huh, yeah that’s fair i did not actually notice that :/

yeah i’m rethinking some stuff too, even in some utopia i think some information related to me might make life inconvenient, so the best way to protect that (e.g. not disclosing it digitally) maybe needs outta the box solutions.

related, does anyone even bother to look at physical mail for stuff? like if i put a cipher in a letter with no return address, using that pen ink that you can erase (which comes back if you put it in a freezer) and only i and my contact have the key to the cipher which we exchanged in-person; could anyone reasonably know it?

it seems digital stuff might be a carrot for surveillance people, maybe it can be made into a honeypot and physical or analog means can make a return.

Hi, could you touch on why F-Droid is less safe? Is it because they package (I think that’s the term?) stuff themselves?

I think they wanted to be, they were advertising themselves!

I have a newer Redmi Phone and I can install an app at least twice. There’s the ‘second space’ as well which is like having a cordoned off user. I use a different fingerprint or PIN and it takes me there.

SimpleX looks neat.

Yeah, fair. It can’t delete your messages to the extent a centralized system, and that’s an indication of the lack of centralized control? It’s a different threat model I think many find satisfying (though perhaps not most).

I think most of your criticism makes sense.

The part about “not reading private messages” I think is mistaken, or rather, maybe amiss. I mean I don’t have evidence, so this is all conjecture. The sophistication of data surveillance and data gathering makes the content of the message rather meaningless in my view.

EDIT: Oh, I don’t think any adversaries of US, even if working together, make any meaningful threat towards it. It’s really hard to imagine, esp. considering the US has a bunch of successful coups & stuff under their belt.

Huh, would it be possible to provide a source? I might be bad at searching, I’m not finding anything…

EDIT: Ok I found one with some search operators. I can provide links, most were less trustworthy, I’d reserve judgement.

1. An organization which was initially responsible for Matrix, AMDOCS, is allegedly (I say allegedly since I didn’t confirm it to a reasonable extent) an organization based in Israel which appears to have products related to surveillance
2. By association, Matrix is tainted, perhaps it has sophisticated backdoors along with the other myriad of issues mentioned by other commenters

To give an alternative explanation with plausible hypotheses

1. An organization linked to intelligence surveillance, created and discarded software, which occurs with most software, and I would imagine occurs with software developed at an organization linked with surveillance as well (if it’s publicly funded, i.e. by a government, I’d lean into this)
2. Though suspect in origin, the amount of time the software has been independent, and with its open codebase, means any backdoors or other nefarious artifacts can be reasonably said not to exist
3. An organization linked to an intelligence agency would perhaps be the one to expect to have a secure messaging platform, one could imagine said organization would develop a solution in-house as even with software audits, they may not be certain of any external software which may itself be compromised by an antagonist or have vulnerabilities which they could not control

Some food for thought. I’m not one to jump to conclusions, I think claims require proportional evidence, and obviously my judgement isn’t the same as a security researcher or clandestine operator, so settling on what ‘appears’ to be true without proper investigation isn’t something I do.

Thanks for the info though!!

I use signal as well, might be worth looking into these two links to better manage expectations.

First here and second here.

Related post by Matrix here

thank you for your service 🫡

I think it’s work that does the work, a tautology, I think using money as a proxy for work is a convenient hop and skip. When it comes down to a rigorous analysis (of the kind say a climate scientist does in a life-cycle assessment money is to vague a reason. What does it represent? Some amount of gold? Well, the US dollar is no longer pegged to gold à la Bretton Woods, how then does ‘money talk’?

I was meaning to respond but I think other’s have. I have one of those 30+ min YouTube videos or similarly ridiculously long blog posts (and a longform article somewhere…) though I think you might not be interested so I’ll keep it to myself unless you are interested in a good faith argument (argument, root word is the latin argumentum, to make clear; prove), I would rather not waste your time or my breath if that isn’t the case.

The rule of law in a specific geographic area in a specific period of time isn’t nearly as important as the meaning conveyed which is misleading.

Rather than missing the forest for the trees, why might he push for the title of founder? Why might some discredit his efforts and tactics in assuming the founder of title in specific contexts?

He did not play a meaningful role in the beginning of the company and is not responsible for its success. Money was responsible, the two founders’ expertise was responsible, that specific person is not special enough for their contribution to matter much. Anyone can supply capital especially during the inflated economic conditions (of which we are suffering the consequences of now) and during the time where EV and technology at large was developed enough to allow such developments to take place.

Willing to admit my ignorance. Thanks for the info.

Wholeheartedly agree. Though I am not sure I would agree with your framing of it being ‘left’ or ‘right’. For sure the content seems to have more vitriol and divisiveness. I would use it in the past to follow scientists and their updates about research, it was really good for that.

Now the majority of those I follow post inflammatory comments or reactions to other content and I find the content writ large has decreased. I’ve so far increased my RSS, IRC, and mailing list usage, but it was nice to have tweets which are character-limited. I could skim through easier without having something catch my attention.

I remember they used to own Lenovo. Ngl, I feel that it’s thrived after it was sold, their Yoga line and novel products are very interesting.