Briar 1.4 – Offline sharing, message transfer via SD cards and USB sticks
briarproject.org
briarproject.org
The most common gripe about Briar is that it's not on iOS, but clearly there is nothing like Briar anywhere. Just too bad about the bluetooth thing. I don't see why it should leak your BT ID. That should definitely be an opt-in feature.
The local communications are of course not onion routed, goes without saying. It's a whole little tookit of subversive communication, including some anonymous and some not.
I recently discovered Syncthing Fork which was customizable in a way Google Drive or alternatives were not. And it's entirely P2P, transmitting files between my laptop and my phone, in either direction pretty seamlessly.
I'm now interested in learning about Bluetooth transfer as well as it works without Internet access. I've heard transfer speeds are slow though.
There was a brief period while I was at school where people would share mp3 files with each other this way. This was before 2010.
I remember I would spend hours after school in Photoshop to turn an image I like into the perfect wallpaper for my phone, tuning the resolution and color gradient until it looked perfect on the phone's low resolution display, and using bluetooth to upload them.
Same with mp3s. Due to the low amount of storage on the early phones amounting to only a few MB, I spent a lot of time experimenting with aggressive compression to make sure I could fit as many songs on my phone as possible. Therefore they sounded pretty bad on the cheapo wired hands-free earphones that came in the box, but I didn't care or didn't bother to notice as I now had my favorite bands always with me in my pocket before MP3 players became affordable and I would just get lost in the lyrics on the bus to school.
On an old Symbian Nokia I had, once you paired it to your PC via Bluetooth, you could send and read SMS texts off it directly from windows just like I can now use Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp desktop clients. I didn't think this would be so mind blowing until I found that Android had no similar functionality built in at the time for SMS on desktop via Bluetooth (and still doesn't AFAIK) which really bummed me out that such a powerful OS with such powerful HW was so lacking in features compared to the dying Symbian.
Another fun anecdote, digging around my parents house this year, I found my ancient 2003 vintage NEC phone which had some VGA photos I took with it of me and my old school mates on it. When I saw that I could pull the photos off it in a pinch to my modern Android phone using Bluetooth, and immediately share them online with my former schoolmates from the photos, it was pretty mind blowing to say the least. Bluetooth gets a lot of hate today for connectivity issues some people face, but seeing it work reliably between vastly different devices almost 20 years apart is an amazing feat in my book and should at least deserve some praise.
In Europe they weren't saints either but they weren't as bad when locking down your phone and mostly just resorted to SIM-lock, instead of locking other features as well.
In 2008 I picked up a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone (Samsung Blackjack) that didn't have any such restriction. USB worked and it had a microSD slot for me to add in movies and music. I could crop an MP3 and simply transfer it to the Ringtones folder via USB mass storage.
(Though I'm pretty sure that they then went back and established traditional contractual relationships with the artists before releasing the compilations).
You have to resort to setting up an ftp server and/or download extra apps on your phone for this, whereas Bluetooth file sharing is standardized and should work out of the box on any phone brand or OS (not sure on iPhones though) and anyone should know how to use it without needing any third party apps.
Material Files is an Android file manager that adds the missing ftp support.
Start/stop the ftp server with a single click. I have yet to find anything easier.
Plus, non-iOS/Android feature phones don't have ftp support but they do have bluetooth so this cross-compatibility out of the box is another advantage.
That's why Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company. Because people want the easy way. If things require extra apps, extra steps and reading tutorials/instructions to use, you can bet most people will stop right there.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just saying how things work for the masses.
I call it the (grand)parents test. If they can't figure it out on their own then it's not user friendly enough.
Open source Android file manager with built-in ftp server.
Windows file manager also has built-in ftp.
Linux has built-in ftp.
Transfer files fast and easy over WiFi.
Thank you for mentioning it!
Been in software half my life never heard anyone saying anything like this. It's most of the time easier and more efficient to use cloud storage than to spin up and bootstrap a p2p system. Also, thanks to encryption I don't really care if data hits the cloud.
The more intrusive it gets the more likely the pendulum will swing.
Not many consumers will encrypt unless it’s at a product level. It’s too difficult.
Not to mention if you are on a mobile connection.
Very people on this planet have fast + symmetric + unlimited bandwith available 24/7.
Is it though? I've found that non technical family members will happily use Apple's airdrop to share things.
In fact, their screenshots remind me of the biggest gripe I had with Syncthing back when I was using it daily in college- Syncthing doesn't let you browse a folder without downloading it. By the time I graduated, I had a good 2GB of Verilog crap sitting on my phone, just so that I could work on homework from my phone (of course, you could also blame me for putting Vivado projects in my Documents folder).
It already says when you would use such functionality("might be useful during internet shutdowns or natural disasters").
If both parties have F-Droid installed prior to the internet going away or being censored or whatever, other apps can be shared locally from a single device that has the app, to any other F-Droid user:
Airdrop is peer-to-peer file sharing built into the OS.
From the project's download page, the only Android application is manyverse. How does that compare to Briar?
Discussion forums, group chat, IM, location-based messaging, email/mailing-list equivalents, blogs and offline websites and more. Not just one app.
An SD card in a card slot can only be accessed as a mass storage device.
A USB drive can act as a mass storage device as well as a keyboard and mouse and even contain an entire OS on it that could be remotely accessible via WiFi.
though granted that's still a way smaller attack surface than what would be typically granted to a usb device.
When it comes to physical access, especially with shared physical devices, there's always going to be some type of attack vector, however small it may be.
The SD interface does not implement a similar spec, so this somewhat safer. The bad news most PC card readers are based on USB, so a targeted attack (which is probably in scope for Briar's customers) may still be possible - you could attack the firmware of the card reader, as described in [1] by Adam Caudill of BadUSB fame. Without breaking that firmware, however, you can't connect USB network->Card reader->USB hub, and you also probably can't connect SDIO/SPI network->SDIO-based-card-reader->USB hub.
There's also the possibility that the card itself can run untrusted code. Just like a USB drive, an SD card typically contains a small 8051 [2] or ARM [3] microcontroller. Running a compromised controller would give the attacker access to all the data that's ever sent to the SD card, but one would hope that Briar does not cache unencrypted data to the uSD card which the user is expected to write to an physically pass to a potential adversary.
Also, be aware of products like the Toshiba FlashAir Wifi SD card, which implement a wireless adapter in an SD card form factor. Replacing the label would be trivial, and it could broadcast or connect to a hidden wifi network without your knowledge. But again, one would hope that Briar does not cache unencrypted data to the SD card where it could, with one of these cards, be exfiltrated wirelessly. I think this capability is only available as an SD card or an obvious uSD-to-protruding-SD-card adapter form factor, not as a microSD card which would typically be used in a mobile device.
Of course, there's still the possibility that the host OS does something stupid, like autorun an executable on the external media...but that's more of a badly configured Windows PC problem, I expect that modern mobile devices do not do that.
[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/a/109595
Hey fellow protester, here is a binary for you to install on your device. That doesn't sound dangerous, right?
I wish it wasn't this way but a communication app that only serves Android is severely limited and won't make the cut on my Android phone.
Namely, things cannot operate easily as a background service. Forcing the user to jump though many hoops to make it work. And since it is not an apple service. There is a single button "reset settings" that breaks all the users changes for these apps.
On one hand it is generally more secure for iPhone users, on the other hand it greatly inhibits some types of innovation.
But it doesn't change the fact that other tools are available which do serve both and are thus much more practical.
There is a severe usability and practicality hit as a result. But if you have friends who interested and paranoid then it is quite worth it.
Don't think so: https://briarproject.org/about-us/
Most people won't carry a second device for just one app.
Is there anything to follow? A list of public accounts/blogs? Or is the only option to get real-life friends to join, and follow only them?