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

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

#331

Post by ajsnigrutin »

Y_Y wrote: post #181
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.

But also because it seems fun in the meantime. In fact a state that doesn't plan to turn off the internet should probably want a cohort of amateur radio operators ready to turn into a signals corps. Maybe in the battlefields of the future we'll be fighting with lorawan cyberdecks rescued from desk drawers, and meshtastic hackers will be the equivalent of fighter pilot aces. On that topic, I'm in this thread hoping to…

Amateur radio is one of the first thing that gets banned in wars, including eg. WW2 in US and the start of ukraine war in ukraine.

Considering the age and political orientation of most people here in this thread, and the age and political orientation of most eg. US hams, the situation would be quite different than most here imagine.

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

#332

Post by andix »

jfengel wrote: post #259
ajb wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters

Do you really think an authoritarian government cares about what people think? If there is a majority that supports them? They don't.

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

#333

Post by _DeadFred_ »

swaits wrote: post #263
jfengel wrote: post #259

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.

Trump seized 500 million dollars worth of oil, and deposited the cash from it's sale in the country that gave him personally a free jumbo jet. You seem to be missing that perspective has changed greatly. What is OK for a President has changed to an INSANE degree.

He has asked our NATO allies to help take over a NATO country's territory. This is what the American President does now. His delegation left the territory's administration in tears, and the US delegation stated afterwards that the US will take the territory.

He ordered federal officers to terrorize American cities, and a 37 year old white mom was shot 3 times in the face by one of them after she dropped her kid off at school. This is America. You seem to be missing perspective. What line has to be crossed for you?

Trump cares more about tariffing countries that don't support his Greenland conquest than the people rising up in Iran. Trump claims Ukraine is the impediment to peace with Russia, the country that invaded Ukraine. 6 times Ukraine has agreed to a Trump initiated peace process, Russia agreed 0 times.

The President stealing 500 million dollars and stashing it in his illegal bribers banks in the middle east, not enough. Actively working to take allies territory, with his people making their administration break down in tears after meeting with the US? Not enough. Extra-judicial murder of Americans after they drop their kids at school, not enough. DOGE. Refusing to release the Epstein files as REQUIRED by law. Forcing numerous law firms to bend the knee to him. Demanding a criminal investigation into the Fed chair. And on, and on, and on. In les than one year.

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

#334

Post by immibis »

oarsinsync wrote: post #272
immibis wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them.

> When Spain blocks CF (it does this regularly), it breaks all CF sites. Of course, the actual problem here is organised crime. Spain and Italy do this because the mafia owns them. Mafia has a vested interest in broadcast rights of football matches in Spain? Spain blocks Cloudflare because the football league La Liga has a court order that allows them to point to IP ranges that are hosting/fronting live streams of fo…

Which directly contravenes the Digital Services Act. And is only in place because LaLiga has strong ties to the mafia.

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

#335

Post by atmosx »

btbuildem wrote: post #96

Take heed, Americaneez -- and prepare, because this may be in your future sooner than prediction markets would have you believe [1]. LoRa mesh networking seems like the runner-up, but vague reports indicate (Meshtastic) doesn't handle crowds well. I think Bitchat can use Meshtastic, so a LoRa radio paired with a phone could be a base for not just texting individuals, but community messaging. 1: https://polymarket.com…

Iran doesn't have the ability to control what you see online. If BigCorps play along, the US can largely do that, to much much greater extend. So they don't really need to bring the internet down, they can just have LLMs create custom "reddit pages" on the fly.

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

#336

Post by falcor84 »

spotplay wrote: post #278
falcor84 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - I found this quantitative historical study [0] showing that while a civil war does significantly increase the likelihood of inflation, only 36% of countries analyzed which had a civil war between 1975-1999 ended up in an inflationary crisis. And with the USD having such a strong foundation, I would expect the risk to be significantly lower. [0] https://kjis.org/journal/view.html?uid=302&vmd=Full

I am speculating wildly but I would expect the exact opposite due to different actors trying to destabilize the US to the point of no recovery in such an event.

> to the point of no recovery

Interesting, are you saying that the intentional use of USD somehow makes the US more vulnerable? What failure mode are you thinking of?

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

#337

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #157
nsvd2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> looks like the current administration may be seeking violent unrest in the hopes of delaying elections Civil war requires two militaries. Tiananmen Square wasn’t a civil war.

[deleted]

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

#338

Post by 1718627440 »

supern0va wrote: post #326
dbspin wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically. I hear that, but we are so dependent on network connectivity for commerce (and entertainment) here that there would be riots from a different subset of the population if they turned that off. You can harass brown people and murder activists here, but if you turn off the TikTok spigot, disable access to finance, or frankly fucki…

The "advantage" of software and remote controlled updates is that you can turn all that off very selectively.

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

#339

Post by HelloUsername »

torginus wrote: post #239
pamcake wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why isn't your comment the top one? You're absolutely right. Where is the proof or study of the title? Or at least the title should be rephrased as a question to its users? (What I tried the other day https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592912) This should be reported (to dang).

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

#340

Post by reaperducer »

supern0va wrote: post #326
dbspin wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically. I hear that, but we are so dependent on network connectivity for commerce (and entertainment) here that there would be riots from a different subset of the population if they turned that off. You can harass brown people and murder activists here, but if you turn off the TikTok spigot, disable access to finance, or frankly fucki…

I hear that, but we are so dependent on network connectivity for commerce (and entertainment) here that there would be riots from a different subset of the population if they turned that off.

You're thinking nationally. Think smaller.

It's not tremendously hard to imagine the internet being selectively shut down in a state or city.

Look at the events of the past week. Now imagine the Insurrection Act being invoked in Minnesota, and the state's internet is cut off as Governor Walz's helicopter flees to Canada to avoid being arrested.

If you can't imagine that, remember that nobody could imagine COVID lockdown, either. We've shut down the national air system twice in the last 25 years. Unimaginable in 1999. Yet, here we are.

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