I detest a lot of modern forms of advertising as much as the next guy, but at the same time I think we'd be choking off a lot of interesting and enriching human expression by trying to remove it entirely.
I find it super interesting reading about goat and human sacrifices done by past cultures. It was a genuinely fascinating part of human culture, that humans thought that could help appease the gods to fix the weather, etc.
Just because it was done in the past, and is interesting to learn about, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t outright ban it.
Like many others, I was inspired by his great attention to detail, his diligence, and his curiosity, which served as a fantastic example for many people working on tricky and important issues in networking and other technologies.
I appreciate and applaud your inclination to sympathy, but I don't think saying words in your head will help him or his family. Perhaps instead you should let his family know directly that you found inspiration in his work - I imagine they would find that quite comforting in their grief.
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.
> I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues.
Yes indeed. I don't understand how the peer-to-peer relaying can possibly scale without some directed routing algorithm.
If my phone running Briar is literally handing off every as-yet-undelivered message to every other phone running Briar, we're going to pretty quickly become overwhelmed.
> It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay.
Let's think this through. Imagine civil war breaks out in Australia, and communications infrastructure is destroyed or shut off. I'm in Sydney and want to transmit a message to a friend in Perth.
How exactly is "everyone acts as a relay" going to work? In particular, how is it going to scale when everyone in the country is trying to do the same things?
> This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.
This is incorrect. Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think. Those nearby Internet-connected devices send the airtag's location to a server.
Nothing about this would work without the Internet.
Yeah, I think current tech assumes a server relay. However imo, and if I were to imagine a solution, in this case I think a message would need a ttl, say 24 hours. In a local mesh/hive everyone would store a copy of the undelivered messages. When people move between hives they would sync these undelivered messages where ttl didn't expire. With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. Undelivered means a destination user that didn't show in a hive. Wdyt?
> With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages.
If you want this to scale you'd need a scheme to deal with limited cache per device. Something like having each device assign a random priority to each message it has in transit. That way everyone culls a different set when things fill up.
> would need a ttl, say 24 hours
Probably better off scaling priority by age. That way you deliver if at all possible, until it eventually falls out of cache. Some people will be able to dedicate much more storage than others.
I do think this approach would be fairly tractable within "hives" where most of the members have few-hop connections to all of the others, most of the time. The trouble is that there would be so many unpredictable cases:
- Regular travelers between cities (e.g. flight attendants) might be the only reliable links between those hives. Travel patterns change, war breaks out, etc and the hive suddenly splits into two (or more).
- A lot of people probably move around too much, and too unpredictable, to participate in a hive that's stable on scales necessary to maintain a TTL of <24h and a reasonable amount of cache for storing others’ undelivered messages.
Maybe I'm being too pessimistic here… I do think it'd be fascinating and instructive to try to build and use a hive/mesh messaging system like this at scale.
Basically, if you visit the Galapagos and you're so inclined… you leave a letter for someone else, and you sift through the letters that have been left there, and try to find one or two that you could conceivably hand-deliver when you return home.
The latency is 100~1000x longer than "normal" snail mail. This is basically with one "hive" constructed around tourists and researchers in an unusual location. But it basically works.
> Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think
Yes, exactly (BLE, UWB, NFC).
First, Airtags only have a coin-cell battery. It is not remotely viable for them to be doing any sort of serious "communicating" because the battery would die in seconds.
Second, making the Airtag effectively a dumb device means you gain the various security and privacy benefits, and means everything needed to make the magic happen can be transmitted in a single BLE/UWB/NFC packet (bringing us back to the battery life aspect already mentioned).
> What's my AEAD again, what's my AEAD again?
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