Briar Mailbox released to improve connectivity | Hacker News Reader

Briar Mailbox released to improve connectivity

briarproject.org

53 pointsslim11 comments

Briar would be a lot more fun if it supported public chatrooms, snipet/file sharing, etc. I don't know if they changed anything, but the last time i used it, I installed it, then bothered a friend to test it out, and since I couldn't find anyone else to use it with, i uninstalled it.

Cool that they made this. A little weird that it's for Android. Wouldn't it be better running on an always-connected server?

EDIT: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar-mailbox From the README right now it looks like they're open to it: "We want the mailbox to be as easy to deploy as possible. The target for this project will come as Android application since it will be easy to setup and besides a spare phone, no special hardware is required. Once this is done support for any hardware supporting Java (e.g. unix server, raspberry pi) could be added."

Looks like it's already there: on https://briarproject.org/download-briar-mailbox/ it says

> A command-line version of the Mailbox is also available when building from source (currently only on Linux x86_64).

The upside is that a LOT of people probably have a spare old Android phone lying around, and keeping it around will consume very little space or electricity.

> Briar Mailbox is a helper app for Briar messenger that lets you receive encrypted messages from your contacts while Briar is offline. Next time Briar comes online it will automatically fetch the messages from your Mailbox.

I never even considered that using Tor hidden services would mean you can't be sent messages when offline. Sounds like a useful addition.

"link [the mailbox] with your Briar account by scanning a QR code". Can a Mailbox receive for more than one device? Does the Mailbox get access to the messages (I assume not)? Sounds like having a few big servers would be useful here, and anyone who wants to self host can still do so.

Avoiding big servers is the whole point, so I doubt they'd support anything that would make that easier.

But I would love to run one phone-sized server for maybe a dozen friends, perhaps require mutual QR-scanning to get it set up.

Would this make it easier to implement Briar on iOS? AFAIK the largest hang up prior for iOS was that it cannot just constantly run in the background and thus would miss a lot of messages.

This looks like a nice addition --- however, communication does not live by Android alone. Lack of iOS support severely limits Briar's connectivity.

This can be useful in India where Briar is banned and in Manipur state, Internet is banned for more than a month now.

Hah, this reminds me of the IRC chatbot days. Some radio email software (winlink) can operate in a similar mode.

I wonder if there's an easy way to set it up on a Linux server/Nextcloud-type system?

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