #41
subscribed wrote: post #7

Perhaps Americans should start preparing with Meshtastic / Meshcore, just in case....... ..,..the Emperor seems hellbent on bringing martial law into effect.

Meshtastic is both extremely range limited and trivial to DDOS. It's a fun toy protocol but it's not resistant to nation state disruption at all.

I've tested >60km links with Meshtastic without problems and had plenty of SNR left.

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

#234

Post by us321 »

cookiengineer wrote: post #92
notepad0x90 wrote: post #81

Does anyone remember yik-yak? It wasn't anonymous and resilient like briar, but it was great in its time to discover people near-by and start chatting. Does anyone if briar relays traffic? like if at least one person in a wifi network has briar and they also connect by bluetooth to another person within an adjacent wifi network, does it relay messages from one end of the city to the other over dozens of devices?

No they sadly don't have that, and that's the major issue of connectivity. All chat recipients have to be online/reachable to receive your messages, which is okay, but useless in mobile environments where you can't afford that constant traffic. The broadcast type channels though are what the article talks about, they are great for off the grid and mesh environments. Relaying and scattering traffic across neighboring…

> Relaying and scattering traffic across neighboring peers (and handshakes via multicast DNS, for example) would fix a lot of the issues you'll get with Briar, but I guess that would imply a refactor of the codebase.

Is this even technically possible?

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

#235

Post by DecoySalamander »

amelius wrote: post #184
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.

How is Ukraine doing this? I suppose Starlink isn't available to everyone.

Most of Ukraine doesn't need to do it. The internet infrastructure is largely intact and very decentralised. The biggest challenge is the lengthy power outages, but mobile networks keeps running thanks to generators.

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

#236

Post by cl3misch »

hhh wrote: post #130
9dev wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked into the iOS issue once, and in the EU at least, it should be possible to add a minimal implementation of the store API to an app, so other iPhones could download the app from an iPhone hosting it. After discovering the amount of pain involved with that API, I quickly discarded the idea though

You can just airdrop iOS apps to people. I don’t think the recipient needs network connectivity to receive it.

Source? I guess you're thinking of long tap → Airdrop, but that essentially shares a link to the Appstore via Airdrop. You're not transfering the app itself.

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

#237

Post by amelius »

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…

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 :)

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

#238

Post by NoiseBert69 »

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 :)

But better having the government shooting down your 10€ ballo.. node with a F-35 instead of a 50€ node.

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

#239

Post by torginus »

pamcake wrote: post #224
torginus wrote: post #179

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.

I mean the whole thing is confusing - is OP actually Iranian? Do we have evidence that Briar is being used in Iran, and is effective? Why was the Farsi manual linked to an English website, when the English is next to it?

From a quick Google search it seems there's no reference to Briar having any connection to Iran other than this discussion, and other places linking to it.

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