Yes, let's talk piracy behind some stupid walled garden. As if public conversations are not fragmented enough as it is
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Signal is a walled garden?
how is it not?
- the worst kind of opensource, where you are not allowed to run the software yourself (or even fork it)
- not indexable
- requires signup with personal informations
- forever tied to a single identity
- not exportable to other services
- no open formats for its storage
it's a shitty service, by a shitty person. I know Moxie personally, and he is basically Elon Musk if he didn't make it
Great... Signal is imperfect.
Can you suggest a perfect alternative?
At this point I'm just happy my family have tolerated it to the point we're not using Facebook Messenger, Google chat (it whatever it's called this month) and WhatsApp.
The xmpp or whatever other convoluted alternative you're about to recommend is not something I'm going to get 20 or 30 family and friends to switch to.
Signal is imperfect... But not as bad as many other options.
here we are talking about piracy, especially the topic of discussing piracy. Just use a forum, even something like lemmy. Here you have everything you need, but without contributing to a piece of shit like Moxie nor putting everything behind a walled garden like discord (or any other chat software for this matter)
You might try a Matrix group instead. Doesn’t require a phone number and supports more than 1000 users unlike Signal. Search is bad though unfortunately.
Why not use SimpleX Chat? If you use Matrix for that you will likely get reported and get banned
Will a simplex group better? Nothing identifiable.
SimpleX all the way
Is there a simplex group we can join?
What is even the point of "piracy groups"? What exactly can you find there that you cannot in other places designed for that, e.g., trackers, usenet, forums...?
I don't know this group but I am on a telegram group that shares movies produced in my country of origin. It's quite niche, I never saw any tracker that does the same. I doubt it for usenet but never looked into it. Anyway, my point is that some layman uploaders use whatever is at hand and not necessarily have much preparation or technically involved solutions...
It's like having a discord 'server'. Nothing gets actually talked about, noteworthy stuffs are hidden beyond layers of clunky mobile UI and everyone's phone numbers are leaked in the process.
I thought signing up for Signal required a phone number and phone app -- and all phones have IMEI besides many other nightmare anti-features.
For the normies it's fine but tbh I'm not sure it's as advertised.
What ever happened to that odd old app called tox?
Honestly I could see a version of DeltaChat + GPG make some gains in popularity but I would argue the email relay servers and spam lists are rigged for max surveillance.
Are we at the point where tech from 20 years ago may be the way lmao.
XMPP, IRC, ICQ /s
Matrix is probably the best bet but some of their apps and clients seem like dogshit. And I am saying that as someone who uses them daily. And the whole "server" thing is a PITA, or it used to be at least.
I guess we'll just have to use carrier pidgin and cypherto encrypt the cat gifs /s
Yeah, for me personally I'm sticking to simplex. I can get an anonymous sim card, but none of the people I'd be talking to would do that. I don't want this relationship/network map out there at all if I can avoid it.
What makes you think Signal is maintaining relationship maps, and secondly, even if it is, is there any evidence they're included in LEO subpoenas?
There is no evidence. safety is about staying multiple steps ahead and risk mitigation when possible.
Centralized servers are a single point of failure that could be compromised in the future.
My contact's devices they use signal on are insecure and could be easily compromised in the future.
SMS/Cell network in general are insecure as hell and I avoid it as much as possible.
Why would I expose all that sensitive data when there's literally no need to? Simplex works great for me.
They pinky promise they don't maintain these relationships. Maybe even they really don't. But they have the ability to, if they were to change their mind, and that's the problem.
Use secure protocols which don't give anyone that ability.
Which ones do you suggest?
XMPP. Simplex.
Good idea overall, unfortunately they still have your IP and phone number which means Europeans are still implicated
Signal doesn't collect IPs and therefore can't even hand them out. It's been requested in 2021. Here's a list of requests from authorities they were allowed to publish. I've looked through 3 of the most recent and nowhere do they reveal IPs.
Sure they don't log the IPs, but it is technically impossible to not know the IP when you're running a centralized service.
What are the "popular" alternatives? Telegram stores everything, WhatsApp doesn't allow usernames, Matrix requires IPs too...
The phone number is not connected to the messages. That’s the only thing they have. It is the best app for privacy.
Arguable in it being "the best app for privacy". Can you link to a source which shows that phone numbers are not linked to accounts? (Why do they need them anyway?)
They have published requests from the law enforcement and their responses to these requests. The only unencrypted data they have is the phone number, a date of sign up and a date of the last login. That is it, everything else is encrypted and they cannot access it whatsoever.
The problem is, if you're in Europe, your phone number is associated with your identity
Sometimes, but that's it. Authorities and signal itself can only say "this number has account with us since $signupDate and used it last on $usageDate". Signal can't say "we know $number is talking to $otherNumber" nor can they say "$number is in $group talking to $users".
Thanks for doing this
Keybase is better than Signal. You may not like it's current owners but it still works, still functions, and can be used to chat privately. It's entirely OSS on the client side; and server-side software isn't provided; but with an open Client; it's likely trivial to reverse and re-implement your own. (Keybase itself doesn't provide their server code; it's private due to abuse constraints)
Keybase is End to End Encrypted. It may not be as "feature rich" but all features are private.
I'm not sure if it's indev anymore though; and it does allow you to be as public or as private as you'd like to be about your identity.
The problem is Signal supports up to 1000 people group chat, so it's better to find something different
I can barely handle chat groups with 100 ppl.