ramenu @ ramenu @lemmy.ml

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2

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53

Joined

12 mo. ago

Well, I disagree about Signal. Proton however, I agree is extremely shady and should be avoided at all costs.

Something at which even the original Signal fails. It has received criticism multiple times (1, 2) for not being verifiable whether it’s been tampered with by the app’s distributor, and also for having included properietary google services dependencies which dynamically load further code from the phone which is also a security issue. Worthy forks solve both of these.

That's unfortunate. I do hope that these forks don't go and start making extensive changes though, because that's where it becomes a problem.

Again, having third party clients would not definitively mean the client is bad. Obviously, if it's a simple fork with hopefully small patches that are just UI changes, it's probably not going to harm the security model.

I should have phrased this better in my original post. When I was thinking about third party clients, Matrix and XMPP immediately came to my mind. Not very simple forks. So I'll phrase this better: "Having non-trivial third party clients is not good for security." What non-trivial means is left to interpretation though, I suppose.

Also do give citations for your bombastic claim that most people don’t want anonymity.

This is entirely dependent on the situation. Privacy is not a black or white thing where you're completely private or not private at all. Everyone lives some part of their life publicly. I don't have data on this unfortunately, but typically where I live, people share phone numbers to people they personally know.

The graph of who communicates with whom is precisely the problem. The government can easily correlate that data with all the other data they have on people, and then if somebody is identified as a person of interest it becomes easy to find other people who associate with them. So, here you just proved my point by showing that you yourself don’t understand the implications of metadata harvesting.

This is not within the vast majority of most peoples threat model.

When you use a client, you are relying on the client's crypto implementation to be correct. This is only one part of it and there's a lot more to it when it comes to hardening the program. Signal focuses on their desktop and mobile clients and they hire actual security professionals and cryptographers (unlike the charlatans in this thread) to implement it correctly.

Having third party clients would not definitively mean the client is bad, but it most likely would break the security model. Just take a look at Matrix's clients.

Seriously, what are you talking about? The vast majority of people don't want anonymity. Obviously Signal isn't cut out for that! The fact is, most people don't care about anonymity.

And what metadata can you harvest exactly from a UNIX timestamp and phone number? Signal can tell who is communicating to who, but they cannot read your messages.

What? How is this a red flag? Having third party clients is not good for security.

It's Proton. What do you expect?

"There are so many things you can do. Don’t accept doing nothing, be a stubborn fuck and do something to alleviate the sadness."

Good words to live by. :)

Speaking of which, Debian users, how safe are distribution upgrades?

I know. And that's reasonable of course. I'm sure most of us would agree that proprietary blobs are bad. I'm optimistic that firmware will become more open in the future though.

That's true. I didn't think about that. Thank you. :)

Sidenote: If you just want a nice web frontend for others to view your Git repositories, you can use cgit instead.

I'm not a fan of GrapheneOS, but the point they bring up here is valid. There is already proprietary firmware on your computer. There's no reason why you shouldn't be updating it to protect yourself from serious exploits. The FSF takes an ideological stance rather than a practical one, unfortunately.

In contrast to my experience, all the other search engines stink. Google is the only good one. But I suggest using a frontend like Araa if you want privacy.

For me personally, it was mostly due to programming on Windows was a painful experience. I was using MinGW compilers, which were quite good but I wanted the latest and greatest GCC. The other options were using MSVC or clang, but I believe clang is just a frontend to MSVC (I'm not sure.. please correct me if I'm wrong).

WSL was an option, but I was doing graphics programming at the time. And I needed to upgrade to WSL2 to run GUI applications or something, which required Windows 11. So at some point I got fed up and just thought to myself, why not run the real thing. This is probably one of the few instances where the technical merits of Linux is what actually got me to switch in the first place. I didn't hear anything about software freedom, privacy, or even care about any of those reasons at all when I did the switch.

As a Windows user for a very long time, using it from my childhood, I wouldn't have switched no matter how unethical it was to use Windows if Linux was too difficult to use. So I'm glad that ended up not being the case. :)

lmao

Go to the police immediately!

I think the reason C++ is at the top is because of QT though.

I like C++. :)