For a second I thought “Good god, hopefully nobody touches that hot piece of shit” but it’s the game engine not the game backend.

I recently read Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez from 2012. All in all it was an OK read, but I couldn’t help feeling that the book had been overtaken by reality.

Ok, because the thing, that everybody knew turned out to be true, every conspiracy theory is valid now?

I guess you should go visit the Nazis in New Swabia and discuss this revelation with them.

The usual conspiracy theory is that Signal is funded by the CIA and therefore a honey pot.

what menssaging app should i use for secure communications? i need an app that balances simplicity and security.

Signal. I can do almost everything that i.e. WhatsApp or Telegram offer, is as easy to use as those and the client is verifiably encrypted and secure.

how to explain it to my friends who use signal because i recomended?

Explain what exactly? Why they should use it?

• It offers the same functionality as other messengers while being verifiably secure and encrypted.
• Signal collects only three datapoints of users
  1. Date of registration
  2. Date of last connection to the server
  3. Your encrypted backups if you enable cloud backups
• Compare that to messengers such as WhatsApp and Telegram where it is not clear which information they collect, whether they store it in an encrypted format or not or who they share it with.
  • In the case of WhatsApp it is at least the US government as required by the Cloud Act.
  • In case of Telegram the data is unencrypted by default and cooperation with various governments has been reported.

what this means for other apps in general?

Please clarify the question.

Technically correct. The beat kind of correct. 🫡

If it was impossible for the other side to read the content of the messages, I’d agree. Hence, why it is less problematic that Signals server software is closed source.

Telegram is not FOSS. The client is, but the server-side implementation is not, which is important if you consider the fact that encryption is turned off by default.

abused by dictatorships and rogue governments who will deploy it against critics or protesters — even those outside of a regime’s jurisdiction.

No way, a treaty proposed by Russia would never entail such consequences! /s

No worries, I didn’t take it that way.

Mine injects some functionality in a specific government website that I frequently use so it’s a very narrow use-case anyway. I only published it “because why not”. Not going to link it because I did so under my real name to be able to add it to my CV.

The main thing I had to wrap my head around was the difference between content and background scripts. Other than that, of course, reading the steps to publish the add-on at Mozilla.

*Looks at his own add-on with exactly 1 user*

😥

So, how is this supposed to work? From what I can gather at a quick glance it appears to be a VPN of some sorts but for cellular data?

Exactly.

The current backup system relies on you still having direct access to your phone or a previous backup you moved off your phone yourself.

What Signal is offering now is an automatic backup system that saves an encrypted copy of your data on their own servers which you can access even if you lost your phone and never made a manual backup.

This is contrary to OSS definitions.

Yes, that’s why I added ‘personally’.

Personally I make a distinction between open source and free (as in freedom) software. Free software is open source but open source software isn’t necessarily free.

I can check and validate the open source software that these fremium devs provide but it isn’t free. The premium part they offer is neither open source nor free.

I assume it’s the same as the Internet (or more specifically HTTP): It wasn’t designed with security in mind.

Unlike HTTP, for some reason it wasn’t included in a new specification, though. My guess is that’s because of the more centralized nature of cellular networks. The barrier for entry is a lot higher as well so there are few but big players who have little incentive to improve over the bare minimum.

IIRC encryption was initially proposed to be part of 5G but got shot down in the process.

Not everything that glitters is (Nazi) gold. /s

I am using PassAndroid

Most of the time these ‘Add to X Wallet’ buttons lead you to an .pkpass File which you can import. The app doesn’t look very nice but it does the job for me.

*Der Spiegel

Just for clarity

0 F is defined as the lowest temperature a guy was able to reach with some random mixture which is arbitrary.

But 0 C is commonly defined as the point at which water turns from solid to liquid and the other way round. Scientifically it’s ever so slightly off but still it’s defined via Kelvin.