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Signal Essay about CIA ties and anti-FOSS
(dessalines.github.io)
Thank you for posting archive links
Lmao you're getting downvotes for the most innocuous possible comment.
Signal haters are back. I skimmed it and didn’t see anything remotely convincing or new. I was hoping this lemmy community wouldn’t turn into quite the level of deranged conspiracy posting as the subreddit of the same name, but it looks like that may not be the case.
The evidence is all there. It's ironic that the negative association of the word "conspiracy" was actually pushed by the CIA and their cohorts, and is used on other words too, to cause your mind to instantly recoil is disassociate yourself from it.
Just try it. Say "I'm a conspiracy theorist" out loud in front of people, and felt the fear instantly take over as you try to mentally remove yourself from it. That's called brainwashing.
But people like you do their bidding and perpetuate the weaponization of "evil" sounding words.
What a weird response, three paragraphs and absolutely 0 relevant information.
Ok, so what is better with other apps and why shouldn't one recommend signal over the apps people use (say Whatsapp, telegram)
OP linked a whole essay about the second part of your question.
An alternative would be matrix, which can be used with the elements app on your phone.
Matrix, where it’s ambiguous if you’re sending encrypted or unencrypted messages, disappearing and view once messages aren’t really a thing, and the server logs all metatata. Much better than signal.
To be fair, all of that stuff can be controlled by the server host. Too bad you have to be the server host to be sure.
How exactly is Signal anti-FOSS? This might have been a problem before (the article is from 2021) but I checked the Github link in the article and the server was updated 18 hours ago with frequent updates this year alone. I also find the source of funding argument to be pretty flimsy. Though I do agree with the conclusion that federated alternatives are better for privacy. For my personal threat model Signal is fine for me.
No hate though, it's an interesting read, I'd like to see more discussions like this.
They are extremely begrudging when it comes to providing a fully FOSS apk. They push really hard for their app to be pulled from Google's servers and refuse to do an F-Droid build or even set up their own instance where they can push whatever they want.
There are legitimate reasons for not wanting to use Fdroid and their builds are apparently reproducible, not sure what you mean about not being fully FOSS either. https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/
There are legitimate reasons for not wanting to use Fdroid
Such as?
The security risk their signing process introduces. My guess would be Signal wants a 0% chance of a malicious client being distributed, hence why they only allow direct apk downloads (which self-updates, essentially making an F Droid build obsolete) and Google Play. I would also guess this is why Signal only packages a deb package (if anyone knows a better way to run Signal desktop on fedora [besides the flatpak] than my current solution of spinning up a Mint Virtual Machine [maybe distrobox?] please let me know!) and literally has no official support for rpm based distributions.
@Unlucky_Boot3467 This is an interesting read for sure, but I see no concrete evidence in the essay that suggests that Signal is insecure. Signal was never anonymous; users who have Signal accounts (myself included) are well aware that their Signal ID is tied to their phone number. If Signal were not offering the E2EE promised, that would be huge... but nothing in the evidence or the article suggests that that this the case.
To be sure, I think Matrix great. But I have to wonder at the agenda behind the article... indirect initial funding from the US government at the outset, even absent malfeasance on Signal's part, is bad, while direct current endorsement of Matrix by the French government is... good? to be clear, I consider neither problematic on their own, but there doesn't appear to be much in the way of logic behind that reasoning.
Overall, I'd like to see us move away from centralized control of communication.. and Matrix might in fact be that eventual solution. But that doesn't mean that Signal isn't safe for those who understand that it is not, generally speaking, anonymous to use.
To be sure, your messages won't be read from the server, but that's not the point. There's way more going on.
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Privacy
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