Yeah, it’s a really great little app. I needed something to keep track of notes between multiple computers, and it’s really perfect for that.

Yeah, it’s going to be a long process realistically, and hopefully there’s actual sustained state level commitment to getting that done from the European countries. Frankly, it should’ve been obvious why it’s a bad idea to become so dependent on foreign tech, but better late than never.

Open source is the only realistic way forward for Europe, since reimplementing popular US platforms from scratch would be a herculean effort. Hopefully there will be a lot more funding and polish for popular projects as a result. Maybe Europe will get serious about using Linux instead of Windows finally.

It’s the job of the people maintaining the project to review changes they merge in and to understand them. When people make PRs to my projects, I don’t just trust them blindly.

Seems to me that the sole focus should be on the quality of the code being submitted. I don’t really care how it was made, the question is whether the code is clean, if it’s doing what was intended, if it has tests.

This is the core of the issue, and it’s wild how many people don’t get it.

Your phone number is metadata. And people who think metadata is “just” data or that cross-referencing is some kind of sci-fi nonsense, are fundamentally misunderstanding how modern surveillance works.

By requiring phone numbers, Signal, despite its good encryption, inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.

Being able to map out who talks to whom is incredibly valuable. A three-letter agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a “person of interest” for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.

Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It’s a perfect filter: “Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto.” You’re basically raising your hand.

So, in a twisted way, Signal being a tool for private conversations, makes it a perfect machine for mapping associations and identifying targets. The fact that it operates using a centralized server located in the US should worry people far more than it seems to.

The kicker is that thanks to gag orders, companies are legally forbidden from telling you if the feds come knocking for this data. So even if Signal’s intentions are pure, we’d never know how the data it collects is being used. The potential for abuse is baked right into the phone-number requirement.

Yup, very similar stuff.

Yeah, I just needed something basic to keep track of notes, and Joplin does more than enough. The sync is the real killer feature for me. I already had a NextCloud I’ve been running, so being able to sync notes through it was really great.

Helps to read the actual article before commenting. The freeloading refers to corporations hammering hosting infrastructure run by volunteers.

the only brainrot here is your own

I always thought that Minix was a superior architecture to be honest.

Radicle is really worth checking out https://radicle.xyz/

The only people who know what the server stores are the people running it.

I’m simply explaining why it’s difficult for people to move from existing networks.

Oh yeah the whole thing is a mess. It kind of blows my mind that we still don’t have a single common protocol that at least the open source world agrees on. Like there is a more or less fixed set of things chat apps need to do, we should be able to agree on something akin to ActivityPub here as a base.

The explanation is obvious. The phone numbers are a personally identifiable network of connections that is available to the people operating Signal servers. If this information is shared with the US government, then they can easily correlate this information with all the other data they have. For example, if somebody is identified as a person of interest then anybody they want to have secure communications would also be of interest.

One of the big problems nowadays is proprietary protocols. Back in the day, you could have a single client that could talk to different networks. Today you have to run a bunch of separate apps, and what’s worse is that a lot of them are built with stuff like Electron that’s resource hungry.

It’s network effects. People have other friends on the network who have their own friends on the network, and so on. Leaving the network means convincing a critical mass of your network to leave along with you.

yup typo, technically it’s a bit over 30 million in 54 years

I’m incredibly excited about Asahi Linux, and it’s amazing to see just how much progress they’ve made with it. M series architecture is strictly superior to anything else that’s currently available, and being able to run Linux on it is really great. The only thing that I miss with it is hibernation, but that’s really not that big of a deal when it comes to day to day usage.