Most modern web breaks without Js though.

ha

yeah turning off js means that you can’t really use most sites

Pretty much yeah, and they’ve had a really good marketing campaign too. They got a whole bunch of prominent tech influencers incessantly pushing it, and it just feels like a massive astroturf campaign to me. Like you said, if a random person pitched this idea, they’d be laughed at, but you get some people with clout to do it, and it sticks because everybody respects them and trusts them.

I also find it really weird how aggressively Signal is being pushed everywhere, and how any criticism of it gets dismissed or ridiculed. It feels a bit like a cult at this point.

The problem is that you just have to trust them because only people who actually operate the server know what they do or do not store. Trust me bro, is not a viable security model. As a rule, you have to assume that any info an app collects, such as your phone number, can now be used in adversarial fashion against you.

It’s also important to continue educating people about the fact that Signal is incredibly problematic as well, but not in the way most people think.

The issue with Signal is that your phone number is metadata. And people who think metadata is “just” data or that cross-referencing is some kind of sci-fi nonsense, are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern surveillance works.

By requiring phone numbers, Signal, despite its good encryption, inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.

Being able to map out who talks to whom is incredibly valuable. A three-letter agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a “person of interest” for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.

Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It’s a perfect filter: “Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto.” You’re basically raising your hand.

So, in a twisted way, Signal being a tool for private conversations, makes it a perfect machine for mapping associations and identifying targets. The fact that Signal is operated centrally with the server located in the US, and it’s being developed by people with connections to US intelligence while being constantly pushed as the best solution for private communication should give everyone a pause.

The kicker is that thanks to gag orders, companies are legally forbidden from telling you if the feds come knocking for this data. So even if Signal’s intentions are pure, we’d never know how the data it collects is being used. The potential for abuse is baked right into the phone-number requirement.

I’m actually building LoRAs for a project right now, and found that qwen3-8b-base is the most flexible model for that. The instruct is already biased for prompting and agreeing, but the base model is where it’s at.

Yup, and this is precisely why it was such a monumental mistake to move away from GPL style copyleft to permissive licenses. All that achieved was to allow corporations to freeload.

I very much agree there, but think of how much worse it would be if we were stuck dealing with proprietary corporate tech instead.

How is that wishful thinking? Open models are advancing just as fast as proprietary ones and they’re now getting much wider usage as well. There are also economic drivers that favor open models even within commercial enterprise. For example, here’s Airbnb CEO saying they prefer using Qwen to OpenAI because it’s more customizable and cheaper

“We’re relying a lot on Alibaba’s Qwen model. It’s very good. It’s also fast and cheap,” he said. “We use OpenAI’s latest models, but we typically don’t use them that much in production because there are faster and cheaper models.”

I expect that we’ll see exact same thing happening as we see with Linux based infrastructure muscling out proprietary stuff like Windows servers and Unix. Open models will become foundational building blocks that people build stuff on top of.

Honestly, I suspect it makes very little difference in practice which one you’re using if you’re going to communicate with people outside Proton. If I use Gmail, and you send me an email from your Proton account, guess what happens.

exactly

yup email is just fundamentally not the right tool for this

Right, which really suggests that email is not the right medium if you want genuine privacy.

Right, understanding what your threat model is important. Then you can make a conscious choice regarding the trade offs of using a particular service, and you understand what your risks are.

Metadata tracking should be very concerning to anyone who cares about privacy because it inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.

Being able to map out a network of relations is incredibly valuable. An intelligence agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a “person of interest” for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.

Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It’s a perfect filter: “Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto.” You’re basically raising your hand. So, in a twisted way, tools for private conversations that share their metadata with third parties, are perfect machines for mapping associations and identifying targets such as political dissidents.

you mean the Gestapo since GDR was integrated into the west German model

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

It’s so lovely to see how the mask has finally fallen off and we get to see the EU as the totalitarian regime that it really is.

This is the core of the issue, and it’s wild how many people don’t get it.

Your phone number is metadata. And people who think metadata is “just” data or that cross-referencing is some kind of sci-fi nonsense, are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern surveillance works.

By requiring phone numbers, Signal, despite its good encryption, inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.

Being able to map out who talks to whom is incredibly valuable. A three-letter agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a “person of interest” for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.

Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It’s a perfect filter: “Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto.” You’re basically raising your hand.

So, in a twisted way, Signal being a tool for private conversations, makes it a perfect machine for mapping associations and identifying targets. The fact that it operates using a centralized server located in the US should worry people far more than it seems to.

The kicker is that thanks to gag orders, companies are legally forbidden from telling you if the feds come knocking for this data. So even if Signal’s intentions are pure, we’d never know how the data it collects is being used. The potential for abuse is baked right into the phone-number requirement.

Yup, very similar stuff.

ha!

I’m sure that’s what was going through the mind of that one downvoter 🤣

Radicle is really worth checking out https://radicle.xyz/

The only people who know what the server stores are the people running it.

I’m simply explaining why it’s difficult for people to move from existing networks.

Oh yeah the whole thing is a mess. It kind of blows my mind that we still don’t have a single common protocol that at least the open source world agrees on. Like there is a more or less fixed set of things chat apps need to do, we should be able to agree on something akin to ActivityPub here as a base.

The explanation is obvious. The phone numbers are a personally identifiable network of connections that is available to the people operating Signal servers. If this information is shared with the US government, then they can easily correlate this information with all the other data they have. For example, if somebody is identified as a person of interest then anybody they want to have secure communications would also be of interest.

One of the big problems nowadays is proprietary protocols. Back in the day, you could have a single client that could talk to different networks. Today you have to run a bunch of separate apps, and what’s worse is that a lot of them are built with stuff like Electron that’s resource hungry.

It’s network effects. People have other friends on the network who have their own friends on the network, and so on. Leaving the network means convincing a critical mass of your network to leave along with you.

Oh for sure, I find most tech news articles are just painful to read nowadays. I also distinctly remember this was not the case before.

I don’t think they actually understand that Mastodon is a network in a traditional sense that works the way the internet was meant to operate before the corporate takeover. People have been so conditioned that the internet is just 5 corps in a trench coat, that they don’t have the cognitive tools to engage with something like the fediverse.

Exactly, even is Signal is secure across the wire, if you have a kit like Pegasus on your phone then it can just capture keyboard input, and screen output, entirely bypassing Signal itself.

I mean this has already been happening for years with stuff like Google home and Alexa.

https://ludwig.guru/blog/the-jesters-privilege-or-the-power-of-being-unheard

I thought we were talking about China as opposed to autocratic western regimes.

No, it’s because lemmy.ml doesn’t tolerate racism the way you fash instance does.

You can literally access the fediverse from China. It’s frankly incredible that somebody can be this ignorant. 🤣

My comment likewise touches on the fact that people living under western regimes are disappeared in regular course of business. In fact, there’s far more evidence for people disappearing without any reasonable grounds in the west than there are in China.