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eyedeekay / brb

BRB(Blue Rubber Band) Wraps khlieng/dispatch in a WebView, configures both for I2P, and keeps it on your system tray. Modern-looking, no fuss Irc2P
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brb

A pseudonymous software for groupchat based on IRC.

STATUS: This project is maintained. I will respond to issues, pull requests, and feature requests within a few days. I am primarily fixing bugs.

BRB incoroporates:

An IRC Client - The actual IRC client is khlieng/dispatch and they deserve most of the credit! All I did was add I2P support to their application, then wrap it up in the interface I happen to think was the most logical. In it's most basic use-case, it's an easy-to-use modern client to the Irc2P network or any in-I2P IRC server.

Dispatch is the reason I call the client "Blue Rubber Band," because print newspapers are often called "Dispatches" and in the US are frequently "Bound" in thin blue rubber bands.

BRB also wraps up an IRC server, using terrarium, a spin-off of another IRC server called horgh/catbox, which I picked because it had relatively few features and a simple, self-contained implementation. In older versions it used an IRC server called prologic/eris which also has easy-to-setup I2P support.

Lastly, using eyedeekay/sam-forwarder, the WebIRC interface provided by Dispatch is then forwarded back to the I2P network as an I2P Site. In this way, anyone who connects to your Dispatch interface over I2P can chat with you or others without the conversation leaving the server hosting the Dispatch/Terrarium combination instance. When used in this way, it could act as an anonymous replacement for something like Slack or Discord.

In addition to that, it sets up:

BRB screenshot

  1. A taskbar icon: using the getlantern/systray library and an accompanying menu, which can be used to launch the IRC client interface.
  2. A menu clicking the taskbar icon will open the menu, which presents options for launching the webview, connecting the webview to either I2PRC or your own private IRC server provided by the local Eris instance, and a panel to check the health of your I2P router.
  3. A Webview: using the webview/webview library. It's configured to proxy all traffic to I2P via the default HTTP proxy, except for traffic which is destined for the dispatch IRC client. This makes it capable of browsing I2P sites. It is not reccommended that you use this feature for general I2P browsing, but it should be ok for opening links from parties who you trust to give you the link.
  4. An I2P Diagnostic View: using the I2PControl API we connect to I2P to gather information about it's readiness in another webview.

The result is a Modern-looking, no fuss Irc2P Client.

I2P Plugin

This was the first "ShellService" type plugin for I2P, a type of plugin which runs an external, usually non-Java application as an I2P managed plugin. This allows it to be correlated to the lifecycle of the I2P router that hosts it and is the recommended way to install BRB.

Android Support

brb is also available experimentally for Android. In this case, the webview parts are provided by the corresponding Android APIs. The final goal of the Android application is to implement all the same features as the Desktop application, including the Eris server. In this case, instead of a taskbar icon and a menu BRB provides:

  1. A Foreground Service: The Go parts of BRB are adapted to be "runnable" and controlled by a Foreground Service. This makes BRB "Work" on Android, but it doesn't have a menu to expose any of it's features.
  2. A NotificationArea with a tray menu: To set up the means to launch into various parts of the BRB app, a NotificationArea is added(persistently) into the toolbar at the top of your Android device's UI. It has the same buttons as the Menu on the desktop.

Enable the SAM API!

brb uses the SAM API to set up it's connection to IRC networks inside of I2P. This means that it can support as many IRC networks as you want to connect to. With i2pd, the SAM API is already enabled. With Java I2P, you must enable it on the Config Clients page.

If you do not want to use either the WebView or Chromium to wrap the user-interface, you can instead use any web browser and direct it to localhost:7669. There is a container tab for this in [I2P in Private Browsing](https://github.com/eyedeekay/I2P-in-Private-Browsing-Mode-Firefox). This should be a reasonable baseline for non-sensitive I2P browsing.