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Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

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Re: Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

#21
eh. good riddance. unless they move away from mobile number requirement, they are as bad as telegram or whatsapp as the local police has been known to phish for phone numbers and physcailly harrass them and what not. https://thenextweb.com/news/kashmirs-police-want-people-to-r... https://kashmirobserver.net/2021/12/23/police-warns-social-m...

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/agra/in-up-district...

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/06/kashmir-social-media-pol... this is for tweeting but twitter is a public platform, same as your "mobile number" because twitter forces 2fa that makes you put your mobile for "security" reasons.

what i am trying to say is, this is not about police needing 100% access to find pedophiles. This is about crushing dissent, about the same big brother type are what people in india are seeing unless they join the ruling party. This is out in the open now and has for some time.

This is the way of the government to force big players to comply.

lets say tomorrow signal and whatsapp BOTH remove mobile number requirement. Now, unless the ISP are made to identify their specific traffic and block them on demand, ALL the users would be independent from local indian administrative action

Re: Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

#24
post #2

People act when on the precipice. Decentralized e2ee messengers and servers will thrive now in India: xmpp, matrix, session, tox, briar, Jami..

Or they’ll just install the .apk directly?

iPhone users are screwed until sideloading becomes a thing, but iPhones represent a tiny market share in India, AFAIK

Re: Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

#25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my iPhone got run over by a truck, and I log in my apple ID to another iPhone, will I get my messages back?

Nope, unless you’re using iCloud backup, or your messages can be synced from other devices in the key ring.

Via that same logic Telegram has ironclad E2E encryption ‘because secret chats’.

99% of people have iCloud backups turned on.

Re: Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

#26
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How popular would it be to treat people like pedos, just because of an app that they use?

Easy. Make everyone think that you have to hide something or create a fake stories that pedos use app X. > if you have nothing to hide, why don’t you show it? Is also “nice” rhetoric that laymen agree with.

I'd assume that India has its fair share of smart people who are able to spot fallacious rhetorics and want to see the bank accounts of officials in return.

Re: Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

#27
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not, imagine possession of such program is treated same way as a child pornography.

How popular would it be to treat people like pedos, just because of an app that they use?

No, what the government says is "use of X is sufficient evidence to support a warrant", then the fact the everyone does it is irrelevant - you only use it against enemies so that's the only time it comes up. Because this is likely government triggered invasion of privacy, it's easy to see how a government can then make it appear that a given [ab]use of the law be "legit".

In CA for example the standard highway speed limit is 65mph, but everyone drives well over 70 (this isn't a silly "everyone does it", it's a "if you're doing 65 you may well be rear ended"), this means that the CHP can basically choose whoever they want to pull over, despite everyone breaking the same laws. Essentially they've created a system where everyone is breaking a law so that they can then selectively charge.

Re: Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

#28
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. iMessage is encrypted, the encryption is end-to-end, there are no backdoors. The unencrypted backup is a clear and annoying hole in the apple privacy story, but the non-e2ee iCloud backup does not include any messages (SMS, MMS, or iMessage), Contacts, Calendars, Notes, iCloud Photos, or health data. A local backup is local, and is protected by filesystem encryption on your local storage. So no, iM…

If my iPhone got run over by a truck, and I log in my apple ID to another iPhone, will I get my messages back?

Yes. You can also do this even if you lose your Apple ID password.

Re: Signal says it won’t compromise on encryption

#29

Is there anything more secure than signal that is widely used? Maybe something that doesn’t leak metadata or require a phone number?

matrix

I have been wondering how censorship resistant matrix is. As far as I know, groups are not hosted on any particular server, it’s some kind of shared consensus.

I suppose the moderators would still be at risk of hosting platforms and ISPs dropping their homeserver.

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