Signal is having technical difficulties

Is still Amazon operating those locations, so I assume it's still the USA who's calling the shots. Please do prove me wrong if I am, this is somewhat of an assumption (even if I am fairly confident it works this way in practice).

Though perhaps I'm putting too much weight on this aspect, it's just that everything we do in Europe can be monitored through one USA organisation or another. It feels really weird when you think about the number of actually European services you use (very few) and how much money the ad machines are making with your data in the USA, how much that data is apparently worth. We're wholly dependent.

Domain fronting: didn't Amazon and Google say they were not going to do that anymore, because they didn't want to stand up for the organisations using it at the time? Some countries wanted to block certain services (was it sci-hub? TPB? Tor? I don't remember) and instead of standing up for them, they just banned domain fronting.

Therefore I'm assuming that one can see when a packet is actually intended for Signal and filter those out. From there, it should only be a very manageable number of packets, since we're only interested in the routing header and packet size.

One does need proper equipment to capture and filter multiple gigabits per second, but the attack scenario was more about legal interception (which you put in front of the server rather than in front of the datacenter) than about dragnet surveillance. The latter is indeed less applicable on non-USA soil, hence my saying Wire and Signal have the same issue but e.g. Threema does not, though centralization still makes it way easier (thus Matrix is king in this regard).

> reconstructing a social network in a p2p network (without onion routing or anything like that) is much easier than doing this in a centralized network

Hmm, you mention gnunet and I'm not up to date there, perhaps you know something I don't, but this doesn't seem quite right to me.

Sure, once you know who is running a server, you can install a tap and learn whom they are talking to. Way less traffic than doing surveillance on a Signal server, I'm with you there. But you do need to figure out who you're interested in first. The way that I understood these metadata targets work, is that you take a popular network (say, WhatsApp) and check who talks to whom. Anyone within 3 degrees of a suspect is now also a suspect if I remember and understood USA law correctly. But if there is no single central service, you need to install a lot of taps or capture the right internet backbones to get close to the same information.

And if you're serious about anonymity, if you're hiding from the police or an intelligence agency, then surely you'd host that server somewhere paid for without traces to your real name. Or use some public home server -- they still need to tap that specific home server rather than a centralized server.

If I wrote that, I’d have my 93 year old grandma who got Signal years in mind. She’s i it because because I refuse to share pictures of my kids otherwise.

Or maybe I’d have my sister in mind. The older one of the two, who has zero interest in this stuff. My youngest sister, OTOH would just as likely advice me to adopt some technology.

All this ranging about fake (and it is fake) politeness is oppressive to the thought process. And it’s very irksome and tiring. When I speak, I want to say something. Not stop and figure out which real an imagined person with a disadvantage might perceive a slight where none is intended.

If I mean to insult you, you’ll know.

When you write instructions to others, by all means, make the “idiot” a young white man from the Midwest. I don’t care. But, just so you know, my grandma is an inspiration of fierce independence (she lives alone in a bad neighborhood in a third world country ). My sister who doesn’t care about tech is brilliant. They just don’t care about apps. And it’s ok.

This is one of the most frictionless donation buttons ever. I love it.

Patreon, Paypal, SEPA transfer, all those are a hassle, comparatively.

This donation thing used by Signal works exactly as it should be. Enter numbers, hit enter, done. No "please cookie us", no 20 times transfer to other domains, no account creation, and they also don't require stuff like MasterCard 3D secure (which IMNSHO really is useless for donations).

Zero hassle, 100% great, and with a nice UX.