Expert developer, Buddhist

  • 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle

  • Well, I took the time to read the whitepaper, and it’s yeah, pretty dumb sounding. The gist is that it’s p2p post sharing with lots of captchas & a crypto edge that it probably doesn’t need https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/eb02f20b-e787-4a02-b188-d0fcbc250ba1/pleb.tex-6d2e1bf.pdf

    The similarities to Lemmy are substantial, it’s just not on activitypub, but rather its own pubsub thing. If you want to host data, you still have to keep a node running at all times, it’s not the case that “there are no instances”. Those instances can moderate the content, so it’s not the case that “there’s no moderation.” The whitepaper mentions that “its possible to delegate running a client to a centralized server…” rather than having to have a fat syncing client running on your own machine … in lemmy, it’s more like “its possible to run your own node if you want”. Plebbit doesn’t care about maintaining history of posts, it expects that servers will go down over time, and the data will be lost. Lemmy is pretty similar in that regard too, if all instances hosting the data go down, then it’s lost. The expected outcome is that there’s a handful of big nodes, as is the typical result of this form of “decentralization” - same as Lemmy, Email

    Ultimately, I don’t see Plebbit doing anything particularly smarter/better, and having private/public key cryptography involved doesn’t really matter. They talk about blockchains and using coins as anti-spam mechanisms, but I don’t see why that’s relevant to the implementation











  • Lung@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.worldWhat's the best messaging platform?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Ok, my bad, it’s not mostly funded now (though funding isn’t totally clear for all of its history) but we do know it was handed 3m near the start by Open Technology Fund which an arm of the US Agency for Global Media which is the US govt, and at best has the mission of pushing us news ideology globally. Ex they did Radio Free Asia after tianamen square, and guess what, that was conceptualized by none other than senator Joe Biden

    Yeah the encryption is probably okay, and I use it daily, but these backdoors are often hella sneaky and we know that the US govt loves doing shit like that if they can


  • Lung@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.worldWhat's the best messaging platform?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s basically just Signal if you want ease of use + good security. Not totally 100% since it is funded almost exclusively by the US govt, and I can’t be sure if the encryption is not backdoored, but it’s the best bet we got. IRC: not secure, XMPP / Matrix maybe ok but hard to use for most, Telegram wouldn’t really trust though in theory has e2e, Whatsapp and Google world stuff even less faith. Honestly none of it is super great, but Signal has the best balance imo. There’s also some crypto based messaging stuff that’s used on darknets but that’s the clunkiest

    I think the only fully guaranteed method is having a pre shared one time pad encryption key between two parties & then send the encrypted text however you want (ex post on a far corner of a mostly dead online forum or Reddit). That doesn’t have any fancy algos that may be bugged, or private/public key stuff




  • Nah, the OS has proprietary overlays that vendors put in there. And it’s not like you’re reviewing and compiling your own software - you’re dependent on your provider to be honest with the software they actually installed. But factually you have no idea if the android phone you purchased has been modified. And Android itself is so huge that backdoors can be sneaky. We have already caught several instances of attempted backdoors in Linux - but there’s always the fear we didn’t find them all

    If this all sounds way too paranoid, then review Snowden leaks




  • You bet your ass they can. Since when has Facebook taken anybody’s privacy seriously? And you remember all the Snowden leaks? Like how AT&T has been a government apparatus for spying for decades? Or how about the way that the USA taps under sea cables to monitor data, causing China to build totally parallel backbone infrastructure

    The better question is whether Signal, despite being open source, is actually secure. It’s very plausible that the govt has backdoors somewhere, for either encryption, the OS, the programming language, the app store, or some random dependency lib

    The answer is yes, the US government spies on everything, and has a complete profile of everyone


  • Well, I’m pretty pissed, and it feels like Google, probably the biggest Internet company, has really gone insane. I mean, a web company stops selling domains? Why? It makes total sense with their Cloud offerings and other stuff like managed Gmail/apps

    Anyway I have like a dozen domains there so I’m just going to hang in for the rollover and hopefully I don’t need to do anything. Ultimately, I use this stuff like 2ce a year so it doesn’t really matter who holds the domains for me