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Comment by imhoguy | Hacker News Reader

Briar will thrive once EU Chat Control 2.0 passes, P2P E2E encryption is the only way to bypass bullshit laws.

Briar is dead because it doesn't work on iPhones. It doesn't work on iPhones because iOS will only allow waking the app from background when there's a push notification. Push notifications have to go through Apple's servers, which defeats the purpose of a decentralized app where your messages (and metadata) can't be traced.

What about a "fake push" that does not leak message contents, sender etc.? Fuzz the time the push notification is sent by a random amount of time and you have something plausibly private given the constraints?

You're still dependent on Apple continuing to allow such a use.

If the goal is messaging that avoids government spying or censorship its a lost cause - the government would simply compel Apple to pull the app in their jurisdiction.

That still exposes some metadata. Depending on your threat model, leaking the timing may or may not be a problem.

Also, how do you avoid leaking the sender? You can avoid giving Apple that information by routing the notification through a server, but then that server would know the sender and recipient.

Briar is designed to work over 1) tor, 2) ad-hoc wifi, 3) bluetooth. None of those are going to be conducive to sending push notifications through Apple's servers.

There are numerous iPhone apps that don't need push notifications and sync just fine.

"Open source programmers do not understand how to code properly for iOS" != "doing things in the background is IMPOSSIBLE on iOS!!!!!"

People just love to screech about iOS/Apple being evil.

Could come from Apple publicly saying a while back that killing apps doesn't save battery life because apps can't wake in the background. Might be sound advice not to kill apps, but part of that was factually untrue.

There is https://developer.apple.com/documentation/backgroundtasks which requires the user to have "background app refresh" enabled

only insofar as it is 1. not illegal to do so or 2. the cost-benefit of violating such laws makes sense for the majority of users, who are not doing things that are actually illegal

because without such a critical mass of normal users you get something like tor or grapheneos that the state begins to associate with people engaging in unsavoury activity

No, because most people (not on HN) value convenience much higher than privacy.

Only, if they manage to improve it, so that regular photos and voice messages can be sent. I am mostly fine with texting only, but such things are an instant no-go for most people.

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