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Joined 3Y ago
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Cake day: Feb 20, 2021

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It’s a talking-head video presentation on a well-known video publishing website.

Given your browser couldn’t show anything useful from that webpage, @kugmo@sh.itjust.works offered a solution: just feed the URL into mpv, which happens to be excellent at playing audio/video from web pages if you also have yt-dlp installed.


Siskin has been working well for some people I know on iPhone.

There used to be some settings you need to tweak, not sure how it is these days:

screenshots of siskin config screens showing how to configure it

Monal has also been getting some regular development and is worth trying out.


Huh? Why not use K-9 or Fair Email?

They’re both excellent email clients.


LineageOS still phones home to Google for most things.

Do you have a source on this? I thought LineageOS was completely de-googled now.



Conversations on Android and Siskin on iOS.

One non-techie parent has Siskin running on their iPhone and it hasn’t skipped a beat in years of messaging using omemo-encrypted XMPP. For servers, they’re on tigase.im and I’m on conversations.im.

Here’s a guide on optimum siskin settings; I don’t know if defaults are better now or not.

Conversations.im is free on fdroid but it’s well worth paying something to the developer directly.


Yeah, there’s a distinct lack of nonsense with Migadu.


It’s always crickets when the issue of improper poor ranking of XMPP is addressed in these threads…


Yep. Really need to compare the best-practice XMPP clients (e.g. Conversations, Siskin), not half-developed clients more suited to the XMPP landscape of 20 years ago. – Just as Matrix’s ranking in the table is high because only the state-of-the-art clients are considered – there are plenty of Matrix clients which don’t support e2ee, for example.

This list of mistakes isn’t exhaustive, but extending from poVoq’s mentions, here are some things XMPP(conversations) does actually have positive findings for:

  • End to end encrypted by default [OMEMO]
  • End to end encryption is available [OMEMO]
  • Voice/video calls are end to end encrypted [“calls are always end-to-end encrypted with DTLS-SRTP”]
  • Utilizes Perfect Forward Secrecy [OMEMO]
  • Data is encrypted in transit [TLS and OMEMO]
  • You can verify contacts out of band [https://gultsch.de/trust.html]
  • There has been a third party code audit [2016]
  • Provider can scan for illegal content [If you send content unencrypted, otherwise no different to Matrix/Signal]

I’m not sure there’s much differentiation between any apps when it comes to “What can the apps hand to police?”; if the police have physical access to your device and app, they have access to everything you do on that device/app.





[Panquake](https://lemmy.ml/post/139820) have released some source code. Not for Panquake itself, but for a link shortening service. I suppose it's a brand-exposure exercise. https://talkliberation.substack.com/p/panquake-early-release-pnqk-now-available
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Here are the github repository, issues and comments immortalised for posterity in IPFS:

The issues and comments are in github json format – if anyone wants to collate them into a human-readable text or html file, please do so.

Edit: Its immortality of course depends on you to access and pin the content.


**"Mr Rolles was arrested in late June, when he was pulled off the street in Sydney for allegedly blocking roads and obstructing traffic."** > Since late June, Greg Rolles must produce on demand his computer and mobile phone for police inspection, and tell them his passwords. > > He is not allowed to use any encrypted messaging apps, like Signal or WhatsApp. He can only have one mobile phone. > [...] > > These are the strict technology-related bail conditions imposed on some Blockade Australia climate protesters — a development legal experts have criticised as "unusual" and "extreme". > [...] > > Defence lawyer Mark Davis, who is representing some of the Blockade Australia activists, said the vagueness of the prohibition was concerning. > > "It used to name the things you couldn't have, and then they made it all encrypted communication," he said. > > "It could be you're on your PlayStation." > > He also takes issue with the non-association rules, and the lack of specificity about what an "association" might be. > Mr Davis said one of his clients had been pulled in by police after they reacted with a "thumbs up" emoji to Facebook comments [...]
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Sure, an individual can prevent their own devices collecting data about them, but the paper is about all the devices surrounding a person in other people’s pockets/homes/workplaces: collecting data on – recordingthat individual.


[…] The researchers discovered that even if individual users turned off data tracking and didn’t share their own information, their mobility patterns could still be predicted with surprising accuracy based on data collected from their acquaintances.

“Worse,” says Ghoshal, “almost as much latent information can be extracted from perfect strangers that the individual tends to co-locate with.”

In many (most?) jurisdictions it is illegal to make a recording of a conversation either which you are not party to, or without consent of all parties involved; sometimes with consideration towards whether there was reasonable expectation that the conversation be private. Even when legal, there are often restrictions on how that recording can be used.

The laws aren’t always written specific to audio/video recording (not that always-recording by google/apple/amazon/etc isn’t a problem already…) – how does such surveillance figure in to existing legislation around the world?


DuckDuck…Gone: “Why not signal”
So, this is interesting. I wanted to find that essay by [@dessalines@lemmy.ml](https://lemmy.ml/u/dessalines) outlining the many issues of Signal and suggested alternatives, but DuckDuckGo had _nothing_ for me. Not on the first page, not on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th page. I thought maybe I just imagined the title, but sure enough, on searching lemmy posts, [it was right there](https://lemmy.ml/post/81033). Then I thought "hang on, there's hardly a mention let alone criticism of signal on any page of those search results!". Hmm.. the wording might be a bit ambiguous, but let's compare: - [DuckDuckGo "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/IeWpR) - NOTHING - [Google "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/j5tTb) - Plenty of results! Dessaline's essay is first up, followed by a plethora of discussions about the essay on HN, Reddit, lemmys, mastodons, and more. Not evil! ..this time. - [DuckDuckGo "why not signal" dessalines](https://archive.ph/09kpY) - Okay, so DDG has indexed it just fine. Maybe dessalines is "downranked" à la RT.com? - [DuckDuckGo "why not market socialism"](https://archive.ph/mKuAb) - Nope, finds one of dessalines' socialism essays just fine, half way down the page. All of the following except Gigablast returned a healthy list of results including the original essay: - [Qwant "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/T7EWn) - [Bing "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/MwiNa) - [Brave "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/4n1MA) - [Gigablast "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/Sjiwf) - [Mojeek "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/fRiUd) - [Startpage "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/7dhKj) - [Yandex "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/ffQLv) - [Paulgo (searxng) "why not signal"](https://archive.ph/ksOg7)
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