This is why in my opinion it is better to say people are unethical/immoral than ‘criminals’ when they do something genuinely harmful.

Criminal is kind of a useless or neutral word if the point we want to get across is that someone actually did something heinous would do or is doing too, and I wish more people would recognise that.

Yep, that’s why mastodon only allows for 72 characters maximum in passwords, I assume.

https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge

Thank you

Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised. I love learning things about indigenous cultures.

Today I learned that it’s an indigenous Māori word, and as such we should probably be respectful and stick with how they pronounce it.

and an attack on encrypted messaging

lmao. It’s barely encrypted and what little of it that is (one-to-one DMs) have never been audited in a way where Telegram haven’t just either ignored the results or moved the goalposts.

Fairly new, yeah.

Oh, right, yeah, that’s bad.

That’s fair, one reason I stay out of big groups, though you can set it not to be displayed to anyone, so I’m not fully grasping your argument.

What do you mean by passport? It will a bit, if someone doesn’t know the phone number of an account that sent a message.

Okay, interesting. I still think my points about it stand though.

And that’s fine and good, if you want that, I’ve no problem with people getting their needs met.

I just wish they wouldn’t call it secure or private or think there will be no consequences for using it, there absolutely could be because there is no encryption in groups and bad encryption in one-to-one contexts.

Apart from the lack of moderation and refusal to comply with police etc from a distance, there isn’t much keeping those who use it safe from arrest, discrimination etc.

Okay, I’ll bite. But considering Signal has no data and very little metadata to give people, what exactly is the problem? What evidence would they have to arrest people on?

Especially now that people don’t have to share phone numbers to add a contact and can stop others from finding them via numbers.

Are you saying Signal uses bad encryption? I genuinely am not sure if this is sarcasm or genuine.

Did Signal roll their own encryption? I am unaware of this if so. Even if it is the case, it has been audited heavily, something which telegram have repeatedly either failed to do or moved the goalposts every time it has been audited. Telegram is not a secure messenger.

I think I was explaining why people could see it as bad, not that I particularly want more global moderation. Having said that, there should probably be a way to throw off people, on any platform, who actually do material harm to other individuals, such as distributing CSAM.

Yeah. Phone numbers are less of an issue now what with usernames and with certain options chosen no one can find you by phone number on Signal.

I do agree with them to some degree that tying accounts to phone numbers should be removed or at least optional, but it’s less of an issue now.

I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking privacy means “the maxmimum amount of privacy at all times” and whilst that’s understandable it’s not a thing that is likely in this current world nor does everyone need it, which is why people can and should be doing accurate threat modelling for themselves, which most don’t.

SimpleX is not as good as other offerings yet, it is very lacking in features and frustrating to use for the few it does have.

Matrix has bad encryption: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/

XMPP also has not very useful encryption (though not bad imo, it’s just not user friendly nor on all the time or in every client): https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

Briar isn’t there yet on every device, it doesn’t have feature parity on all devices/OSs and can’t be used on all devices/OS.

Signal is the only one really worth considering at the moment in my opinion for most users, good features, and for actually proven encryption.

Because it’s a bad messenger which rolled their own encryption (a thing that should bever be done) and yet it’s still only in one-one chats in very few contexts.

They have lied constantly about various things including never having ads etc, they just silently updated that they would and expected people to be fine with it.

Sure, piracy is okay, but there’s lots of other bad things that go on it which is immoral and unethical and they don’t care enough to do anything about it.

In short: It is not at all a private messenger and lacks any type of good moderation.

Of course they are censoring culturally significant things. Bunch of colonisers, ugh.

Transphobes, at least once that I saw.

Yikes, the legal system really is horribly systemically broken, right to its core.