Yes there is FUD around signal. But they are not offering any better solutions.
Signal has some structural issues, and isn’t a good solution for all threat models (i.e. if your a government who doesn’t fully trust the USA, then signal isn’t for you)
Any conversation that doesn’t talk about briar, simplex, etc is deeply flawed since only they attempt to address the fundamental structural issues with signal.
Don’t use that centralized chat service, use THIS centralized chat service - is just FUD… and isn’t a helpful conversation.
Don’t use a centralized chat service. Use a decentralized chat service. XMPP uses the same encryption for it’s e2e encryption, is decentralized, and super light weight for both the server and the client.
And “super easy” to use. To get your friend onto it, first you have to host a server, then they have to install a client with an interface from the 90s, activate the XEPs for encryption on their client and ensure the server supports it too, exchange usernames, create an encrypted connection and exchange random codes over another medium to ensure you’re talking to the right person.
NOW you can start chatting with the other person and hope the server doesn’t crash. ECPC
XMPP is nice, but OMEMO is brittle.
Haven’t ran into issues with it yet, and this is my preferred PM method. When does it break?
One account, multiple devices logging into it (in my use case, personal laptop, work laptop, two phones).
Or, you can skip the unhinged rant, use monocles or dino, and a public server.
Also, hosting a server is much simpler than something like matrix. You can host an xmpp server on a pi and that is more than enough. Or, just use a public server.
So difficult.
I like how you included steps that absolutely aren’t required and haven’t been for like a decade to make your statement more hyperbolic.
if your a government who doesn’t fully trust the USA, then signal isn’t for you
how? i tought it was e2ee and open source?
The security of your key is determined by the strength of your passphrase. Am I missing something?
https://hackertalks.com/comment/3441244
Uploading your private key to the cloud is a very risky thing to do regardless of your threat model. And there are many threat models that absolutely cannot do that. So it is worth indicating as one of the weaknesses of signal
telegram is the real FUD here. its closed, not encrypted by default and all messages go through a centralized server.
I don’t think it has anything to do with the “right wingers.” I think many people and governments seek to discredit anything they can not control. Its basic misinformation tactics.
As far as Elon goes, he says crazy things and shouldn’t be believed.
They do this periodically. We saw it during Occupy, the Arab Spring, BLM, now Palestine (again). As a general rule, when folks go into the streets, the tighty righties start up the FUD.
There is a reason why spooks learn tradecraft - threat modeling, procedures, awareness, and techniques - more than they learn technology. It would behoove folks to to learn a little about that before hitting up the appstore.
Yes.
Yes, “because one of their council is leftist pro censorship”
It think there are a lot of factors at play. Musk wants Twitter* to be an everything app and has mentioned plans to add e2e encryption to the dms. Telegram already had an iffy relationship to people who look for encrypted platforms so he probably wants to set up that idea to get people onto Twitter instead, especially as the right’s relationship to the platform is absolutely getting worse.
A big chunk of far right Telegram has moved off the platform recently after quite a few of the groups that got their start from anti-lockdown demos had members get arrested for terror charges. They seem to blame the fact that Telegram is backdoored but they constantly fed-post in open unencrypted channels anyone can read anyway. The police probably do monitor those channels but if I were to guess how they got caught, my bet is honestly that they just put in reports to the cops about each other because being fascists usually goes hand in hand with being horrible people.
I’m not sure how much he actually reads on far right Telegram but there is evidence of him at least following some channels where this sentiment can be seen. If I were to guess he saw oppotunity in bringing that audience back to Twitter.
* I refuse to call it X
EDIT: fix early accidental submission