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Comment by kevinfiol | Hacker News Reader

Just wanna say this app saved my family and I when we went on a cruise. Normally, we would had had to pay to use the chat service via the ship's paid-only Wi-Fi (since we get no phone reception on the seas). Without needing to pay for the Wi-Fi, we were all able to use Briar to communicate whilst connected to the network, which made coordinating and finding each other on the ship way easier. It was great and worked really well. So thanks, Briar!

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I was pleased to discover that if I was within hotspot range of the person I was trying to talk to (approximately WiFi range), I could connect directly to their device and send messages over that WiFi connection.

It's great for things like concerts where service is spotty and you lose somebody, but know they probably aren't too awfully far away.

I'm a bit torn about this. On one hand, it definitely makes coordinating things last minute easier on a cruise ship. On the other hand, to me being nearly forced to untether is most of the reason for going on a cruise, so still carrying my phone around with me even if only to message family is partially missing the point!

Maybe I'll feel different with kids on a cruise ship, but honestly I enjoyed the freedom of spending my day with nothing but a wristband for everything I wanted.

Definitely depends on the size of your party. We were a group of five, split between three cabins on different floors of the ship. With how tremendously huge modern cruise liners are and how crowded cruises can be, I found it was invaluable. For example, being able to quickly message "I went back to the cabin" or "I'm on deck 6 at the table at the far back" or "meet you at the dining hall at 5pm" was very helpful.

Check out https://berty.tech for direct off network communications when you do not have internet.

How does this work? Do the two devices still need to be on some sort of net work accessible to each other? Two cell phones not on the same Wi-Fi are going to have a hard time talking to each other buy anything other than Bluetooth, no?

It is Bluetooth (Low Energy), yep. https://berty.tech/features

The site has some hard dependency of AMP, takes a long time to load when ampproject.org is blocked and then renders broken.

It looks very cool regardless, thanks for mentioning it.

It uses only BLE. What's the point when Briar is a better alternative?

I think it supports both. There’s options for off grid that includes Bluetooth and multipeer connectivity, and options for multicast dns and relay servers. As for the why: it supports Android and iOS so if you don’t have an Android device, Briar is basically out.

Does Briar work on iOS?

No, only Android and any Android-derivative that can run .apk files. For more convenient installation, it's available on Google Play and F-Droid.

Oh wow, I love this use case. I'd imagine it's also quite useful on a plane as well

Except I don't usually lose my family in the plane xD

I can see it being useful to type and chat between each other if we aren’t seated together on a plane.

We used it with my gf to make comments about other passengers quietly.

Sounds like a very important and constructive use-case :-)

Watching real life social and dysfunctional families interactions is much more entertaining than netflix or telenovelas imho. :)

I miss the days of mystery and adventure as a child, of being totally disconnected and unfindable, and lost without fear.

Because you aren't a child anymore or because you can't put your phone away?

I am in my late 50's and many women still call me a child (in a positive way), so I do not think that is my problem.

It is not about my phone use, but the expectation that I should always be findable since I have a cellphone. But I do admit to working at challenging my fear of living without a cellphone, but I am homeless so it is more difficult than when I had housing.

Fear is the hook I guess. It is ok to not know where your kids are or for them to miss dinner on a cruise ship.

That's cool and and me too, but I don't see how that relates to my use-case. None of us were lost or in fear or un-findable without Briar, it just made the trip more convenient for coordinating time and place between multiple parties.

Sorry, how exactly were messages being transmitted from phone to phone?

Were you connected to the Wi-Fi, with browsing blocked behind a paywall? And that was sufficient for Brair to find the other phones?

Sorry I may have communicated this poorly.

We were connected to the local area network, but we had no Internet access (which was behind a paywall). However, only being connected to the local network was sufficient for Briar -- no Internet needed!

To be fair, it would absolutely be possible to set up a hotspot where all the clients were jailed and invisible to each other, had IPs in different subnets, whatever.

Conventionally, I guess that sort of isolation doesn't typically happen as it's more work to set up and only really benefits users (privacy from each other), but maybe if more apps figure out how to take advantage of this things could change.

It’s not really more work; it’s just a matter of enabling the ‘client isolation’ setting on the wireless AP.

For example, see Cisco’s Meraki documentation: https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Firewall_and_Traffic_Sha...

> With Client Isolation enabled, clients will only be able to communicate with the default gateway and will not be able to communicate with any other devices on the same VLAN (or broadcast domain). In order for the wireless client to communicate with another device, the upstream gateway must be used to enable this communication (e.g. inter-VLAN routing and ACLs). Any traffic bound for an address on the same VLAN as a device in client isolation will be denied. Traffic bound for other VLANs will be forwarded and routed normally.

Even that extremely minor step counts as “more work” for the clientele we’re talking about here.

I would certainly expect a cruise-ship-wide paid network to be managed professionally.

Realistically though, it's probably a multi-ship contract involving some small IT firm who installs everything, and then gives the onboard electrician/maintenance-guy a quick primer on how to do basic diagnosis of problems.

I'd bet that most of the configuration decisions are made based on how to minimize the likelihood of such problems ever occurring.

But you can't use Briar and the like with this Client Isolation, can you?

Isn't that their point? The only reason it worked on a cruise ship connected to the WiFi was because local devices could talk to eachother and were not isolated.

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