
Briar Project - ColanR
https://briarproject.org/how-it-works.html
======
lolc
There are things you wonder why they don't exist. Then there are things where
you wonder why only bad implementations exits. I'd so far refused to install
messenger apps on my phone. Briar changed that. It looks like they know what
they want to exist and are not taking shortcuts.

So far my contact list has exactly one entry: The dude who showed me Briar
exists :-)

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pdfernhout
I wish the Briar project well and congrats to them on this milestone. With
that said, here is an essay I wrote in 2015 on "Why Encryption Use Is
Problematical When Advocating For Social Change" (prompted from thinking about
working for the Briar project): [https://pdfernhout.net/why-encryption-use-is-
problematical-w...](https://pdfernhout.net/why-encryption-use-is-
problematical-when-advocating-for-social-change.html) "I believe decentralized
knowledge sharing is important, especially for disaster preparedness. I also
believe encryption is important in practice, the same way as many people have
locks on their doors. Such things do affect a balance between state power and
individual power, which is important in a democracy, and they also make it
harder for vandals and criminals to operate. So, a project like Briar that
supports decentralized communications and encryption is important for those
and other reasons. Still, as my father (a machinist among other things) used
to say, "Locks only keep honest people honest." Here is a partial list of all
the ways a tool like Briar can fail when being used by activists engaged in
controversial political actions. ..."

In short, there are many ways that your privacy can be compromised when using
networked computers even if your software works perfectly at the application
level --- from the hardware, to the firmware, to the OS, to the network stack,
to user error, to people you communicate with being untrustworthy.

The conclusion: "If you want to build a mass movement, at some point, you need
to engage people. In practice, for social psychology reasons, engaging people
is very difficult, if not impossible, to do completely anonymously in an
untraceable way. People have historically built mass movements without
computers or the internet. It's not clear if the internet really makes this
easier for activists or instead just for the status quo who wants to monitor
them. If you work in public, you don't have to fear loss of secure
communications because you never structure your movement to rely on them. If
you rely on "secure" communications, then you may set yourself up to fail when
such communications are compromised. If your point is to build a mass
movement, then where should your focus be?"

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cosmojg
How does this compare to Tox and Ring?

~~~
mstef
the main dev of tox is kinda toxic to it's own project with kneejerk responses
like these:
[https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426](https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426)
and
[https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121](https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/121)
showing much more enthusiasm than competence when it comes to security and
crypto. while the people behind briar i got to know as reasonable and
deliberate people.

can't say much about ring, but a few years back i looked at the crypto and it
was boring, which some people argue is good, i was not sure about that in this
case. dunno how much they evolved since then.

~~~
wyoh
I thought Toxcore was forked and it was going better. As a packager I never
had any issue with them, they are helpful in the fork.

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theyinwhy
2 cents: \- love the fact you have to meet contact in person to add \-
forbidding screenshots is great as well \- why trust your own repo more than
f-droid repo?

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rkeene2
I tried to install it on my Chromebook from Google Play and was unable to do
so because Google Play indicated "Your device isn't compatible with this
version." :-(

~~~
grote
This should be fixed in the next release.

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cbluth
Congrats on the v1.0 release, team. Awesome!

