Lime Buzz (fae/she)
fae/faer or she/her
A lover of fruit, fun and helping people out.
Not human so please do not refer to me as such or use any words relating to humanity when referring to me or if it’s intended to include me.
- 4 Posts
- 50 Comments
Sure, I get your point and agree.
I just think that third party middleman attacks should be mitigated wherever possible and so far, in looking at online therapy I’ve never seen one that can back up their claims of being private with data, just vague references to how secure it is.
It’s a tricky situation, and I guess there’s no good solution because either we have to trust the third party or just the therapist and if neither can be trusted, well…
it just speaks to a larger issue with society as a whole, how we treat mental health and especially that we need to pay in order to deal with our issues, and that it hasn’t been understood yet that it’s shameful and scary to come forward about problems because of certain laws, and the possibility of either the original scenario or the one you proposed.
And that’s fine and good, if you want that, I’ve no problem with people getting their needs met.
I just wish they wouldn’t call it secure or private or think there will be no consequences for using it, there absolutely could be because there is no encryption in groups and bad encryption in one-to-one contexts.
Apart from the lack of moderation and refusal to comply with police etc from a distance, there isn’t much keeping those who use it safe from arrest, discrimination etc.
Okay, I’ll bite. But considering Signal has no data and very little metadata to give people, what exactly is the problem? What evidence would they have to arrest people on?
Especially now that people don’t have to share phone numbers to add a contact and can stop others from finding them via numbers.
Did Signal roll their own encryption? I am unaware of this if so. Even if it is the case, it has been audited heavily, something which telegram have repeatedly either failed to do or moved the goalposts every time it has been audited. Telegram is not a secure messenger.
I think I was explaining why people could see it as bad, not that I particularly want more global moderation. Having said that, there should probably be a way to throw off people, on any platform, who actually do material harm to other individuals, such as distributing CSAM.
Yeah. Phone numbers are less of an issue now what with usernames and with certain options chosen no one can find you by phone number on Signal.
I do agree with them to some degree that tying accounts to phone numbers should be removed or at least optional, but it’s less of an issue now.
I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking privacy means “the maxmimum amount of privacy at all times” and whilst that’s understandable it’s not a thing that is likely in this current world nor does everyone need it, which is why people can and should be doing accurate threat modelling for themselves, which most don’t.
SimpleX is not as good as other offerings yet, it is very lacking in features and frustrating to use for the few it does have.
Matrix has bad encryption: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/
XMPP also has not very useful encryption (though not bad imo, it’s just not user friendly nor on all the time or in every client): https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/
Briar isn’t there yet on every device, it doesn’t have feature parity on all devices/OSs and can’t be used on all devices/OS.
Signal is the only one really worth considering at the moment in my opinion for most users, good features, and for actually proven encryption.
Because it’s a bad messenger which rolled their own encryption (a thing that should bever be done) and yet it’s still only in one-one chats in very few contexts.
They have lied constantly about various things including never having ads etc, they just silently updated that they would and expected people to be fine with it.
Sure, piracy is okay, but there’s lots of other bad things that go on it which is immoral and unethical and they don’t care enough to do anything about it.
In short: It is not at all a private messenger and lacks any type of good moderation.
Other suggestions:
Social problems cannot be solved by technical solutions e.g. “turning the racism off” by filtering or blocking others as a user (run from any instance that takes this approach instead of defederating or blocking at an instance level).
If your instance is shit and gets blocked, don’t complain that it got blocked, either complain to the admins of the shit instance or move instances.
Boost the things they say about their experiences or the experiences of others and boost things they care about because likely it’ll benefit people at the very least by raising awareness.
Image description: A screenshot of two black people playing Disco Elysium reacting to a failed visual calculus check. The text reads:
Visual Calculus [Medium: Failure] - All you can see is the fact that her skin is a different colour from yours. That’s literally all. You’re gonna have to run with that.
Then the only option to reply with is given:
-
- “You’re black”
Below that the two black people have their hands on the tops of their heads in manner which denotes frustrated surprise, they are sitting behind microphones as they are playing and commenting on the game together.
Ooo, very good way of putting it!