This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I mean...I guess thanks for the stepping off point? Android has the Briar Project, which couldn't be distributed for iOS due to Apple's license fuckery. I'm at least curious enough to look through this and see what they've done different.
I think the most useless part of this is using BT only which has a range of what...40ft?
It's definitely limiting. LoRa wan meshed network is more useful. But most people don't have a LoRa capable device. I could see something like this at a protest or public event at least. If there were enough nodes in the area the network could span hundreds to thousands of feet with the right conditions. But that's a big ask ATM.
Meshtastic requires bespoke hardware, it’ll always stay a marginal tool
This requires: an iPhone.
And someone will make a bridge from this to Meshtastic in a while anyway
There are plenty of situations where that’s useful, especially if you can have group chats with images. Think airplanes, weddings, concerts, sports arenas. And if you have meshing and store and forward when nodes are moving around, you can cover a large area that may not have internet. It’s a legitimate tool that no one has done right yet - and as apple only, this is t yet either.
Oh great, yet another secure messaging app.
Getting people to move off Messenger or even WhatsApp is tricky enough already for to interview and resistance to change. But even when you can coax them to move, you then often end up in a debate about where to move to. Signal, Briar, Viber, whatever proprietary thing Apple is currently pushing, or the thousands of other options/apps. I guess we can just add this one to that long list.
I mean, what is actually needed is a secure messaging app that scrapes wraps existing apps. So when two people send messages through FancyMessages, they are secure. But then if only one person has FancyMessages, and the other has Facebook messenger, then they could still comminicate - the FB user using Messenger as usual, and our hero's FancyMessages app picking up the FB messages and passing them on through the FancyMessages UI.
This is a great idea, but it would be difficult to manage.
It reminds me of the instant messenger wars during the late 1990s/early 2000s.
AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) had a virtual monopoly on the industry, and so when Microsoft started breaking into it with MSN Messenger they cracked AIM's protocol so their users could communicate with AIM users. This enraged AOL, and there was a wild cat-and-mouse updates battle for a few months. AOL would push an update to block Microsoft, then Microsoft would push an update to get around that. Sometimes there were multiple updates from both sides per day.
And then there was Trillian messenger just sneaking through the middle providing access to both, mostly unnoticed (at least for a while).
Signal used to work this way and I'm still mad they dropped SMS.
Beeper is like this, but the list of supported messaging apps is limited. It does have FB messenger though.
This is nothing like the ones you list, this is local only no internet
Okay. But one of my points still stands that there are already a bunch of p2p Bluetooth-based messaging apps out there.
And more is better so people get used to using them and skip the telcos and other stuff that can be tracked
So he took a page from Apple, copied Firechat, and will offer it to users who use Apple products. Yeah, okay, nice, I’m in.
He should try a cheeseburger once in awhile.
This reminds me of the times I was saving text files on my phone and sending them to random classmates, which makes me think that if two people (especially between iOS and Android) want to communicate in BT, there is no need for a third party app.
Well that's odd, on the apple App Store there is a 4 year old Social Networking app called BitChat, that appears to mostly be in Japanese. I think I'll stick with Signal.
I really like this despite using nothing Apple.
Briar if you're on Android
Briar is the much better and much more mature version of this.
I actually liked the way this particular thing works, I've visited the repository and it's much like a real version of my toy of two months. (Except my toy doesn't work for anything real)
My mobile stuff is on Android, but Briar desktop (despite being a Java application?..) swears at "unknown OS FreeBSD" and doesn't run.
Sorry, I'm not a dev on the project, just have an interest in secure communications.
Yes, I didn't think you were, just shared ... In any case under Linuxulator with Linux JRE it swears a lot, but seems to work.
That's what my friends and family use!
Really not interested in anything the guy with the terrible facial hair wants to make.
💯
