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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

#281
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the recent threats from Cloudflare against Italy and siding with Vance, Musk and co., this is definitely not a far-fetched reality. Big Tech has demonstrated which side they are going with.

Not really, you are framing this issue and dropping key words to make it political, are you a bot farming for engagement, please stop.

Not OP but, oh common. This entire thing IS political. Big Tech IS in bed with the authoritarian US apparatus, they have been very transparent about it. What are you expecting to gain from your message? Pedantry points?

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>You are exactly not answering the question though. WHich question did I not answer? >weren't caused by recent decision in my view No, but they could admit it was a fuckup of the political class, and tell us how they're planning to fix it, instead of gaslighting us for complaining about it and doing more mistake that further damage our economy. We can't stop the music chair song from playing just yet. Just one more r…

> WHich question did I not answer?

The "what policies should a perfect government have enacted instead, with hindsight". But your last post adds a lot on that front.

> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.

Hard disagree on this. Just consider two poster children for continuous positive economical growth: Poland and Vietnam. Did that economic outlook effect positive population growth? Clearly no (for both cases, and it's not even close).

My personal view: Easy access to contraceptives (people want to fuck more than raise children), and realignment of economical incentives: Children are no longer the default retirement plan (nor are they needed by the parents themselves as cheap workforce).

Both of those factors are icky to counteract for a modern democracy.

> If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?

No, because those did not occur synchronously. The imported, lower-skill workforce was most needed earlier (pre 2000s), with the big youth unemployment problems mostly occuring later (2000s and after).

Immigration rates are also much easier to control than local birth rate, and, most importantly, dont suffer from a two-decade lag.

Restricting foreign workers would have most certainly been a big economic hit (this is somewaht obvious; because foreign workers are mostly raised and educated for free), especially for countries like Germany, even with perfectly boosting population growth at the perfect times to compensate.

> Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.

Poland has been playing catchup inside a huge, wealthy, low-barrier market. Would their growth have been comparable if wages had started at a German level in 1990? IMO clearly not.

> all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked except now we made ourselves poorer for it

Two big problems with that view.

First: The planet "getting fucked" is not binary. If you want to limit warming to a somewhat reasonable degree (and the worst-case timelines are not reasonable), then action has to be taken at some point, and pretty obviously the biggest culprits need to get the ball rolling, or no one is ever gonna do anything.

Second: The EU has already fucked the planet much harder than any developing nation, China included, despite being not even half the population of India or China. You could make a case that the US is slightly worse, but thats completely irrelevant; the relative moral net-obligation on the EU to act is clearly pretty large already for a long time now, and a few outliers (US, oil states) being even worse does not absolve the Europeans from anything.

Lastly, those efforts to combat climate change clearly had already huge global effects. Or do you honestly think that massive Chinese buildout of solar/wind power would have happened without those technologies getting developed, refined and proven in Europe over the last decades?

I don't necessarily disagree with your outlook completely: I think a bunch of things could have been done better, especially refugee handling, and possibly immigration vs economy tradeoffs. But still: a lot of those decisions had to be made without hindsight, and I don't think expecting much better than what we got is reasonable.

You also have to consider that lots of those decisions were made in a different time (with different values/outlooks): It was much harder to let refugees become homeless, executed or starved when a lot of Europeans saw thair own past actions (=> colonialism) as a big driver for those crises (and I'd argue that this only really changed, somewhat justifiably, post Arab spring).

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>You are exactly not answering the question though. WHich question did I not answer? >weren't caused by recent decision in my view No, but they could admit it was a fuckup of the political class, and tell us how they're planning to fix it, instead of gaslighting us for complaining about it and doing more mistake that further damage our economy. We can't stop the music chair song from playing just yet. Just one more r…

> WHich question did I not answer?

  pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years
So, they'd have to be things that were democratically acceptable at the time.

For example: Germany in that period was never no way going to accept nuclear power. Their leadership regrets it in hindsight, but at the time, forcing it on the people would have been undemocratic.

> They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports.

20 years ago the biggest problem with the EU's farming system was massive overproduction.

Like, "newsworthy scandal" levels of overproduction.

> Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-gdp-growth?tab=lin...

Poland mainly missed out on the downside of the global financial crisis, rather than being special otherwise. Few percent difference between Poland, Germany, Japan, Europe collectively, and the USA all around the same level.

> is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did

Europe did not in fact import millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare. This would have been a self-evidently stupid thing to do, which is why that is not what happened.

Europe did take around two million asylum seekers in total, before the pandemic. Important thing about asylum: they get sent back as soon as their homes stop being warzones, or sooner if they're deemed to have been taking the piss. Right now there's about 4 million Ukrainians, who would probably count as "second world" given the etymology; do you want to count them as "uneducated"? I wouldn't. But then, I have Ukrainian neighbours.

Economic migrants, who are important for the economy, are a bigger group. Mixing up asylum seekers and economic migrants because they're both "migrants" is as much of an error as declaring that all Canadians and Mexicans are "Americans" because they're from the continent of America.

> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.

If this were so, even royal families would not have had any kids before 1850, there certainly wouldn't be a massive population boom in e.g. India where they've only recently connected (almost) everyone to the electricity grid.

> Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this?

I was born in 1983. I remember being warned of overpopulation, there was literally zero public concern about a demographic crisis, and even in the last few years people are mostly warning this will affect us by the time I reach pension age.

I also remember ongoing press campaigns in the UK demonising single mothers.

> instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.

That's a new one.

You think there's a law banning people from criticising the lack of support for families? Have you seen, like, any election campaign ever? One reliable theme throughout, no matter how effective the policy would be if examined closely, is at least one party saying they support families.

> EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it.

China's also going green. India… isn't, but the pain point hits them much sooner than we expect it to hit us, so they probably will. Like, it becomes reliably lethal to work in parts of India before it's expected to make heatstroke deaths more than a passing headline in Europe.

The US was going green, then Trump happened. He's against renewables and doesn't believe in climate change, while also wanting to invade Greenland for reasons that only make sense if one or both of those are good bets; he insists on keeping coal plants open when the owners of those plants don't want that because gas is cheaper; he's lying a lot in general, but specifically by saying China doesn't use the renewables they're exporting. He's all over the place, wildly incoherent, and is mad enough he could lead to WW3 where none of this matters anyway (P(WW3 this year due to him)~=0.05).

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

#284

Mobile phones with "Mesh networking" built-in have now started to appear in the market. E.g Tecno Spark Go 3 - https://www.tecno-mobile.com/phones/product-detail/product/s... - recently launched in India has a feature called Freelink 2 that claims to connect with other Tecno phones to provide "connectivity" without wifi or cellular network up to a range of 1.5 kms. More here: https://www.intelregion.com/tech/how-to-u…

> (Personally, I don't think any government is going to allow this.) Then that's a pretty clear signal for how free that government is.

As someone who lives in a democratic country, I am quite loathe to trust any foreign-controlled communication platform. I also do not support or endorse violent politics. Seeing how social media has triggered political riots in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and now in Iran (probably with the aid of foreign sponsors / agents) to destabilise these countries, I am fully in favour of governments clamping down hard on such kind of "dark networks" that they don't have oversight over. Note that this is nothing new - governments always have been mindful that foreign agents in their country should not have a way to communicate with their masters, and that is why everything from radios to satellite phones require some form of license to operate.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right.

Downvote all you want (native app developers, is that you? > This specification takes several approaches to make such attacks more difficult:

> Pairing individual devices instead of device classes requires at least a user action before a device can be exploited.

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

#286
post #247

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,bec…

> Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown.

They also do so to prevent political violence from spreading, as social media does fan the flame of further violence. This is (in my opinion) a legitimate response to prevent hatred and mob violence from growing.

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

#287
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is concern that the US may also go from chronic concerns to acute ones. Opponents of the government accuse it of serious crimes, and are already perceiving violence used to suppress dissent. The administration is not popular and may lose a lot of power in the upcoming election. It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters, but the point of the exercise…

Keeping things in perspective, no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term. The places where this happens, like Iran now, are in extremely different situations than anything in the US, or any other Western country. That shouldn’t discourage people running meshes though.

> no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term

Non American here observing from outside. Given the move in a few months from a normative western society to one in which heavily armed masked men raid homes and businesses [1] to racially profile [2] for mass imprisonment and deportation. Given the current governments explicit redefinition of political opponents as terrorists [3]. And finally given the extent to which three letter agencies are integrated into US telecommunications infrastructure [4][5]. It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vance-door-to-door-ice/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/09/supreme-cour...

[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/trumps-domestic-terrorism-memo-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...

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

#288

Please, sell me a USB-C device that gives me mesh networking on my phone. I'd like a Small, Medium, and Large option. Ideally, each would have a passthrough charger, so I can charge my phone even with the device plugged in to my phone. The Small is just the device, and I guess it would drain my phone's battery. The Large would have a 25,000mAh and be just small enough to legally take on an airplane in the United Stat…

Pragmatically, cost and ease of access is especially important in suppressed countries or ones with unstable infrastructure. While the devices you're talking about has lots of conveniences, distribution and price dominate in lower income regions. For a side project, sure. But in first world countries, the odds of infrastructure breakdown or suppression of Internet is incredibly rare. In Iran's case, suppression is a…

I'd like to start with something that works, and then make it affordable.

Rather than start with something free, that demonstrably doesn't work where it needs to.

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

#289

So this is a sabotage agency operation? I am old enough to remember the "Arab spring" "intelligence" operation. Are people really naive about these types of Sabotage Agency supported projects and entities, regardless of the interest and curiosity about the technology? And no, I know these things as a matter of fact for reasons that will need to remain my own.

Briar is a peer-to-peer encrypted messaging app that has received funding from multiple organizations, including the Open Technology Fund (OTF), which is financed by the U.S. government through the Agency for Global Media [1][2][3]. The OTF was established in 2012 as a program of Radio Free Asia, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, and became independent in 2019 while continuing to receive congressional appropriations [3].

## Government Funding and Transparency

Briar openly discloses its funding sources on its website, listing support from the Open Technology Fund alongside other organizations like NLnet Foundation, the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, Access Now, Internews, and others [1][4]. This transparency is notable—the project does not hide its connection to U.S. government-funded initiatives. The OTF itself supports numerous widely-used internet freedom tools, with over two billion people worldwide reportedly using OTF-supported technologies daily [5].

## The Security Trade-off Question

Your skepticism about government-funded privacy tools reflects a legitimate concern that civil liberties advocates have raised [6]. However, Briar's open-source nature allows independent security audits—it was examined by Cure53 in 2017 and received positive assessments [2]. The project was developed by researchers and activists including Michael Rogers and Eleanor Saitta starting in 2011, with stated motivations around supporting freedom of expression and protecting activists and journalists [4][7].

## Technical Design vs. Political Origins

The technical architecture of Briar—peer-to-peer encryption, mesh networking capability, and operation over Tor—represents genuine attempts to resist surveillance regardless of funding sources [8]. Unlike some mesh networking apps that researchers have found vulnerable (such as Bridgefy, which had serious security flaws allowing impersonation and surveillance), Briar's design philosophy emphasizes decentralization [9]. The question becomes whether government funding necessarily compromises such tools, or whether open-source transparency and independent auditing can mitigate such concerns.

Citations: [1] About - Briar https://briarproject.org/about/ [2] Briar (software) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briar_(software) [3] Open Technology Fund - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Technology_Fund [4] About Us - Briar https://briarproject.org/about-us/ [5] Trump's Reshuffling of US Foreign Aid Endangers Internet Freedom https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/trumps-reshuffling... [6] US: Fight Continues for Open Technology Fund's Independence https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/08/20/us-fight-continues-open-... [7] 3 - Concealing for Freedom – Mattering Press https://www.matteringpress.org/books/concealing-for-freedom/... [8] Briar Desktop got another round of funding https://briarproject.org/news/2022-briar-desktop-nlnet-fundi... [9] The privacy perils of using a mesh network – and why we urgently ... https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/the-privacy-peril... [10] Briar - NLnet Foundation https://nlnet.nl/project/Briar/ [11] Briar Darknet Messenger Client For Android Secures Chats With ... https://hothardware.com/news/briar-darknet-messenger-client-... [12] History · changelog · Wiki - briar https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/changelog/... [13] Mesh Networks Won't Fix Internet Security - CITP Blog https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2014/04/22/mesh-networks-won... [14] Congressional Remit | OTF - Open Tech Fund https://www.opentech.fund/about/congressional-remit/ [15] Radio Free Asia | OTF - Open Tech Fund https://www.opentech.fund/security-safety-audits/radio-free-... [16] RCFP supports Radio Free Asia's lawsuit challenging funding cuts https://www.rcfp.org/briefs-comments/radio-free-asia-v-unite... [17] The Trouble With the Open Technology Fund https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/the-trouble-with-... [18] Trump restores funding for Radio Free Europe, Tech Fund - The Hill https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5217360-trump-a... [19] Trump administration under pressure to restore funding to groups ... https://kesq.com/news/national-politics/cnn-us-politics/2026... [20] Supporting the Open Technology Fund https://www.thefai.org/posts/supporting-the-open-technology-...

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

#290

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.

Yeah until google, apple & friends boot them from the stores and block side loading as well. Then we're all screwed, as they will have 100% grip and visibility on comms and won't allow third party encrypted comms. Just wait and see friends, that day is around the corner. Which means all sensitive comms will move back offline...
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