41–50 of 187 posts
We already have email for things we need permanent record of.
We have seen the UK government magically lose phones and supposedly WhatsApp messages where we all presume illegal business was being done that financially benefits those involved. I think we need a blockchain version of messaging the does the opposite and using anything like this for government communication should have mandatory 5 year sentences attached.
Can't imagine a negative second order affect of moving all government discussions to the public /s
I dunno, I think being able to hoard your own data shouldn't be demonized or valorized? Fine with whatever the default is, but I feel like the subtext here is that Signal thinks people's phones are going to be increasingly compromised so this will be a more necessary, and the "remember the passing acoustic conversation" is just a way to put a less depressing spin on that.
The default, if I'm reading the article correctly, is to not disappear messages. What's new is the ability to disappear messages by default for all conversations, instead of having to remember to set it for each conversation. For some people (e.g. journalists) this is exactly what they need, because forgetting to set disappearing before sending a message could be problematic, and I'm glad they added this feature for…
But that is exactly what the default should be and what's needed to thwart large-scale blanket surveillance of the whole population.
If the mere fact that ephemeral messages are enabled raises a flag, that kind of defeats (part of) the purpose.
I really like the idea of disappearing chat. I want my chats to be like an old landline telephone call. Hang up the phone and the conversation is over and what we both take from it are the parts we remember. Massive backlogs of text conversations are just added digital mental baggage in the already overstimulated digital world I live in. We already have email for things we need permanent record of.
The max timer is too short. 6 months would be a convenient value - enough time to reference the messages while they might be relevant, but also not floating around forever
I really like the idea of disappearing chat. I want my chats to be like an old landline telephone call. Hang up the phone and the conversation is over and what we both take from it are the parts we remember. Massive backlogs of text conversations are just added digital mental baggage in the already overstimulated digital world I live in. We already have email for things we need permanent record of.
My view is exactly the opposite. Having suffered from the "I thought you said..." problem (where other parties recall a verbal conversation differently than me, out of forgetfulness on either of our parts or to serve their interests) for so much of my life I welcome these ubiquitous devices that augment my memory and provide black and white clarity to what was actually said. I have no nostalgia for lossy recall and t…
I know HN has a higher proportion of the reasonably-paranoid EFF-loving population, and I appreciate their push for options like Signal, but do you folks really prefer acknowledging that a secret number has changed every time someone screws up new device setup? I don't know how many times I've been saved by searchable chat in gMail or got a key piece of info from my Location History, or answered someone's question by scrolling back through https://myactivity.google.com/ - am I the exception?
And, hypothetically, if we were scheming terrorists or dissidents in a totalitarian state, who here would trust their conversations to _any_ mainstream communication tool, no matter its privacy reputation?
I really like the idea of disappearing chat. I want my chats to be like an old landline telephone call. Hang up the phone and the conversation is over and what we both take from it are the parts we remember. Massive backlogs of text conversations are just added digital mental baggage in the already overstimulated digital world I live in. We already have email for things we need permanent record of.
My view is exactly the opposite. Having suffered from the "I thought you said..." problem (where other parties recall a verbal conversation differently than me, out of forgetfulness on either of our parts or to serve their interests) for so much of my life I welcome these ubiquitous devices that augment my memory and provide black and white clarity to what was actually said. I have no nostalgia for lossy recall and t…
Interrupting conversations with “lemme check that” followed by fondling a phone is a nasty habit anyway.
Persistent messages seem like the obvious better default. 99.9% of my conversations have no obscene secrets, but a solid 1% have information that might be search-worthy. Hangouts / gChat seemed to get this right - extremely fast search and an "off the record" function for when you can't switch to an ephemeral alternative (usually a phone call). I know HN has a higher proportion of the reasonably-paranoid EFF-loving p…