I read through the whole list, and monero was the only decent privacy recomendation I could find. Everything else was US-hosted. A lot of it was just recommendations from Apple and Google on “privacy” services they offer.

No mention of syncthing, matrix, xmpp, even with sections dedicated to those categories.

Yes, I believe all the messages are in plain text, and it’s up to the server not to log it.

It is possible to e2ee the message content yourself tho.

Edit: it looks like ntfy.sh specifically keeps messages cached in memory for a few hours befor discarding them. https://docs.ntfy.sh/config/

One feature that genuinely is cool that keeps getting better (at least on lots of android models) : battery life and charging speed.

My OnePlus 12r has a 2 day battery life, and can charge from 0-50% in like 10 minutes.

Its so good that I use the 80% max charge setting to preserve the battery for a few extra years.

At this rate I could totally see a future where we can fully charge phones by plugging them in for less than a minute.

I really wanted this, but couldn’t find anything than worked well. I ended up using tasks.org, an open source todo list that has great calendar functionality and syncing, and moved all my calendar events to it.

Hedgedoc or etherpad work.

That rabbit hole goes very deep, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to speak on it. It could very well be a crypto AG style honey-pot, or already cracked tech, that we might not know about for years to come.

There is no reason to do any of that. No one forced signal to use phone numbers as their primary identifier, and plenty of privacy oriented chat programs don’t require that.

I’m sot trusting anything from signal themselves, just like I wouldn’t trust anything apple, microsoft, google, or any other US-based company with centralized services says about themselves.

That got added recently, but you still need a phone number to sign up. A phone number is tied to your identity, meaning that signal’s database has the names and addresses of everyone who uses it. And since signal is US-based, its subject to US national security letters, meaning its illegal for signal to tell anyone that the US government has requested information about who they’re talking to.

Under the Obama administration, an average of 60 NSLs were issued every single day.

I think they even have pen (like, writing pen) cameras that can fit inside a front pocket for pretty cheap.

Give me your phone number so I can chat with you on signal about this.

The US-state-department funding is important sure, but you also ignored every other point in that article.

Almost all those can be self-hosted, and built from source, so matrix, xmpp, simplex, are fine. Don’t use anything that’s uses a centralized server in a five eyes country, like signal or threema.

This tech could easily work with any type of camera too, that’s a lot harder to identify than glasses with a light that turns on when its recording. Hidden cameras on pins, necklaces, clothing, etc.

You can install a gemini / gopher browser to see what sites look like with them.

You can’t self-host it. People asked for this feature, and were harshly turned down by the signal devs. If you don’t believe me, then try it yourself.

Makes sense, although it’d be nice for privacy-oriented people to have this thin-layer that converts any site into a de-bloated version that they can view safely. As far as I know, there isn’t any tool that even provides this option right now.

I think Gemini or Gopher includes both. They don’t read html / javascript, so they definitely wouldn’t look the same.

That says nothing about what they actually run on their server, or who they allow to look at their database. Most importantly, you can’t self-host signal anyway, so posting the source code for something you can’t verify that they even run, is pointless. They went a whole year one time without updating that repo, until the open source community made an uproar about it, and signal was forced to start updating it again.

The Gemini protocol is really interesting. The site markup is so minimal, that people can (and do) create browsers for them from scratch, in a way that would be impossible for html web browsers.

I’m probably in the minority with this opinion, but I genuinely hope web browsers die. Google all but owns the browser, with nearly every browser except for firefox being a skin on top of google’s browser engine. This situation is only getting worse, so I really appreciate the efforts of these alternative protocols to slim down and provide a privacy-oriented way to view what should be simple static content (text + pictures).

Source for China doing what the US does?

Totally pointless since the chokepoint is Signal’s US-domiciled back-end server, and Signal doesn’t allow you to self-host it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/

If this is for torrents, the binhex qbittorrent docker can do this for wireguard.

Great list of apps. The only few things I could recommend on top of yours are:

• tasks.org for tasks (and it can easily replace your calendar). It’s foss, and has good syncing / backups.
• You could move off aegis and put all your 2fa in keepassdx. It supports 2fa already, and has smart form filling for it too.
• Readera for ebook reading. Not FOSS, but its light and works really well.

I do this also, it works really well. I used to use ultrasonic, but that seems to be abandoned.

Anyone who has worked with centralized databases can tell you how useless that is. With message recipients and timestamps, its trivial to find the real sender.

Give me your phone number. I’ll quickly be able to find out where you live.

Anyone who has any experience with centralized databases, would be able to tell you how useless sealed sender is. With message recipients and timestamps, it’d be trivial to discover who the senders are.

Also, signal has always had a cozy relationship with the US (radio free asia was it’s initial funder) . After yasha levine posted an article critical of signal a few years back, RFA even tried to do damage control at a privacy conference on signal s behalf:

Libby Liu, president of Radio Free Asia stated:

Our primary interest is to make sure the extended OTF network and the Internet Freedom community are not spooked by the [Yasha Levine’s] article (no pun intended). Fortunately all the major players in the community are together in Valencia this week - and report out from there indicates they remain comfortable with OTF/RFA.

These are high-up US government employees trying to further spread signal.

You can read more about this here.

Spell check? If you mean smartphone keyboards, then yes, the non-foss ones are keyloggers. One of my side-projects is a privacy-oriented keyboard, but there are many out there that don’t require network calls to google or apple.

For sure. I’m convinced signal is supported mainly for the same reason’s apple products are: it’s got a shiny user interface and it’s simple to use. That let’s them overlook all the privacy dangers behind the curtain.

A gigantic US-based service based on phone-number(meaning real identity) identifiers.

This is the same Meredith Whittaker doing interviews with US defense-department aligned sites like LawFare.

Why are all these big tech sites like wired so interested in pushing signal anyway?

Does the EFF have access to signal’s server? Where they store all the phone numbers and messages for its users?

Why would the capitalists let you vote away their wealth or power? What incentive do they have to do that?

That’s defeatism.

No, it’s a historical reality that voting is not an effective method to undo class society. Even the ancient greeks knew (before the Marxists rediscovered this and dealt their own death blows to representative government in the 1800s) that voting in an aristocracy is nothing more than theatre, because only the rich and entrenched families have the resources to fund campaigns, and get themselves elected (or appoint political puppets to do their bidding).

Political power is a reflex of economic power, and the rich will not allow you to use the system they control, to undo it.

single ant cannot destroy a tree. It’s the work of countless ants that achieve that.

Many socialist / communist parties did just that, and they weren’t deluded enough to try to accomplish it via voting in a system controlled by the ruling classes.

No they’re made by those who possess economic power. That’s a tiny sliver of the US population.

It’s elections are nothing than political theatre, with a side goal of creating the illusion of democracy, and building consent for the dictatorship.

Voting will fix it, it’s worked so far. /s

They must’ve added that recently then, but still doesn’t get around the fact that they’re required, which means signal (and likely the US government) knows exactly who you talk to and when.

Wrong, you need a phone number to create a signal account.

The audits mean nothing for a server domiciled in a Five-Eyes country. Signal has your phone number, and the other phone numbers you talk to (social connection graphs), and it is 100% illegal for them to tell you that they’ve been issued a national security letter divulging that information.

The current president of Signal is also still happy to do interviews with US-defense-oriented think tanks like Lawfare.

They probably still are funded by USIntel, considering how interested RFA was in pushing Signal in privacy-oriented spaces.