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LarmyOfLone ,

This sounds like a unjustified callout and a bit of an ad hominem. He doesn’t argue against tools for dissent, but specifically against Signal and recommends matrix. link to post

Any communication tool that requires you to personally identify yourself through a phone number and is hosted centrally in the US is not good for dissidents.

PugJesus OP ,

He doesn’t argue against tools for dissent,

He says it’s a ‘smart move’ for the totalitarian countries he simps for to ban signal. It’s not just a question of preference.

LarmyOfLone ,

Well maybe his bias is showing there, but Venezuela is in a cold war with the US and it is objectively a smart move from a strategy perspective.

You simply cannot have open and free democracy if a superpower is meddling in your election. If I didn’t know who the dessalines was (I don’t) I wouldn’t especially think he was wrong. Any country that finds itself in opposition with the US is smart to limit or shut down US controlled IT infrastructure.

Of course I wouldn’t be surprised if Venezuela and Russia would ban Matrix and other P2P protocols too.

FundMECFSResearch ,

Venezuela is an authoritarian regime not because the US is “meddling in its elections” but because the current leader is a despot who faked the election results.

PugJesus OP ,

You simply cannot have open and free democracy if a superpower is meddling in your election.

I’m pretty sure the concern of Venezuela and Russia is not in having open and free democracy, but preventing it.

Any country that finds itself in opposition with the US is smart to limit or shut down US controlled IT infrastructure.

How convenient, then, that the US controlled IT infrastructure they target is the same IT infrastructure that dissidents use to communicate and that totalitarian governments can’t track. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

LarmyOfLone ,

Well I’m not going to argue against any of that, I’m certainly not a fan of Putin. I still hate Signal though and hate that it gets recommended and marketed as a secure messenger when it’s clearly an unsafe tool for dissidents.

We still don’t have mature and widely used fully decentralized P2P messenger apps. I suspect that Signal is part of an effort to prevent that, I imagine all it takes is to ever so slightly sabotage projects, like hire a guy who works on an open source project, or buy it, or invest a bit of money into marketing the controllable alternative.

So putting this critique about Signal in an article about repression is worthwhile and important. At least in an “enemy of my enemy” sort of way 😉

kn0wmad1c ,
@kn0wmad1c@programming.dev avatar

I agree the callout is unjustified, but there is still something to be said when those countries ban Signal but aren’t banning WhatsApp.

DarkThoughts ,

No. He's a well known Tankie and has a Castro profile picture. So crying about privacy while rooting for autocrats is absolutely laughable.

Wildly_Utilize ,

Shoutput to simplex as another option

Not fully decentralized but you can host your own servers or use whichever ones you want

simplex.chat

Quacksalber ,

Signal was already made to hand over all the data they stored for one account at least in the US, here is a video describing how that went: youtu.be/3oPeIbpA5x8

ivn ,

While this is true it’s still good to add nuance.

There is a difference between judiciary and intelligence context in these kind of things, if you use a tool in a judiciary context you burn it (as with the FBI malware on Playpen). So it’s probably better to keep it low, even avoid to use some of the information gathered, so you keep the intelligence source.

I’m not saying that’s what’s going on, just that this is not an absolute proof.

PoTayToes ,

Tell me though, which company will not hand over what data they have when asked by their country’s judiciary?

The question here is how much data they keep. Strict legal minimum or more.

qaz , (edited )

You obviously didn’t watch the video, the point made is not that there is information being handed over (every company has to comply with legal orders), but that Singal handed over nothing except 2 timestamps shared as integers.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d0f77a05-367b-4726-b27b-12c2cd990a83.png

DarkThoughts ,

Congrats if you can stand more than a minute of this 4chan-esque garbage but I'm not gonna sit through 10 minutes of it while they stretch out getting to the actual point. If you want to bring forth an argument, don't start with "watch this random ass YouTube video" where I have to sit through some garbage and have to then fact check every potential point made.

ivn ,

Here’s what the video is based on: signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/

I get not watching the video, I didn’t, but why reply then? It’s obvious you would be off the mark. Also, sometimes the description is enough to get what a video is about, here it was.

DarkThoughts ,

I only opened the embedded player, I didn't even bother wasting an actual click on that video. And why reply? Because they've made a stupid point about not having watched the video. That's why. If he wanted to make a point he could've cited an article with the relevant tidbits instead.

Slayer ,

Yeah, better use Telegram /s

Gsus4 ,
@Gsus4@mander.xyz avatar

Wasn’t it protect-your-privacy-Snowden who pushed for signal a few years ago?

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