This is incredibly important. Signal is considered the “gold standard” of encrypted and private communication for a reason.

Some photographer took a picture of a politician in the Trump admin using a Signal clone. That signal clone allowed the user to archive chats to a third party.

While I agree in theory, in practice open source has a similar amount of expected trust as closed source can have in many cases. I use all sorts of open source software without reading the code. I ain’t got time for that.

I can trust that software from a lot of organizations are trustworthy even if it is closed source, but I can’t trust any open source repo without reading the code. I habe to use other ways to evaluate it, is it probable that someone has audited it? Is it popular? Is it recognized as safe and trustworthy? Is the published and finished build the same as the one I would get if I built it myself?

But yes, you can never be 100% certain without open source and auditing it yourself.

I do trust that my travel pass app from a government organization doesn’t install malware / spyware on my phone. I can’t trust a random github repo even if it is open source.

We had some emergency law that was almost passed recently. As in it passed the first of two rounds. The second voting round is just a formality, all laws are just passed after the first in practice. Luckily some law professor raised the alarms and it did not pass the second time. So within a couple of hours margin it was stopped.

The law gave the government the ability to force people to do a lot of stuff, work any job at any place in Norway. If you do not comply you could get up to three years in prison. It would not be a problem with the current or any government in the near future, but it is a law. And we can’t have laws that rely on trusting politicians. Because we might have politicians with anti democratic tendencies in the future

I think certain arguments work, and certain don’t.

I live in a very high trust society, Norway. This has a lot of advantages, but also some downsides.

We trust eachother, our neighbours, our government and our media. Which is fantastic, and well deserved. The government deserves the trust.

This makes it hard for me to make people realize how important privacy is, because they trust organizations with their data.

During COVID, Norway made their own app for tracking who met to prevent the spread. Of all the apps in the world, Norway wanted to push about the least privacy friendly app in the world. This from a country with the highest press freedom and rankings for democracy. Most people though it was fine, because why not? We trust our government.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/norway-covid19-contact-tracing-app-privacy-win/

Luckily someone protested enough, and it got scrapped for something better.

When I try to convince someone I have a couple of angles:

1. You trust the government and organizations with your data today. But do you trust the government in 30 years? Because data is forever. The US has changed a lot in a very short time, this can happen here as well

2. You have a responsibility for other peoples privacy as well. When you use an app that gets access to all your SMSes and contacts you spy on behalf of companies on people that might need protection. Asylum seekers from other countries for instance.

I have been thinking about how or if I would track my own children. I do not have any at the moment though.

I think the only system that would work with tracking and still be ethical is a system with accountability.

They need to know that I would never check unless there was an emergency. So we’d have to have some sort of immutable log that they can check regularly. So they know if I checked their location. It should not be like a panopticon. in which they don’t know if the parent is checking their location or not. That changes behaviour. Even with the trust that I would not check, just me having the option would alter behaviour probably.

Youth and kids are independent individuals with their own rights to privacy, autonomy, right to select their own friends and acquaintences, right to freedom of expression and movement, right to make mistakes, etc. If they are thought right and have a high trust bond with their parents, preferably with little judgement, then it will probably be fine and most issues can be solved.

I agree, but am happy that X is losing users to Bluesky, so I don’t try to convert friends and family from Bluesky to Masrodon. I’d rather they start changing other stuff instead that is easier.

Yeah, I was not able to convince my wife to use LibreOffice instead of Office365, but OnlyOffice was an easy sell. I really enjoy it myself as well.

On their page it says: "## Ascensio System SIA - home of the ONLYOFFICE

ONLYOFFICE is a project developed by experienced IT experts from Ascensio System SIA, leading IT company with headquarters in Riga, Latvia. Originally ONLYOFFICE was designed for internal team collaboration.

An attempt to introduce it to a wider audience proved to be successful: ONLYOFFICE received very positive feedback from the Internet community. As a result, its functionality was considerably revised and expanded that brought about a high and stable growth of users from different countries.

Nowadays, ONLYOFFICE is an international, open source project with employees and contributors in more than 30 countries. The holding company in Singapore unites our offices around the world under the ONLYOFFICE brand. For now, we have departments in Riga, Singapore, London, Dallas, Belgrade, Yerevan and Tashkent. Would like to join our big open source family? Check how to become a contributor or discover job openings."

https://www.onlyoffice.com/about.aspx

Hmm…you seem to be at least partially right.

“In 2009, a group of software developers from Ascensio System SIA (Latvian-based) and New Communication Technologies (Russian-based) launched a project called TeamLab, a platform for internal team collaboration.[32]” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice

I think LMG / LTT paid for it, but the issue still remains what do you do as a manager or boss in a company when these things happen?

If the authorities is not involved then there only is one thing to do, hire someone yourself. Doing the audit internally by yourself is worse. So they did what they can do in a situation like that.

Unfortunately we have to trust them in the very end. If they say that the audit found X and not Y, we have no other choice but to trust it, or have zero tolerance. By not forgiving or allowing people and companies to improve we only make them repress and hide issues more. Zero tolerance could also leads to innocent people and companies being harshly and unfairly punished.

Sources: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/16/23834190/linus-tech-tips-gamersnexus-madison-reeves-controversy

Thanks, I see that this was somewhat contradictory.

My point is that the issue with SA and sexual harassment is so prevalent in society that it happens everywhere. A company of a 100 employees or more would probably have someone acting badly. As long as it is handled and the parties face some sort of consequences that prevents it in the future I don’t see how disregarding an entire company is productive or helpful. If there is proof of them not taking the harassment seriously, then I think boycotting is productive. I have not seen evidence of this in regards of LTT.

The statistics on SA and sexual harassment in society pretty much points in the direction that it is a huge problem and happens everywhere, and therefore should be expected to happen at LTT as well. Not that it is OK.

Not that I condone or want to minimize the experience.

But isn’t that something that happens at pretty much all companies given a certain size? The more people work somewhere the higher the likelihood that some form of sexual harassment would happen? LTT has >100 employees I believe. LTT seems to be a place that takes good care of their employees compared to most companies.

I kinda feel that disregarding the entire company because of a sexual harassment incident is heavy handed. Note that I do not know of the extent that this has happened.

I am open to having my mind changed here.

I have never gotten used to WebStorm, is it worth the investment of time? I use VSCode / VSCodium and am generally happy with it.

After what?

The German government is also using Matrix for communication in some organizations.

https://element.io/matrix-in-germany

How so?

Does it work well from a user experience standpoint? I am considering switching from my current provider to KeePass XC. Usability is important, I also need to share some passwords with my SO. She is good with technology and computers, but not a dev.

I live in Europe, but not in a EU country. Is there anything I can contribute with?

Banking compatability by country. In my experience even banking apps not mentioned also work. https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/