Comment on Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe

• vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Perhaps you need to get some sleep if you don’t understand what I’m talking about.

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  • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I get it messenger = gun wow i didnt know!

    Holstering my phone now thanks

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    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Unironically yes, communications (information and roads) were historically as important. Lenin’s call to “take post, telegraph, telephone stations, bridges and rail stations” kinda illustrates that.

      What I meant is that abstractly having fully private and free communications is just as universally good as everyone having a drone army. In reality both have problems. The problems with weapons are obvious, the problems with communications in my analogy are not symmetric to that, but real still - it’s that people can be deceived and backdoors and traps exist. Signal is one service, application and cryptographic system, it shouldn’t be relied upon this easily.

      It’s sometimes hard to to express things based only on someone with good experience telling them to me, making it an appeal to anonymous authority, but a person who participated in a project for a state security service once told me that in those services cryptography is never the basis of a system. It can only be a secondary part.

      Also, other than backdoors and traps, imbalance exists. Security systems are tools for specific purposes, none are universal. 20 years ago anonymity and resilience and globalism (all those plethora of Kademlia-based and overlay routing applications, most of which are dead now) were more in fashion, and now privacy and political weight against legal bans (non-technical thing, like, say, the title of the article) are. The balance between these in popular systems determines which sides and powers lose and benefit from those being used by many people. In case of Signal the balance is such that we supposedly have absolute privacy and convenience (many devices, history), but anonymity, resilience and globalism are reduced to proverbial red buttons on Meredith Whittaker’s table.

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      • dogs0n@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Unfortunately, I don’t get most of your refetences, but sure you can find similarities in wildy different things.

        Signal being easy to rely on is its biggest benefit. No one will adopt something that’s more complex, but I don’t think extra complexity would offer better security for the average person. More complexity just means more things to go wrong.

        People can be deceieved anywhere in their life, this isn’t synonymous to an end to end encrypted chat.

        Backdoors do exist and they are obviously bad, but Signal choosing to leave the market before implementing one sounds best to me.

        state security service once told me that in those services cryptography is never the basis of a system. It can only be a secondary part.

        Obviously I’m no smarter than this person, but without cryptography how is any “secure” project actually “secure”. The only thing more important that I can imagine would be the physical location of a server (for example) being highly protected from bad actors.

        In the end, I personally think having an easy to use platform that is secure gives everyone amazing power to recoup their free speech wherever is it eroded.

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