gist/briar

Briar notes

Briar is a P2P over Tor messenger that can also peer over LAN and Bluetooth.

my-accounts.csv has list of my Briar addresses, as there isn’t support for multiple devices. They possibly should be in aminda.eu, but I don’t know what would be a good way to show them as browser integrated CSV viewers are rare and I don’t think these would be in so much demand.

Note that as per the FAQ, the connection request needs to be accepted within 48 hours by entering your Briar address. However after that introductions can be made without timeout concerns.

Briar doesn’t hold as big place in my heart as IRC or Matrix to have a dedicated page either and my HTML table tendency is effort even if the page wasn’t given a navigation menu entry.

Contents

• My account naming
  • Which accounts of mine you should care about?
• Briar desktop
• Further reading and quotes

My account naming

I tend to name my accounts Aminda-HOSTNAME (%Y-%j) e.g. Aminda-Lumina (2022-153) where %Y is year in 4 digits and %j the day of the year (001 to 366). However the older the Briar account still in use, the more random naming scheme there is.

This is by no means a security feature, anyone can name their device like that, it’s more of convenience should there be older and newer me on same device in contacts lists. This doesn’t either mean that I will remember this scheme or updating these files.

Which accounts of mine you should care about?

For more details such as the Briar links, refer to my-accounts.tsv.

• My Briar desktops serve my phones that only connect to network when charging
  • Aminda-Lumina (2022-153) has recently been more active and travels with me.
  • Aminda (SedricFlatpak-2022-075) home device that also runs Samba for PlayStation 2
• My phones are
  • Aminda-Janus (2023-061) - actually tertiary phone, but native Android and which I mostly use to post to forums to (via WLAN)
  • Mikaela - my main phone predating the naming scheme discussed earlier, but as it’s SailfishOS Android AppSupport important Briar features are not implemented and I don’t use it that much.
• My family devices that are seldom online don’t need to be cared about that much, but they have all the forums that my other devices if I have been sharing them.
  • Aminda-Zaldaryn (2022-161) - mostly seen when I am at family.
  • Aminda-Rbtpzn (2023-034) - 2006 desktop PC that really shouldn’t have Briar.
• Then there are deprecated accounts/devices that occassionally come online but are not a priority.
  • A replaced by Aminda-Janus
  • Aminda-Lumina-UserTest-2023-045 is a Briar test build instance as a result of attempting to contribute and test Briar flatpak.
• And dead accounts.
  • Aminda-Janus (2022-311)
    • factory reset on 2023-061. Note changed date number.

And to repeat one more time:

%j The day of the year as a decimal number (range 001 to 366). (Calculated from tm_yday.)

– Manual page strftime(3)

Briar desktop

Port: it will pick one and try to stick with it, so sudo netstat -plnt is your friend, look for java. It should be on LAN and link-local interfaces.

I install it from Flathub and at the time of writing it doesn’t support groups (where only creator can add users), forums (groups where everyone can add new users) or blogs.

Further reading and quotes

• https://briarproject.org/quick-start/

  • Please note that Briar will only synchronize messages with your contacts, not with nearby strangers who are running Briar. And it will only sync the messages you’ve chosen to share with each contact. For example, if you invite your contacts X and Y to join a forum, and they accept, then messages in that forum will be synced with X or Y whenever they’re within range. So you can receive forum messages from X in one location, travel to another location, and deliver those messages to Y.

  • But this doesn’t work for private messages: they’re only synchronized directly between the sender and recipient.

• https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ

  • Your Briar link contains a public key and it is safe to publish in the same way as a PGP public key. If you want to contact someone via Briar, both of you need to add each other’s links.

  • No, your online status isn’t exposed by publishing your briar:// link. Only your contacts can tell whether you’re online.

  • No. Unlike with adding contacts at a distance and its 48 hours timeout, there’s no such thing for introductions.

• https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar-desktop/-/wikis/Changelog

  • [0.2.0-beta 2022-02-22] Synchronize messages via local LAN

• #2081: Add to FAQ most frequent reasons why Briar fails to connect to a contact