Comment on Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe
RiverRabbits@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks agothat’s a lot of words to say you generally accuse any programm that isn’t federated of having an agenda targeted at its userbase.
And lots of social woo-woo that doesn’t extend much further than “people don’t understand cryptography and think it’s therefore scary”.
A pretty weird post, and one which I don’t support any statement from because I think you’re wrong.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I used the word monoculture, it’s pretty good.
Not that. Rather “people don’t understand cryptography, but still rely upon it when they shouldn’t”.
I mean, you’ve misread those two you thought you understood.
RiverRabbits@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Using mono ulture as a word doesn’t change the meaning here. If anything, its a pathway for the foal you ascribe.
I do give you credit about the second part - it would be better to have your own private key in chat apps, which isn’t handled by the app itself, at the very least to establish a shared key. I still think the existence of crypto is a massive boon to many, even in a “flawed” implementation with the “control” being on the side of corporations - tho if they are smart, they’d never store the keys themselves, not even hashes. Unless you’re part of the signal project, I doubt you know the exact implementation and storage of data they do.
Still, thanks for summarising your lengthy post, even if I had to bait you into it. Sometimes, brevity is key.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
Of course it does. Federation can be a monoculture too (as it is with plants). A bunch of centralized (technically federated in IRC’s case, but united) services, like with IRC, can be not a monoculture.
Monoculture is important because one virus (of conspiratorial nature, like backdoors and architectures with planned life cycle, like what I suspect of the Internet, or of natural one, like Skype’s downfall due to its P2P model not functioning in the world of mobile devices, or of political and organizational one, like with XMPP’s standards chaos and sabotage by Google) can kill it. In the real world different organisms have sexual procreation, as one variant, recombining their genome parts into new combinations. That existed with e-mail when it worked over a few different networks and situations and protocols, and with Fidonet and Usenet, with gateways between these. That wasn’t a monoculture.
Old Skype unfortunately was a monoculture. Its clients for Linux (QT) and Windows and mobile things were different implementations technically, but with the same creators and one network and set of protocols in practice.
That’s the problem, it’s not. You should factor psychology in. People write things over encrypted channels that they wouldn’t over plaintext channels. That means it’s not just comparison of encrypted versus plain, other things equal.
And that’s another problem, no. Crooks only steal your money, and they have adjusted for encryption anyway. They are also warning you of the danger, for that financial incentive. Like wolves killing sick animals. The state and the corporation - they don’t steal your money, they are fine with just collecting everything there is and predicting your every step, and there will be only one moment with no warning then you will regret. That moment will be one and the same for many people.
What matters is that the core of their system is a complex thing that is magic for most people. You don’t need to look any further.
0x0@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
XMPP was sabotaged by google (and meta) but is still alive and well.