I blog about #technology #gadgets #opensource #FOSS #greentech #traditionalwetshaving #LCHF #health #alternativeto #hamradio (ZS1OSS) #southafrica - see https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog. I also blog to various other social networks which I list at https://gadgeteer.co.za/social-networks-i-post-to.

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Cake day: Jan 20, 2021

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A lot of speculation that does end with this in the article:

"After discussing her case with experts, Matsapulina now believes her Telegram messages may have been compromised by a form of spyware. When she was told that a hacking device would need to be physically nearby to infiltrate her phone, a memory resurfaced: At times before her arrest, she had noticed an unmarked truck with a dome on its roof parked outside her building. She had even jokingly mentioned it to friends on Telegram. Now, she remembered, as the police were banging on her door that morning, she’d spotted the same mystery vehicle parked outside. By the time the police stormed her home, the vehicle was gone.

Matsapulina has since started using Telegram again."

Most messaging apps are vulnerable on the client side with spyware, no matter what E2EE exists along the way.





Paid Proton Mail with my own domain name and own PGP keypair. Although it now has a way to securely search mail, I use the bridge service to allow Betterbird mail to sync my mail to my PC for searching.


Surely we need some context with this, as what we post is basically publicly visible. Even if we defederate the posts are anyway visible. Our IP addresses are probably visible to the home instance we connect to (or our VPN IP address etc) but how does our IP address then travel off with the federated post to someone following us on Threads? It’s only what travels out through the ActivityPub federation.

What would help with this post was, instead of just a link, maybe extracting the two or three issues that look problematic, and say why. That gives us something definite to actually debate.

For those who have friends stuck on Threads still, this maybe a good way for them to stay in contact. The Threads user gets their login times, IP address, location, etc tracked by Meta, and the Lemmy user with their Lemmy app, only identifies with their Lemmy instance. Threads should only be seeing the post and time that a Lemmy user posts something that is followed by a Threads user.


I think it is quite well known that only Telegram Secret Chats are true E2EE. That said, Telegram is still not in the business of selling metadata actively like Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta are. As far as plain features go, Telegram is streets ahead of Whatsapp. But if I needed real “secret chat” I’d probably use Threema, SimpleX, Nostr, Jami, etc where I’m not tied to my mobile phone number or e-mail address.


Yep too similar, and often both in a Linux gaming environment ;-)


Many of us Linux users may have been using Timothy Crosley's excellent app for Linux. But with the Pillow library causing a problem after it was updated, we realised Timothy seems to have disappeared. Within a week or so of that realisation, the project was now forked to https://github.com/streamdeck-linux-gui/streamdeck-linux-gui and even the AUR package has now updated from the new fork The bug was fixed and the Linux support is again fully working. The project has a coordinator, and a few people looking at issues, but it would be great to see if there are more devs who are interested in assisting, especially with adding of any new features. For example, users would like to see hold for repeat key presses, buttons showing dynamic display information, etc. So right now we can't expect too much to happen, but if any of you know any devs who may be able to assist, that would be greatly appreciated. It's a long shot, but maybe even someone from Elgato wants to unofficially assist as well, after all even though we use Linux, we have bought and support the Elgato Stream Deck. The more features we can use of it, means we are less likely to migrate off onto some other brand.
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They have just updated the ToS tho to now exclude using your data without permission for training AI. But Jitsi Meet is still a better option ;-)


No it’s not more secure going via Gmail. But what I did was to get the paid Proton Mail and I used my own domain name. So yes plenty pain and time now to slowly update my email address everywhere away from Gmail to my own domain name with Proton Mail.

But hopefully it’s the last time I have to update the email address everywhere, because even if I leave Proton Mail, my mail address is not tied to them, but to my own domain name so I can point that to any other mail provider.

So every mail address I’m changing now, is one away from Gmail. But if course 99.9% of businesses don’t Encrypt mail, so I’m only really cutting Google out of the loop (assuming the other party is not using Gmail of course).


I’m not sure RCS is yet complete enough. It was really designed with replacement of SMS in mind. It also needs to work independently of any phone number and ensure full E2EE.


RCS is more carrier based messaging and the whole stack is not built with proper E2EE as far as I know. No I’m thinking more like XMPP type open protocol, but endorsed by an international open standards body. I’m fearing that RCS is too tied to carriers just like SMS itself was.

Interesting that we already have a W3C standard for social networking but messaging itself seems to elude us…


I deleted Whatsapp a few years ago when I stopped working (would have been more difficult at my work). So now about 90% of my friends etc are on Telegram, and the rest have to phone or e-mail me. I see a few businesses offer some sort of Whatsapp line, but I phone or e-mail them. Just my fridge repair guy has this irritating habit of doing my card payment here and says the receipt will be sent electronically, but obviously it gets sent by Whatsapp and I don’t get it. I detest that assumption that “everybody is just on Whatsapp”. It’s not any sort of official standard like SMS is.

Personally, I really want to see E2EE open standards coming to messengers, like we have e-mail talking to other e-mail servers.


Actually no, sorry I see SimpleX is via a server. But why would Berty not work as it is offline and does iOS as well? Tox is another option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol) but bear in mind their point made, that if there is no central server used, both (or all) clients needs to be actually online for any connection. There is no store and forward server in the middle.


iOS especially is a problem for WiFi enabled apps or cell to cell direct. Could also maybe look at SimpleX https://simplex.chat/.


** Now in Android and iOS app stores ** No Face, No Name, No Number, No SIM card, No Internet! Berty is a messenger that doesn’t require any of your personal data or network connection (using Bluetooth Low Energy BLE). All conversations are encrypted with end-to-end encryption, in a fully distributed network. It is a peer-to-peer messenger with no servers, no cloud - your data is only stored on the device where Berty is installed and used. No one would be able to access the data or shut the app down, not even the developers. Being P2P, it means the IP address needs to be available to route messaging, but their site explains a bit about how they've tried to mask this. Whilst Briar is an excellent alternative, it is still Android only. The closest alternative is maybe Jami, but it lacks a non-Internet Bluetooth alternative if I recall correctly. Interestingly, Berty also can use Airdrop (iOS to iOS) and Android's Nearby as alternative protocols. You can share your details and add contacts via a QR code, public key, or an invite link. It is currently available on both iOS and Android, with desktop clients to follow. See https://berty.tech/ #technology #messenger #berty #P2P #IPFS #privacy
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Seriously any centralised social network hosted in the USA, Russia, China, Australia (to name but a few) is fully traceable, can easily be censored, and can be held legally accountable. No so easy with peer-to-peer networks or decentralised networks hosted across numerous countries. It's not impossible, but seriously centralised network = no privacy. See https://mashable.com/article/parler-first-amendment-fbi-users-outraged #technology #privacy #parler #freespeech
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