I recently took a flight with family- on a budget airline that did not have Wifi, so we could not hop on WiFi and message each other using Signal. I wondered what other options there would be in the air- and remembered Bluetooth Communication apps- and had everyone install Briar- it came in haandy!
I like the built in Bridge option as well, (when the app communicates over the internet) to help avoid revealing the traffic is Tor traffic.
I have been impressed by the range of Briar- with a clear line of site, easily hundreds and hundreds of feet- i tested it to well over 500 outside- and on the plane , my family was scattered, but that was no issue at all. (More recently though i've detected my own Bluetooth MotoTag trackers from my luggage in Cargo holds while on planes, so Bluetooth indeed works well on planes.)
-I have heard of but have never used BridgeFy, which I know was a well known famous Bluetooth app that competed with Briar in the past. To my understanding it isn't quite as secure or open source.
There is a informative post here
https://old.reddit.com/r/Briar/comments/gxiffy/what_exactly_...
where a developer noted Briar's capabilities at that time- it seems due to some changes on the OS/phone Hardware end, and whatnot- and due to the phones only passing messages to contact nearby - Briar is not a true mesh networking app. It is a shame- i feel a true Bluetooth mesh networking app would be unstoppable in availability -though it might be a bit of a battery drain.
It is a shame Briar isn't on iOS also -
I also wish Signal would eventually consider communicating over any medium accessible- they would probably run into similar issue Briar has.
What will it take to get a Peer-to-Peer capable Bluetooth/Wifi/Celluar network using/(more possibly in the future)- proper optional mesh networking, Tor capable, VPN friendly, wholly end to end encrypted ,perfect forward secrecy including, fully open source App providing messaging (with the 'accounts' that Briar uses?), for Android and ios?(And Let's throw in PC Mac and Linux, so laptops could have a extremely user friendly user accessible way of doing this as well.)
Better yet, add Calling capability- i don't know how rough doing video calls would be over some methods like modern day Bluetooth- but even a rough capability would be used a little and be worth adding to the collection of things one could do(Briar is only Messaging at the time of this post- which is something notable for sure,as very few apps let you transmit solely thru Bluetooth<I have not heavily looked into the shared Wifi communication abilities of Briar at this point in time> - but more could be added in some form...I observe apps do exist that allow for Bluetooth calling or act like "Bluetooth" Walkie Talkies)
Unfortunately, iOS simply does not allow apps like Briar to run reliably in the background[1]. Unless Apple changes its thinking about iOS, Briar or other similar apps would never work reliably.
Switching ecosystems is a huge pain, I started with iPhone and eventually moved to Android and back again to iPhone. When you use a lot of the Apple/Google Services, it's not really easy to just switch over
I guess it's easy if a person cares enough about it? I'm the relative PITA in my family because I prefer to put everything on a paper calendar and mostly use my phone for Signal, iMessage, occasional email, some photos, and internet, including toe-dips into this forum as my social media engagement. I'm in my 40s, grew up with a Commodore64, and am disenchanted with computers now (while still using them for a few things- life's messy, and that's okay). Surveillance capitalism is more of a threat to much of what I care about (includes partcipatory democracy and mutual aid), and it makes sense to both push back and find a better path.
Humans have done okay for a hundred thousand years+ without computers, with some dark ages here and there when people get greedy.
No larger screen has ever had issues with permanent damage from regular use. They just aren’t a good fit for most people in their current durability state. Anyone who totally baby’s their phone can use them, but that’s about it. Also, they’re pretty much all in an extreme price bracket. You could buy a small tablet and a regular flagship phone for the price of one of the galaxy folds.
Surely you jest? There’s oodles of reporting on how delicate the flexible screen is. Fingernails can forever leave scratches on it. There’s plenty of reports of people having their screen randomly break despite no noticeable physical damage. Dust/dirt can get in the hinge and cause damage as well, despite advancements in the hinge design. It’s better now of course, but the physical limitations are still there.
People didn't like the OG Xbox "Duke" controller. They complained left and right.
I'm a tall adult male. Every other controller is tiny to me.
My max phone size is just about right on the ProMax iPhones. They should be a little smaller - but only a little, like 1-2 mm width. I've got big hands, and I love a big screen.
I don't need to do that, despite it not being hard to do, because I know that would be a waste of time because I can clearly see from the pictures in the reviews that it is far from perfect. You can definitely see the fold.
It would piss me off no end watching videos with a line down the middle.
Also, knowing that every time I bend it, I'm one step closer to the screen failing.
huh? Those things are a novelty. I may be aging into fuddy-duddy land, though. If I keep using a mobile phone, I like the smaller ones that easily fit in one hand and most pockets, I want it to last a decade or more (this iphone is from 2018, I think), and I like it just powerful enough for communication, browsing, and photos. Done with games.
To try to see another view, though, if the tech is there and not too harmful (that's relative- I think our venture into computer-land is immensely harmful in many ways) and durable enough, it seems nice to protect the screen? Except if grit gets between the glass?
Android isn't AOSP, and Android isn't open source.
It's safe to assume that every large tech company is spying on everything you do - including Apple. (Remember they're legally required to do so in the UK, and probably in more countries but it only leaked in the UK)
Android is more trustworthy not because of that but because it lets you install apps that haven't been approved by corporate overlords first.
I don’t blindly trust Apple either, but I believe enough of what they say and consider the gaps when they don’t say something. They fight things like the UK E2E encryption requests… but also, having owned both Android and Apple devices, and managing my own iOS devices and the Android devices my parents own, I definitely feel like the iOS devices are more secure and less prone to bad actors via App Store. I think safari is more anonymizing than chrome.
The (US) government already has too much access to us, and I think Android is more open to them than iOS. The government has cameras in public and access to our banking data, I’m not gonna protect myself from them by choosing one platform more than the other, or one bank more than the other.
What I don’t want, though, is to be annoyed to death or scammed. My choice is more front loaded by that consideration. If I find out that Apple accedes to backdoors though, I’d have to live without both Android and iOS.
Whether you want to call it a “restriction”, “a lack of permission without being X type of activity”, or “it works because the app exhibits Y behavior”, it’s all functionally a restriction.
You can run some background activities that are not audio apps, but you’re at the mercy of iOS’s decision to keep your task active or not. If you’re off the charger, all bets are off. iOS’s dev docs make this very clear.
I said NOT(rule in "fundamental restrictions") AND (rule is XXX). You showed (XXX in "restrictions"). It would have been sufficient to prove my statement false if "fundamental restrictions" === "restrictions", but it is not.
I am not here to debate meaning of words. If LLaMA 3.1 8B can understand the difference between a fundamental restriction and a restriction in general on its own, so can you. If you feel like this topic is worth your time for intellectual pursuit, feel free to debate with it: https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct I don't feel that it is worth mine. See if you can convince it the definition your are implying is more accepted than the one I am.
You say that, but then you dedicate a whole paragraph to my potentially (I’m not a native speaker, so it’s very possible) incorrect word usage :)
But also, I took your advice and had a chat with an LLM – seems like it's pretty much in agreement with my understanding of the meaning of "fundamental" as a plausible one.
In this context, fundamental just means something inherent to the system, like a thing that can’t happen because of the way the system was defined. A boat fundamentally can’t fly, because it wasn’t made in a way that would allow it to fly. This is different from a plane which is restricted from flying because of a no-fly order. There’s no fundamental restriction (the plane was designed to fly, after all) but there is something keeping it from flying. And maybe one plane get special permission to fly despite the no fly order—that’s a carve out.
So with iPhones, they are built in such a way as to allow background execution (there is no fundamental restriction) but Apple has made it so they cannot do so, with certain carve outs for things that people will want to be able to do while the app is in the background, like listening to audio or tracking the phone’s movements with gps. So there isn’t a fundamental restriction to background execution, it’s just a rule Apple makes (and then makes some exceptions to).
There are other ways you could use the word fundamental, as in something that is important because other things rely on it. But that’s not the way it was being used here.
Hope that helps!
Not sure what you mean with fundamental. As mentioned in the thread parent comment links to, the issue lies in enforced limits and lack* of general mechanism available to developers to allow background execution for any kind of app or/and purpose. No one said iOS itself lacks the functionality for background execution.
*In the same thread, it is noted that this lack is by choice and special-purpose mechanisms are preferred instead to prevent abuse.
It's not an issue of sideloading or censorship in iOS. It's a product decision related to background apps (they kill the running process with no recourse to bring it up again on its own).
In Europe it's been ruled that since Apple makes no pretense of being competitive, they don't have to be, while Google has to actually deliver on their open platform promises.
> so we could not hop on WiFi and message each other using Signal.
I have a feature request for this actually. I think if it got a harder push they would consider it. It's not full decentralization but does still prevent the concerns that Moxie and Meredith have stated.
It is like you say: I too wish Signal would allow for communication over any available medium.
Have you seen Meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/)? It seems like a similar concept but using dedicated devices and unlicensed ISM frequencies, and it's a proper mesh network (so you can even setup repeaters to provide better coverage for an area). I guess they wouldn't work too well if you're travelling to another country since you'd have to get the right radios for the country but it's a neat idea.
Furthermore, the latest build of Meshtastic mentioned some LAN networking, so nodes that don't have radios can still exchange messages if they're connected by some other means.
That seems just a hop skip and a jump from having a Bluetooth WPAN/WLAN that lets many phones share one or zero Meshtastic radios but still be able to talk to each other...
How was your actual UX with Briar? I tried to get family to use Briar during a flight and it was pretty poor. Messages wouldn't show up and we were worried about disconnecting from personal Bluetooth headphones while keeping using Briar. It worked okay and at one point my partner and I chatted about landing plans when the person next to us was asleep. But we found that just passing the phone around with typing worked just as well. It worked okay for the other family but again, was a pain.
It worked well! Most messages did go through! The caveat- I don't think anyone was also using Bluetooth headphones
500 feet outside was the test i did with a clear sightline- the inside of the plane was not quite as far, but the messages did go through - and we couldn't have passed the phone around when one family member was 5 seats behind me, the next was about 20 rows in front of me
I like the built in Bridge option as well, (when the app communicates over the internet) to help avoid revealing the traffic is Tor traffic.
I have been impressed by the range of Briar- with a clear line of site, easily hundreds and hundreds of feet- i tested it to well over 500 outside- and on the plane , my family was scattered, but that was no issue at all. (More recently though i've detected my own Bluetooth MotoTag trackers from my luggage in Cargo holds while on planes, so Bluetooth indeed works well on planes.)
-I have heard of but have never used BridgeFy, which I know was a well known famous Bluetooth app that competed with Briar in the past. To my understanding it isn't quite as secure or open source.
There is a informative post here https://old.reddit.com/r/Briar/comments/gxiffy/what_exactly_... where a developer noted Briar's capabilities at that time- it seems due to some changes on the OS/phone Hardware end, and whatnot- and due to the phones only passing messages to contact nearby - Briar is not a true mesh networking app. It is a shame- i feel a true Bluetooth mesh networking app would be unstoppable in availability -though it might be a bit of a battery drain.
It is a shame Briar isn't on iOS also -
I also wish Signal would eventually consider communicating over any medium accessible- they would probably run into similar issue Briar has.
What will it take to get a Peer-to-Peer capable Bluetooth/Wifi/Celluar network using/(more possibly in the future)- proper optional mesh networking, Tor capable, VPN friendly, wholly end to end encrypted ,perfect forward secrecy including, fully open source App providing messaging (with the 'accounts' that Briar uses?), for Android and ios?(And Let's throw in PC Mac and Linux, so laptops could have a extremely user friendly user accessible way of doing this as well.)
Better yet, add Calling capability- i don't know how rough doing video calls would be over some methods like modern day Bluetooth- but even a rough capability would be used a little and be worth adding to the collection of things one could do(Briar is only Messaging at the time of this post- which is something notable for sure,as very few apps let you transmit solely thru Bluetooth<I have not heavily looked into the shared Wifi communication abilities of Briar at this point in time> - but more could be added in some form...I observe apps do exist that allow for Bluetooth calling or act like "Bluetooth" Walkie Talkies)