241–250 of 262 posts
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I pushed some people to change to Signal. We are all back now and I feel pretty dumb for having done that.
Why do you feel dumb?
Whatsapp is actually an amazing app, now that I think about it.
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Time for people to look into Session ( https://getsession.org ). You get automatic native onion routing via decentralised infrastructure - currently 1800~ community-run servers (service nodes).
Session is based on a crypto scam though, that makes me hesitant to support it. And I otherwise have supported tor onion routing for many years so I'm definitely an idealist. Honestly I might be moving off to I2P instead.
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Time for people to look into Session ( https://getsession.org ). You get automatic native onion routing via decentralised infrastructure - currently 1800~ community-run servers (service nodes).
Still fraction of the size of the Tor network. Let's take another look in 5..10 years.
The size of the network will grow with time and using it obviously contributes to its growth.
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Session is based on a crypto scam though, that makes me hesitant to support it. And I otherwise have supported tor onion routing for many years so I'm definitely an idealist. Honestly I might be moving off to I2P instead.
What makes you think it's a scam? Do you mean crypto in general or the oxen project itself?
Now the founders could of course have idealistic goals in mind but we might never know that. Realistically there is no market giving that currency a value and they're asking for literally thousands of dollars just to support the onion routed network.
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Counterpoint - I'm completely happy with signal. The useability, contrary to some comments here, is wonderful. In particular I love the desktop app, it was easy to get family to use and does everything I need smoothly and with good privacy.
Sounds like you have a relatively new smartphone and never used Whatsapp.
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Because past experience matters and Facebook has failed quite a few times on the privacy spectrum
Right. I’m just surprised that WhatsApp was just called out as worse than Facebook messenger. Both are owned by the same company but one of them is technically much more secure. (Yes, FB has the keys to the kingdom and can technically do whatever they want, but it’s much easier to snoop on messenger than WA.)
Shiny stickers and broader user market vs privacy.
Almost constant uptime due to being owned by a multi million/billion dollar company vs a group that mainly runs on donations.
Etc etc
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While you are correct, I just want to clarify that by that I was talking about people living as subjects of totalitarian regimes or in places where their lives may truly be on the line if what they say in private would ever get out. These individuals may not have the means or the option of paying for the service (either due to being blocked or by potentially exposing them selves to said regime if they would).
This isn't really the primary issue with Signal, as the protocol is pretty well audited, tested, and cryptanalyzed. THE issue with Signal is using real phone numbers as identifiers. I know this point has been made repeatedly, but it's important to beat the drum, since it's recommended for journalists and dissidents, and that this "feature" will quite possibly get you killed if you're a dissident in a totalitarian sys…
But that doesn't change the fact that there are non technical people who are using Signal in places where they believe it will protect them.
And I am not cynical enough to be ready to say that they are not being protected in some way by using Signal rather than say email/telegram/whatsapp/facebook etc.
But the points you raise stand, and I agree. I would never use Signal for things that are highly sensitive.
But we are tech literate individuals. We are a wast minority.
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> "It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations." Completely agree with this point. Unless you are paying for the service (by being the product or via donations) you have no particular right to get upset with the creators of said service. > "What do you expect?" Professionalism and an understanding of the impact this will have on Signal's users. Some will be cut off from necessary communicati…
I definitely agree with you on a user level. But on a practical level, I wouldn't want to be on 24/7 pager duty if I was part of signal, not getting paid much, if anything for it. I don't think matrix is there yet as a good replacement, at least for my use case. It's just not mature enough. I know, chicken and egg problem, but I don't want to be debugging my primary form of communication. It's too important.
After all there is a well funded foundation backing the development and operations of the platform.
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Why do you feel dumb?
Multiple outages now, worse ux, broken video call functionality, this annoying forced pincode, very bad desktop app instead browser portal. The list goes on. Whatsapp is actually an amazing app, now that I think about it.
It frustrates me to no end that it took them 3 hours to officially acknowledge this outage at all. A single tweet 3 hours AFTER the outage has started is just not acceptable [1] [1] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 Edit: Yes I know signal is free and funded by donations. I've donated multiple times. I still don't think 'free' is a a valid reason for not informing people sooner. It's just unpro…
It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations. What do you expect? I don't think we have the right to hold them to high standards because you get what you pay for. Signal has always been a bad choice for messaging in practice. In theory it's really secure and all, in practice, they have security issues that don't get fixed and no real reason to provide a quality service.