Preston Maness ☭

Holy shit that’s fuckin’ awesome XD

If that were the case Molly FOSS wouldn’t exist

I’m not speaking of hard dependence as in “the app can’t work without it.” I’m speaking to the default behavior of the Signal application:

1. It connects to Google
2. It does not make efforts to anonymize traffic
3. It does makes efforts to prevent anonymous sign-ups

Molly FOSS choosing different defaults doesn’t change the fact that the “Signal” client app, which accounts for the vast majority of clients within the network, is dependent on Google.

And in either case – using Google’s Firebase system, or using Signal’s websocket system – the metadata under discussion is still not protected; the NSA doesn’t care if they’re wired into Google’s data centers or Signal’s. They’ll be snooping the connections either way. And in either case, the requirement of a phone number is still present.

Perhaps I should restate my claim:

Signal per se is not the mass surveillance tool. Its dependence on Google design choices of (1) not forcing an anonymization overlay, and (2) forcing the use of a phone number, is the mass surveillance tool.

LOL it’s actually even lower if you look at Schedule J. Her base compensation is only 115,057. It’s bonus and incentive comp (76,172) that brings it up.

Signal is not dependent on Google.

It literally is though.

191,229 USD

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840/202342569349300244/full

Law enforcement doesn’t request data frequently enough in order to build a social graph. Also they probably don’t need to as Google and Apple likely have your contacts.

They don’t need to request data. They have first-class access to the data themselves. Snowden informed us of this over a decade ago.

Saying that it is somehow a tool for mass surveillance is frankly wrong.

Signal per se is not the mass surveillance tool. Its dependence on Google is the mass surveillance tool.

However, phone numbers are great for ease of use and help prevent spam.

And there’s nothing wrong with allowing that ease-of-use flow for users that don’t need anonymity. The problem is disallowing anonymous users.

Strictly speaking, you can download it directly from their website, but IIRC, the build will still default to trying to use Google Play Services, and only fall back to a different service if Google Play Services is not on the device. Signal really, really wants to give Google insight into who is messaging who.

Yeah, Signal is more than encrypted messaging it’s a metadata harvesting platform. It collects phone numbers of its users, which can be used to identify people making it a data collection tool that resides on a central server in the US. By cross-referencing these identities with data from other companies like Google or Meta, the government can create a comprehensive picture of people’s connections and affiliations.

This allows identifying people of interest and building detailed graphs of their relationships. Signal may seem like an innocuous messaging app on the surface, but it cold easily play a crucial role in government data collection efforts.

Strictly speaking, the social graph harvesting portion would be under the Google umbrella, as, IIRC, Signal relies on Google Play Services for delivering messages to recipients. Signal’s sealed sender and “allow sealed sender from anyone” options go part way to addressing this problem, but last I checked, neither of those options are enabled by default.

However, sealed sender on its own isn’t helpful for preventing build-up of social graphs. Under normal circumstances, Google Play Services knows the IP address of the sending and receiving device, regardless of whether or not sealed sender is enabled. And we already know, thanks to Snowden, that the feds have been vacuuming up all of Google’s data for over a decade now. Under normal circumstances, Google/the feds/the NSA can make very educated guesses about who is talking to who.

In order to avoid a build-up of social graphs, you need both the sealed sender feature and an anonymity overlay network, to make the IP addresses gathered not be tied back to the endpoints. You can do this. There is the Orbot app for Android which you can install, and have it route Signal app traffic through the Tor network, meaning that Google Play Services will see a sealed sender envelope emanating from the Tor Network, and have no (easy) way of linking that envelope back to a particular sender device.

Under this regime, the most Google/the feds/the NSA can accumulate is that different users receive messages from unknown people at particular times (and if you’re willing to sacrifice low latency with something like the I2P network, then even the particular times go away). If Signal were to go all in on having client-side spam protection, then that too would add a layer of plausible deniability to recipients; any particular message received could well be spam. Hell, spam practically becomes a feature of the network at that point, muddying the social graph waters further.

That Signal has

1. Not made sealed sender and “allow sealed sender from anyone” the default, and
2. Not incorporated anonymizing overlay routing via tor (or some other network like I2P) into the app itself, and
3. Is still in operation in the heart of the U.S. empire

tells me that the Feds/the NSA are content with the current status quo. They get to know the vast, vast majority of who is talking (privately) to who, in practically real time, along with copious details on the endpoint devices, should they deem tailored access operations/TAO a necessary addition to their surveillance to fully compromise the endpoints and get message info as well as metadata. And the handful of people that jump through the hoops of

1. Enabling sealed sender
2. Enabling “allow sealed sender from anyone”
3. Routing app traffic over an anonymizing overlay network (and ideally having their recipients also do so)

can instead be marked for more intensive human intelligence operations as needed.

Finally, the requirement of a phone number makes the Fed’s/the NSA’s job much easier for getting an initial “fix” on recipients that they catch via attempts to surveil the anonymizing overlay network (as we know the NSA tries to). If they get even one envelope, they know which phone company to go knocking on to get info on where that number is, who it belongs to, etc.

This too can be subverted by getting burner SIMs, but that is a difficult task. A task that could be obviated if Signal instead allowed anonymous sign-ups to its network.

That Signal has pushed back hard on every attempt to remove the need for a phone number tells me that they have already been told by the Feds/the NSA that that is a red line, and that, should they drop that requirement, Signal’s days of being a cushy non-profit for petite bourgeois San Francisco cypherpunks would quickly come to an end.

one of the reasons the Signal app can’t be put unaltered on F-droid is because it loads in external dependencies from Google at run-time

IIRC, the APK you get directly from their website doesn’t have the GCM bits in it (edit: I did not recall correctly; the GCM bits are there, but there is a websocket fallback if GCM isn’t available), and will work without them. At least, I didn’t have any issues with notifications back when I was running the website APK with GrapheneOS and no Google bits.

We lost the .ml domains. Defederation happened.

Looks to me like lemmy.world still has lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml linked. I can see this post on All at least.

Just to clarify…is /showerthoughts just a place to post an opinion?

Then there is the tankie Left, which also started with good intentions but seem to have confuse the recipe-book of slogans and the Party über alles discipline invented in the late 19th century and early 20th century by middle class intellectuals to inspired the near-illiterate masses of the time to create an utopian leftwing world (which didn’t work) with the actual thinking Principles and Intentions from which the rules were made.

The “tankies” are absolutely not utopian. There was a great big schism about this very question more than a century ago, with Marxists roundly rejecting the utopianism of the libertarian socialists (Anarchists). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels is a good starting point.

but I hate it when someone behind the scenes decides whether or not I should be able to debate/talk to my political opposites.

Then you’re not gonna be a fan of federated alternatives like Lemmy. At least unless you run your own instance. Because instance admins can defederate from other instances, preventing you from reaching those defederated instances. In my mind, this is a Good Thing. I don’t want to federate with nazis and fascists myself, and I want to minimize my association with anyone who does. If “having a dialogue” with people that want us dead is super important, then they can pick a different instance to call home.

Because in real life, it’s (relatively) easy to have both anonymity and trust.

It’s cute that people still believe this.

Hot take: Public voting records are good actually.

I see a lot of posts about how lemmy.ml admins are deleting any posts critical of Russia & China. Are there any receipts for those claims? I haven’t seen any actual proof, just a whole lot of people saying tankie.

The modlogs show that the moderators there are doing their job. If folks wanna continue uncritically regurgitating NATO propaganda and McCarthyism, they can do it elsewhere. Though I will admit, the irony of thousands of people fleeing a capitalist sinking ship, to a ship built and run by communists, only to then complain about all the communists, is funny.

I use Kagi:

https://kagi.com/

You gotta pay for it, but I’ve found it worth paying for so far.