Internet shutdowns or disruptions in connection with armed conflicts and mass demonstrations have led to people not being able to communicate or report abuses, which has caused further insecurity, violence and violations of human rights. Off.guard allows private individuals, journalists and human rights defenders to share information when and where deliberate disruptions of the occur.
It’s good to see human right orgs working on such tech.
I hope they take the opportunity to work together with existing similar projects, like Briar. This is a big project that’s going to take work to keep current, and to improve. I fear they have lesser chance of success if efforts are diluted on multiple competing/incompatible communication tools.
Did they just reinvent Matrix?
It seems to be a website with a stream of tweets? How are people supposed to view or communicate from the page when internet shuts down? someone fill me in.
Basically just a tool that runs in the background and keeps your feed up to date. When you have no connection at all, you will no longer receive updates, but still have acces to content up until that point.
From their website:
Off.guard is built using a module called service worker. By accepting push notifications in “settings”, Off.guard will be able to remain active in the background of your browser and continue to update. Even when a poor connection is detected your feed with information updates using web-push notifications, without the need of your attention. In case the internet would be shut down, off.guard always saves the created feed using cookies.
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Yes, that’s bad. It’s a first version aiming at a very special target groups, but I do hope they’ll support alternatives in the future.
The Briar Project already exists ;p
Took a long time following links to find:
In order for off.guard to work properly make sure to activate push-notifications for this website in chrome settings and click activate notifications below. Then off.guard will take care of the rest.
So it’s using net access to push info out.
I gave up finding more. Lots of marketing buzz words and little technical details.
- Briar exists
- Web push notifications obviously don’t work without internet
- They are telling people with a need for privacy in countries that are fine with shutting down the internet to use Google Chrome if you visit using Firefox
