It is the definitive moment to change instant messaging application. I have switched to the XMPP protocol with clients like Gajim or Profanity. There are also applications for smartphones.
just don’t use whatsapp? problem solved!
#returntoemail
Email is unencrypted.
Not if you use pgp
Or Proton/Tuta.
Right attitude, wrong solution.
Email is very much not private
Protonmail is
The body of the messages arguably are, but the metadata is not, and that includes the subject line and the sender & recipient addresses.
Even if you have 100% confidence in your own provider, you also need 100% confidence in every other recipients provider, which is basically impossible.
Protonmail is definitely more private than google or Microsoft, but you shouldn’t hold 100% trust in any provider. Ultimately your data is still on their hardware and they have control of it. Also, as others have pointed out, both sides need to be secure otherwise all that data is accessible on the other side.
You can mitigate it yourself a bit by hosting your own email server, but I highly recommend against that as its a massive headache to secure and basically every provider will reject your messages anyway.
protonmail is CIA https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/
besides the above, their open support for regime change in China is NOT something a Taiwanese company would do. I live in Taiwan and have worked here for over a decade. Executives here try to keep their head down and just make money. They do not champion any causes.
Then go tell that to all of your WhatsApp contacts, people won’t change apps.
but that’s the beaury of email! people don’t need to be on the same app to communicate with each other!
that arbitrary walled-off garden of whatsapp doesn’t hamper anyone here!
Of course there are alternatives, that’s not the main problem, it’s the adoption by people not familiar or interested in tech.
I have zero such contacts. For the moment, I tolerate Signal. When it falls I’ll switch to self-hosted Matrix.
I’m not touching an app owned by Meta. If people want to message me, they can use Signal.
Turns out, this policy has weeded out lots of useless conversations from my life. So, I see it as a win.
eMail is affected as well. There is no alternative. And mails are not private if not all participants use end to end encryption
Of course there are alternatives. That’s the cherry on top of this crap pile: only regular non tech folks are affected. Nerds and actual criminals will just run an xmpp or simplex server and not care about the legislation.
Can we have the names in the headlines of which MPs keeps consistently putting this crap on the agenda multiple times every year for the last couple of decades?
They can’t scan chats that don’t exist. Time to make a switch, folks!
A switch to what? To nothing?
Self hosting Matrix comes to mind. With deployment automation it’s reasonably painless.
Is that like a decentralised WhatsApp?
To clarify: eMail, web chats, gaming chats, Signal, Threema and so on are affected as well
Self-hosted Matrix is obviously unaffected.
This is why Matrix is infinitely better than Signal. This and not having been funded by the CIA through Radio Free Asia. Even with weaker architecture
You say this but Matrix is largely centralized so it would be easy to get the biggest node to comply. Servers are quite costly to run too which is a big problem.
Federated protocols are not centralized in principle. It might not scale to one user-one server (which probably even Lemmy can’t handle) but if you’re signing up for a central server, you’re doing it wrong™. Don’t do that. The nice thing about Matrix client is that it allows end to end encryption, including groups. So that greatly limits what Mallory can do in principle. As to servers being costly to run, given what documented Synapse requirements are, you’re looking at less than 5 EUR/month for a single server. Which can be shared among several users, obviously. This is in the same range as costs for a monthly VPN.
Synapse boasts about 50,000 concurrent users on a node. Ejabberd has been tuned to 2,000,000 concurrent users which shows how efficient & scalable the setup can be. €5/mo is a lot for many folks.
Poor people (who still can afford the end devices and an Internet plan) can of course share the costs in a community, or use one of the many free servers, as long as they are aware of the tradeoffs. Beigers not being choosers, and all that.
You can also choose to use technologies that aren’t such resource hogs. The eventual consistency model of Matrix alone & storage costs causud many medium-sized operations to shut their doors. Distroot.org for instance had to move to XMPP to deal with costs—& I have personally seen others.
Does XMPP have feature parity with Matrix? I presume that bridges exist?
Self-hosted XMPP using OMEMO included? OMEMO are based on Signal, hence my question.
The americans seem to have figured out how to get change in relation to health insurance. Perhaps people might consider taking a page from the french history books to get some change on this issue.
However they want to do it, it will undermine a key principle of democracy and a human right: the right to privacy and private communication.
