Not morons, just not educated enough about them to understand exactly what the implications of that action are.
Not morons, just not educated enough about them to understand exactly what the implications of that action are.
I agree that them having users’ phone numbers isn’t ideal. There are other identifiers they could use that would work just as well. However, both the client and server are open source, so you can build, at least the client, yourself. If you can content yourself that it does not leak your ID when sending messages, then you don’t need to trust the server as it does not have the information to build a graph of your contacts. Sealed sender seems to have been announced in 2018, so it’s had time to be tested.
Don’t get me wrong, the fact they require a phone number at all is a huge concern, and the reason I don’t really use it much, but the concern you initially stated was addressed years ago and you can build the client yourself to validate that.
You’re correct that if you use the system the way it used to work they can trivially build that connection, but (and I know this is a big assumption) if it does now work the way they say it does, they do not have the information to do that any more as the client doesn’t actually authenticate to the server to send a message. Yes, with some network tracing they could probably still work out that you’re the same client that did login to read messages, and that’s a certainly a concern. I would prefer to see a messaging app that uses cryptographic keys as the only identifiers, and uses different keys for different contact pairs, but given their general architecture it seems they’ve tried to deal with the issue.
Assuming that you want to use a publicly accessible messaging app, do you have any ideas about how it should be architected? The biggest issue I see is that the client runs on your phone, and unless you’ve compiled it yourself, you can’t know what it’s actually doing.
Strictly you’re having to trust the build of the client rather than the people running the server. If the client doesn’t send/leak the information to the server, the people running the server can’t do anything with it. It’s definitely still a concern, and, if I’m going to use a hosted messaging app, I’d much rather see the client built and published by a different group, and ideally compile it myself. Apart from that I’m not sure there’s any way to satisfy your concerns without building and running the server and client yourself.
‘Sealed sender’ seems to avoid this by not actually requiring the client to authenticate to the server at all, and relying on the recipient to validate that it’s signed by the sender they expect from the encrypted data in the envelope. As I mentioned in another reply, I’m just going on what they’ve published on the system, so either I could be completely wrong, or they could be being misleading, but it does look like they’ve tried to address this issue.
Whilst I absolutely agree it’s correct to be skeptical about it, the ‘sealed sender’ process means they don’t actually know which account sent the message, just which account it should be delivered to. Your client doesn’t even authenticate to send the message.
Now, I’m just going on what they’ve published on the system, so either I could be completely wrong, or they could be being misleading, but it does look like they’ve tried to address the very issue you’ve been pointing out. Obviously it’d be better if they didn’t have your phone number at all, but this does seem to decouple it in a way that means they can’t build a connection graph.
With ‘sealed sender’ your phone number, or any other identifying information, is not included in the metadata on the envelope, only the recipient’s id is visible, and it’s up to the recipient’s client to validate the sender information that is inside the encrypted envelope. It looks like a step in the right direction, though I don’t use signal enough to have looked into auditing it myself.
Look, I’m not attacking them over this, as you rightly said, it has plenty of other drawbacks and concerns, I’m just emphasising that Google do have a large degree of influence over them. For instance, Chromium is dropping manifest v2 support, so Brave pretty much has to do the same. They’ve said that, as Chromium has a switch to keep it enabled until June (iirc) they’ve enabled that, but after Chromium drops manifest v2 the most they can do is try to support a subset of it as best they can. The Brave devs may not want to drop support, but Google have decreed it will be dropped, so they end up dropping it and having to put in extra work to keep even a subset working for some period of time.
If Brave gets even a moderate market share, Google will continue to mess them around like this as they really don’t like people not seeing their adverts.
Ultimately it’s software, so the Brave devs can do pretty much whatever they want, limited by the available time and money. Google’s influence extends to making that either easier or harder, it much the same way as they influence the Android ecosystem.
Both Brave and Chrome are built on the open-source Chromium browser engine
That’s from the Brave website: https://brave.com/compare/chrome-vs-brave/
Yes there are plenty of changes, but it’s built on it, and shaped by it, and Chromium is heavily influenced by Google. If chromium doesn’t support v2 manifests it is unlikely that Brave will. In this particular case it may be that Brave’s ad blocking and privacy features are equivalent to uBO, but it’s still underpinned by an engine that Google has strong influence over, so it can’t completely shake their influence.
Dude, what are you actually trying to make right now? Like, this isn’t flight sim stuff anymore.
It’ll only be done when you can get out of your plane, walk around, find a computer and start playing Flight Simulator 2024.
It’s a non-starter for me because I sync my notes, and sometimes a subset of my notes, to multiple devices and multiple programs. For instance, I might use Obsidian, Vim and tasks.md to access the same repository, with all the documents synced between my desktop and server, and a subset synced to my phone. I also have various scripts to capture data from other sources and write it out as markdown files. Trying to sync all of this to a database that is then further synced around seems overly complicated to say the least, and would basically just be using Trillium as a file store, which I’ve already got.
I’ve also be burnt by various export/import systems either losing information or storing it in a incompatible way.
NATO’s having a presence in a member state is protection. It reduces the chance of opportunists like Putin invading.
Putin tried to call NATO’s bluff, using Ukraine as a bargaining chip. NATO didn’t blink, and so he started a war. He doesn’t get to do the abuser thing of saying “see what you made me do”. This is on him, and him alone.
He can demand that NATO withdraw all he likes, and I’d have some sympathy for that if it didn’t involve invading another country as leverage. Note, I say some sympathy, not that NATO should actually do it, especially as Putin’s regieme has threatened other countries already.
So, you’re saying that Putin sent demands to NATO, saying they either bend to his will by removing their protection from a large portion of their member states or he’d start a war, and by not signing it NATO are responsible for starting the war? I just want to fully understand your position on this.
It’s been years since I had to admin Windows servers, but I was quite impressed with the number of MS products where the install and configuration tools would output the Powershell commands to carry out the changes you’d asked for. It made it quite a lot easier to automate. I’d love to see that paradigm catch on more widely, with the GUI and CLI having the same functionality and the GUI giving you the commands to run.
What?!?? I just tap my finger on the glowy thinking rock and demons/faye/angels take my messages to other people’s thinking rocks and bring me their responses. I don’t believe in all that ‘electricity’ witchcraft!
Seriously, yes burial uses a fair bit of space, which is part of the reason cremation is increasing in popularity in many places. Even with burials though, many graveyards reuse plots after some number of years, once the previous body has decomposed to save space. For those wanting a more ecologically friendly method than cremation, there’s the option of resomation too.
It’s a safe and reliable way to dispose of a corpse that might be diseased, will smell bad as it decomposes, and would certainly attract scavengers if left lying around. The same goes for cremation, it really just depends on local custom.
I think that the point is it’s entirely pointless building something like this into the email system. It should be a separate system that you can choose to use if you want it. Building it in just opens questions about exactly what they’re doing with your data, despite their assurances.
It depends what you want to do with it. If it’s just for storing files/backups then encrypt them before uploading and make sure the key never goes anywhere near the VPS. If it’s for serving up something like a simple website, you probably care more about data integrity than exfiltration, so make sure you have the security, including selinux or equivalent, locked down, and regularly run integrity checks. If it’s for running something interactive, or where data will be generated or downloaded to the machine, you’re out of luck, there’s no even theoretical way of securing that against an adversary with that much access.