I’m always amazed how people come out of the woodwork to defend Signal any time any criticism of it comes up. It’s become a sacred cow that cannot be questioned. Whatever you may think of Telegram should bear zero weight on your views of Signal.

The reality is that developers of Signal have close ties to US security agencies. It’s a centralized app hosted in US and subject to US laws. It’s been forcing people to use their phone numbers to register, and this creates a graph of real world contacts people have. This alone is terrible from security/privacy perspective. It doesn’t have reproducible builds on iOS, which means you have no guarantee regarding what you’re actually running. These are just a handful of things that are publicly known.

And then we know stuff like this happens. NSA suggested using specific numbers for encryption that it knew how to factor quickly. The algorithm itself was secure, but the specific configuration of how the algorithm was implemented allowed for the exploit https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/nsa-crack-encryption.html

These kinds of backdoors are very difficult to audit for because if you don’t know what to look for then you won’t have any reason to suspect a particular configuration to be malicious. Given the relationship between people working on Signal and US government, this is a real concern.

The same kind of scrutiny people apply to Telegram and other messaging apps should absolutely be applied to Signal as well.

I find it weird how any discussion about Signal will inevitably have a bunch of people piling on dismissing any criticisms of it. Believing that Signal is perfect has become like a religion at this point. Whatever people might think of Telegram is completely irrelevant when it comes to the question of whether Signal is actually a secure tool or not.

The fact that people working on Signal have direct ties to US intelligence agencies cannot be ignored. No can the fact that Signal is a centralized system based in US. These two things alone should make everybody very concerned.

I thought the entire purpose was to watch content that region locked?

LMFAO

Let’s face it, the goal was never privacy or security. The killer clowns in charge of US regime are simply upset that there’s a popular social media platform they don’t control. This is about bullying China into selling this platform to US oligarchs. It’s sad and pathetic, and it’s not going to happen.

And my point was that the increasingly authoritarian government will eventually go after people who are trying to protect themselves in this way.

Working around laws that ban E2E encryption will ultimately be seen as subversive and the legal system will go after people doing this, what part of this is unclear?

I swear, I’m just gonna laugh at these clowns, honestly, and just PGP encrypt my messages that they can intercept in plain text. So fuck them. I don’t actually think they will win, but even if they did, it will only hurt law abiding people and will make no a difference to non-law abiding people.

yeah that’s very clearly the direction EU is headed in

a person who doesn’t go with the flow

I’m sure people were saying the same thing in 1930s Germany.

Give it a few years and EU will pass some laws to round up trouble makers like yourself.

It’s true, people living in Russia and China will safe from this.

It’s safe to assume they were not providing data to anyone at the time, and perhaps they are not now. Thing is that you don’t know that, and it’s a relationship fundamentally based on trust. There’s nothing wrong with trusting a company like Mullvad, but it is just trust in the end.

First of all, nowhere did I say anything about trusting any hosting provider. The point once again was about jurisdiction of the provider. Meanwhile, there’s nothing more arbitrary about picking a hosting provider than a VPN.

The only thing that actually matters is the jurisdiction. If your hosting provider is in a place that the country you live in can’t legally force to hand the data over then you’re much better off than using a service that may be sharing data with your government.

I agree, it’s all about understanding what the actual value these services provide is and what the risks are. There are legitimate use cases, but it’s important to be aware that it’s not a panacea.

yup that’s basically it

Another option, if you have technical skills, is to just run your own VPN which tends to be pretty easy to setup on a VPS nowadays. You can find a VPS provider in a jurisdiction you want, and you control what gets logged.

Network effects do make it really hard for any new platform to displace the incumbents.

There is no way to know whom the trustworthy VPN provider shares data with. That’s just the reality. And sure you’re back to square one if you don’t use a VPN, but the point here is that people think that using a VPN is much safer than it actually is. Furthermore, another option is always to just run your own VPN that you can host in whatever jurisdiction you want.

I don’t need to look it up. I grew up in USSR, and I liked my life there while it lasted. What followed after was hell, and anybody who thinks capitalism is a good system is a piece of human garbage.

Wow what an amazing counterpoint you’ve mustered there.

Actively working on it dronie. It may surprise you, but learning a new language and uprooting your whole life to move to a different country is a difficult process.

Some are doing better than others, but emissions aren’t meaningfully improving in most other industrial countries.

The Uyghur narrative is completely made up and has been debunked to death at this point. What Israel is doing in Gaza is directly enabled by the west. Likewise problems in Myanmar are also linked to US operations. Meanwhile, people are literally fleeing South Korea to the north at this point. South Korea is a direct product of western occupation. So yeah, much of the horrors going on in the world today can be traced directly to the western empire.

the only cringe is that you keep commenting here

Sure, capitalism needs to be abolished for humanity to thrive.

Sure, but some countries are leading the change and others are dragging all of us down https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/business/us-production-oil-reserves-crude/index.html

you keep on seething there little buddy, it really suits you

Climate change affects everyone, but that doesn’t mean it’s an unsolvable problem. In fact, at least one country is far along the path of mitigating it.

These must be western values we keep hearing so much about.

Never gets old how westerners see themselves as the world.

indeed

I think the most newsworthy part of this is that UK monitors private communications of British citizens. The person was making an obvious joke within a private snapchat group of his friends who knew this was a joke. There was no threat and no hoax because this was a private chat where everybody had context that this was a joke. This is what life in a dystopian surveillance state is like.

This is precisely why I’ve never found Chromium based browsers to be of much relevance. These are just skins on top of the rendering engine which is the core of the browser and that’s entirely controlled by Google. People kept ignoring this and now we’re in a situation where Chrome and its derivatives dominate the market to the point where sites no longer care whether they follow W3C specs as long as Chrome renders them. We’re now back in pretty much the same situation we were in the days of IE.

It’s depressing that people were unable to understand where things were going until Google started doing blatantly evil things. The only thing that was keeping Google in check before was the fact that it was lack of market dominance. Google is an ads company, and there is a huge conflict of interest with them being the gatekeepers to the internet.

LMAO hope they do another purge of CIA operatives https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html

Easier to list what’s not really.

This extension works pretty well https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome