Evidence is: Signal still requires a phone# that is your unique identifier. Thus when connecting two parties, it is bound to have identifying metadata about them. (and that Signal still operates within AWS cloud, and is bound by US law: FISA, Patriot Act, etc.) How much more than this do you need?
Joe Bidet
Random Joe, or should I say… GNU/Joe
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Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: November 28th, 2021
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You’re lying.
Thanks! :)
But no. Happened to several friends of mine, out of the blue: phone# verification to their signal account. Therefore when accusing people of lying… you are lying! :)
It’s not just about “having your phone number”, it is indeed relating it to the phone numbers of all the people you interact with, and (at least) processing these data in the RAM of amazon servers while promising they do not use or store it. It is strongly identifying “strong selector” metadata that is incompatible with the protection of users’ privacy.
You can call me a lier, but you better check your sources.
usernames is just for users. it is just a display thing. Signal still require that you use a phone# to sign up, and that you keep owning and paying for that SIM over the years in order to be able to verify it at random intervals…
despite being a very anti-privacy feature (esp. from a US company, funded initially bu US gov, who still forces its users to have their metadata stored on a US cloud…), it is also very much anti-user as in many cases around me, people who opened Signal accounts with some SIM card some day later traveled abroad, changed life, etc… and one day were asked to verify their account. (this is in some case what prompted their migration towards other communication networks…)
by “FOSS” you mean compatible with the core values of free/libre software?
This rules out Signal because: 1/ some of its server software is proprietary 2/ they dont allow you to communicate with “their” users if you want to run the server software yourself 3/ the prevented authors of free/libre software in the past to distribute their software (find a fdroid/signal thread) 4/ in practice they channel their users through their centralized servers hosted on AWS
(and that’s without evoking their questionable funding, and long lasting commitment to make all their users identifiable through phone number, 10+y after US generals declared “we kill people based on metadata”…)
Simplex seems to me like the one really ticking all the boxes.
Even taking time for +1 and -1 content is useful and counts as active contribution!
NB: also don’t beat yourself down if you cannot be contributing financially: there are many ways to contribute to the community by posting, commenting, reporting, moderating, and overall just being active and nice ;) your presence and participation here already means a lot!
oh yeah that, and compiling your kernel! Felt like opening an old spell book or something…
friend told me “ah you like hacking at DOS and stuffs, you may be interested in that, it’s called ‘linouqse’ i guess…” so i gave it a shot.
“Slackware”… it was something like kernel 1.3.12 or 1.3.13 i am not sure… it came on 6 or 7 floppy disks.
from the boot already it seemed like nothing i had seen before: all (!) hardware seemed to be methodically enumerated, a bunch of esoteric commands and processed started their bizarre dance before my very eyes. looked already like i was accessing so much more information about the insides of my -then beloved- machine than ever?! this flashes very fast though and is a bit frustrating… then a rudimentary install menu, in text mode, asking a lot of questions.
… trying all of this and failing many times, getting an old hard disk in a secondary bay to dedicate to the exercise… getting to it again and again (there was no Internet, where i was, then)… until finally, the thing boots up. a login prompt. i had remembered the password chosen upon install, that was it!
… a shell? i had never heard of Unix before, 100% of my previous practice before was with micro-computing, from 8bit to 16bit to DOS PC and its laughable Windows 3.1 ™…
… what am i gonna do with all this, now?!
[fiddling…]
[months passed]
… “xf86something”…? what? some more configuration? some more esoteric? Where does that lead me? wait.
… a graphical environment just popped out of my console?! with windows and shits??? this was there since the very beginning, like it was already there this whole time?!?!
🤯
Later on erring back on the side of Win3.1 because its “trumpet winsock” was the obvious, “easy” way to get connected to this new eldorado that opened up around (the year was 1995)… reading more about it on this new “online” helped me figure how to get back on that cool and hacky side, to finally (after months?) get the modem to connect, through PPP, to my ISP…
This is when I decided it would be cool, someday, to make this my primary OS, and that i’ll work towards this end from now on. at the same time i heard for the first time of “free(libre) software” and that thing resonated within me as something i didn’t know was possible: a way to organize society, based on virtuous principles of sharing knowledge and helping one’s neighbor, through the same playful excitement of hacking that had kept me on my toes since i was a child? where do I sign?!
3 years later i decided to never boot a Windows OS again, and here I am, ranting on lemmy like i am 275 years old…
Imagine a pile of floppy disks, with stuffs inscribed on it that you never heard of…
… will you insert one into your computer and reboot it?
9·7 months agowelcome home! <3
don’t use it if you’re flying a plane, though!
to edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT all night long
As many people mentioned backups before, I would only add this: Maybe check -in your favourite search engine- if the very same model of computer that you use doesn’t have know quirks (hardware needing some tweaking, not being fully recognized, etc.) with gnu/linux, like for instance searching “$model linux” or “$model $distro” (with the distros you plan on trying, etc.
Also maybe if you connect only via Wifi, check that wifi chip for compatibility first, and maybe get as a backup a USB wifi dongle that is know to work on gnu/linux… juuuust in case ;)
…You wouldn’t download a car?!
same here.
my first switch from x to wayland was on the pinephone and that convinced me to make the big jump elsewhere. that feeling of snappiness you describe, from not having all the screen refreshed all the time i gues…?
check wayfire :)
I already have everything. I use Sway… :)
as said before: backup first. the rest afterwards…
It is just enough that this metadata be handled within the computing environment of Amazon. Their refusal for anyone use their own server and federate with “their” (as in captive) users also prevents anyone for using it in any other way…
If you dont see that Signal requires that its users use a strong-selector phone# in order to use the service, there is nothing i can do for you.