If you are organizing folks in Minneapolis right now, you may find this guide to Signal for beginners by @mshelton useful: https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/signal-beginners/
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@drrjv @evacide Also I reread what I typed after the fact and My passion on the subject and wanting to make sure others don’t try to use it as a secure solution (trust me I think mesh tech is cool AF) could be interpreted as confrontational, accusatory, or as a doglile and was not intended to read that way. My apologies if it was received that way! 💜
Signal is centralised and was attempted backdoored by the uks online safety bill and saved by signal threatening to walk. Simplex is open source and quantum resistant e2ee like signal and also has its secret group chats and metadata protection like Signal but SimpleX is also decentralised with ip protection, tor support, no persistent id basically "a burner phone for every contact"
Signals centralisation also makes it more vulnerable to total censorship, all you need to do is block signals domains, being a decentralised network SimplexChat has no single point of failure to censor and anyone can run their own relay node
#PSA #E2EE #Privacy #Encryption #Anonymity #Signal #SimpleX #UnitedKingdom #OnlineSafetyAct #Censorship
@ambiguous_yelp @evacide @mshelton
Signal has Tor support built in, which it uses in unfriendly countries where it’s blocked, such as Iran. This doesn’t help in cases where it’s a friendly country (i.e. one that members of the Foundation may want to visit or risk extradition to), because actively circumventing a ban would place them under legal risk.
The thing that makes this particularly bad for Signal is their choice of AGPLv3 for their apps. Apple does not allow code under this license in their App Store and so Signal relies on a CLA that allows them (and only them) to relicense the code to ship the App Store version.
If a court requires Apple to block Signal from the App Store, Signal is gone for about half of the users in that country. Google Play has no such restriction (and Android allows other install mechanisms), so you can install things like Molly on Android even if Signal stops distributing their client in a particular country. But that doesn’t really help if half of your contacts suddenly disappear.
This is (one of the reasons) why communication protocols should have a permissible licensed reference implementation.
Don’t volunteer data for ICE’s database: Your life might depend on it sooner or later.
