Yeah, IMHO Signal is the right balance of usability and privacy. Problem with not having a user ID is that you can’t easily use the application on multiple devices at the same time and if you lose the device, or don’t properly migrate to a new device, you will have to start over building your connections to others.
But the real issue with no user ID or centralized platform is discoverability. Same reason things like gpg for email never caught on. You can’t just type in a person’s phone number, username, or whatever and start talking to them. It only works if you have another line of communication with each person to set up the connection. This is usually the deal-beaker.
But the problem with user IDs is that anyone can create as many as they want and use them to avoid spam and abuse filtering. So that’s why phone number is used by Signal as a unique identifier. It’s not 100% unique, but it’s good enough to deal with all but the most determined abusers.
Can’t speak to this incident, but i do agree that in general, free VPNs are not safe because usually they are funded by selling your personal information and web traffic data or performing MITM attacks to inject ads and thus compromising security, even if that’s not the intention.
That being said, Rise Up is a donation funded organization and is specifically run by a nonprofit promoting activism, so really it all comes down to your trust that org. The cost of bandwidth required to run a VPN is high, their site mentions it costs them about $60/person/year. So that money has to come from somewhere. If you’re paying, and it’s a reasonably trustworthy company, then it’s unlikely they will be willing to risk selling your data. But if you’re not paying, then the incentive to not sell your data just isn’t there, thus it requires more trust, IMHO.
Also, if they are a legit org and I take their product without paying, I’m taking that money from activists in places that truly need VPNs to stay safe from arrest or murder, so I generally don’t feel it’s moral to use it just to save money, but that’s me.
Because with stores, the evidence would be missing products. Very easy to see. With bugs like this, a million people could have abused it, or one. Either way that data is likely available to all who want it.
A better comparison is, store posted list of their customer’s addresses on the back door. No clue how many people walked by there much less if anyone copied it down.
Problem is that knowing the link between a person’s profile and their email now means you know the link between their account and their accounts in many other places. That information could be used to offer the person different prices at stores, attack them for being a minority or activist, to hack their account because their password was leaked from another site that uses that email,or all the other things these cumulative leaks add up to.
That’s what backups are for. No matter what solution I use, I would need backups. I used to use LastPass, but that just relied on LastPass to do the backups. I backup the database, but you can also periodically export the data and back that up somewhere securely on your own if you want it in a different format.
It’s not a private messaging platform, it’s an anti-censorship messaging platform among other things. If you’re looking for privacy, this probably isn’t the application for that. Though it is somewhat possible to make it more private, that’s not the primary use case. If you’re looking for a platform for public conversations where corporate interests of the day won’t cause your messages to be censored, then Matrix might be useful. But moderation of spam, hate content, etc., is also not going to be robust in general.
I have it set up with “only not embedded” and then I let the preview load and click on the YouTube link to make it pop out and it redirects to Invidious and works. Not directly watching it embedded, but it works well enough for me. I just tested this site on my phone and it worked. Should work on desktop similarly. Just with this you have to get to the point where it loads the preview of the video at least, so you can click to open it outside of the embed.
I use librewolf on desktop and IronWolf on mobile with the libredirect plugin. And I have a pihole that does ad blocking, so eventhough I don’t have YouTube totally blocked, it refuses to play even with a wide open browser.
I’ve never gotten the embedded option to work, but Google is constantly fighting Invidious, and pop-out is a minor inconvenience for me.
No. I don’t use DoH inside my network because I redirect DNS traffic on my primary VLAN to a pihole for ad and malware reducing. But I also control what has access to that VLAN pretty strictly. I have another VLAN for guests and untrusted devices that doesn’t use the redirecting, but does use the Unbound server as the default DNS, just doesn’t enforce it. And I have an even more locked down VLAN for self-hosted servers that also doesn’t use the pihole, but does use Unbound.
I use a local unbound DNS server on my router with Quad9 as upstream. I actually have google DNS entirely blocked/rerouted on my router because google uses it for advertising tracking, but I get creepers out by targeted ads showing up in random places when I do do something on a totally unrelated site. Most important thing, though, is to use DNSSEC DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS to reduce middlemen from using your DNS info to track what sites you visit and sell that data. Of course ISPs still see the destination of all of your data for tracking what sites you visit unless you use a VPN or similar tools, so you can’t hide it from them that way.
Edit: DNS over TLS not DNSSEC, totally different thing…
Matrix isn’t more secure/private than Signal. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Signal has a centralized server, but has no access to the keys to decrypt any of the data flowing through them. Matrix chat rooms live on servers that would theoretically be able to access the data in the rooms, so you need to trust the server owners. Advantage is that multiple servers are involved so no one sever can kill your chat room. With Signal, the disadvantage is if you join a chat room, you can’t see any past messages because those are encrypted with keys you don’t have access to. Similarly if you move to a new device, that device won’t have any of your past conversations because the new device doesn’t have the keys for those messages. (though migration is now somewhat possible but done poorly IMHO).
So, they address different concerns. Is your concern keeping your conversations private, or keeping your conversations from being censored? Signal is more secure and private, but more centralized and easier or to fail. Matrix can be secure if you host your own server or explicitly trust the owners of all servers that house your chatrooms to keep them secure and to not sell their servers in the future. Matrix is more distributed, so more difficult to be censored or have your data lost by a single point of failure.
Is it “secure enough” depends on what your concerns are. If you host your own, then it’s as secure as you are technically able to keep them secure yourself. Otherwise it depends on the server owner.
Servers are always going to be owned by someone. But the data is encrypted with keys not available to the server. Signal isn’t perfect, and I don’t like some stuff they do, but it’s the best design out there that is also relatively user friendly and doesn’t have holes that are easy to exploit by the server owner.
Most advertising links are routed through click tracing sites so that they can add some tracking information about what advertising campaign brought the user there and what that user does while on the site among other tracking data. In the rare cases i want to see something from an email, I never click on links, I always copy the URL being displayed and paste it. You can get email clients that have settings to warn you about this or that will automatically use the displayed link and ignore the anchor link.
“There’s nothing to suggest that these people will be approached with any claims directly.”
No, but they’ll be pressured to testify with the threat of such a lawsuit. And if the RIAA wins, then ISPs will likely start giving the names to them openly so they can start those lawsuits back up again, at least in the US where it’s again no longer considered an essential utility service by the government thanks to Republicans. There’s a reason they’re not targeting the bigger ISPs that have enough money to fight back anymore. This way they can get a judgment to use against them later.