I cannot afford this, you could buy a (albeit shitty) car for that price!

I wanted to get a pinephone, but that thing is made in China and owned by a HongKong company.

Due to lack of secure/reliable phone options, may just get a dumb-phone that has a hotspot. . . There’s nothing wrong with that. Besides, I already use an offline Garmin GPS ( works great ), I have a nice camera for photos, and use a laptop for most internet usage.

I may have a strong case of cognitive dissonance, but abandoning my smart-phone is starting to sound like a pragmatic idea.

Hello, use peertube dude.

edit: This is my preferred instance: https://video.ploud.jp/ free registration and uploads, but uploads require manual approval, imo it is a good approach

Is there any concrete evidence of that? IIRC they were involved, but not comprehensively involved in data sharing.

Oh shit, well I had no idea. Hell, I know in China you used to easily get a burner number, but now it is restricted… Well listen, that certainly changes the conversation.

Do you know if there are any pay-as-you-go phone plans in Europe ?

I appreciate your critique and well written essay, as well as your motivation. Thank you again for writing this, and I will heed your advice and be more skeptical of signal foundation. However, but I have followed Marlinspike for years, and was an early signal adopter, so I do have some trust that the project is not compromised.

comment from lobster also makes some good points here, and I tend to agree with this guy

This take comes up every so often, e.g. in some of the linked articles. I’m sympathetic to many of the concerns raised, but I’ve yet to see serious engagement with some of the deeper issues raised. For example: A significant number of security and privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) have received US military funding or other support. See: Tor from the Naval Research Lab, OpenBSD from DARPA. SELinux comes from the NSA. The Open Technology Fund has also support Ricochet, WireGuard, ? Delta.chat, and Briar (that the author recommends), etc. (link). Are all these tools suspect? As an aside, the EU also funds a significant number of PETs. While not as egregious as the US, the EU is no enemy of mass surveillance, either. One reason for Signal’s centralization is, in short, that it’s hard to update federated protocols, including their security features. E2E encryption in XMPP or email is still a pain, and far from usable for most people. I hope that e.g. Matrix can pull it off, but they face challenges that centralized services don’t. With a centralized service, you know that you can handle unforeseen security developments quickly. Shouldn’t this be a key priority for a security tool? Using phone numbers as identifiers has its benefits: you don’t need to store users’ contacts on your servers. A service like Wire, that does allow you to sign up without a phone number, has to store your full social graph on their end. Avoiding this sort of metadata is a hard problem — Signal has opted for minimizing the amount they store. It’s hard to overstate how much ease of use matters when it comes to gaining mass adoption for these tools. For a long time, privacy & security tools were super user-unfriendly, reserved only for a small technical elite (see PGP). If we want to combat mass surveillance, we need tools that the masses want to install (in my experience, it’s hard enough to convince activist groups to migrate off Discord or Slack — the alternatives need to be similarly easy to use).

How do you feel about the guy who donated 50 million to Signal? He probably has the most influence on the project second only to Marlinspike.

I appreciate and admire your motivation @dessalines@lemmy.ml

However, Signal is like the one application that’s user friendly and is NOT compromised, and you seem to be completely attacking it.

I have reason to believe that Signal is NOT compromised. and the code is indeed Open Source and can be trusted.

I don’t trust the US, but I do trust Moxie Marlinspike to be a privacy advocate, he has spent his entire career being an advocate for privacy.

although Signal went a whole year without publishing server source code because they were being subtle about introducing mobilecoin crypto-asset support, and they didn’t want people to jump hog wild into mobilecoin. However, they now have released the server source code, therefore I do not think this is a valid argument.

Not to point out the obvious, but if someone uses a burner phone to initially setup their signal account, that is another big layer of privacy

newsblur… I use it all the time, great iOS app. https://www.newsblur.com/

Hah… trusting facebook not to put spying devices into whatsapp was never a good idea. Although, I am partial towards open source programs, for good reasons.

ban this