Excuse the reddit link but this is a fantastic comment I had bookmarked that answers your question, at least in regards to learning C.
marighost@piefed.social 22 hours ago
As someone who has very little experience with coding, where would you recommend I start?
MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
As someone who has a fair bit of experience with coding and with charlatans, don’t trust the one in the OP. They just joined Lemmy today, and they’ve been spreading unfounded conspiracist FUD. Learn IT stuff if you value your privacy most; the OP has no fucking idea what they’re talking about and gives zero practical examples to illustrate their point. Programming knowledge has rarely if ever been anything more than a tangential aid in maintaining my privacy.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
I mean, there are software libraries that handle encryption for you. I’m imagining that OP is thinking of some kind of scenario where it becomes illegal to distribute communication software without ID verification, and people must write their own client programs, which is not an impossible task.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
You still need to know what you are doing to use them correctly and not introduce vulnerabilities.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
If the library is high level enough that it is for the communication protocol itself, of which there are lots, it will probably be fine. Even if you aren’t rolling your own code in this scenario, it would still be useful to learn because it may be hard to verify trustworthy sources of illegal software without reading the source code yourself.