On desktops. All Android UIs are clunky.

Just because Session is a fork of Signal doesn’t mean it isn’t better.

And nobody said that, strawman count one.

Session adds identity protection and it is decentralized.

Just so you knew, everything about security is made much harder and more complex by decentralization. Welcome to the real world, two good things do not help each other, you have to compromise on something.

This statement adds nothing but the vague idea that decentralization helps security, so answered only that.

There is no personal information needed to create accounts; no phone number or email required. There is no metadata storage.

The article I don’t remember was about purely technical mistakes of Session developers in processes inherited from Signal. Mistakes! Mistakes happen in software. While what you are doing is listing features.

Signal requires a phone number to have an account which traces to an identity and metadata that logs time and date.

You are again talking about features and policies and limitations.

Damn right it’s better to use a system where users using their IP addresses store messages in a blockchain, very anonymous.

Had the Trump cabinet used Session instead of Signal, there would be no evidence to the identities of the individuals messaging each other. Signal requires a phone number to have an account which traces to an identity and metadata that logs time and date. The leaked war plans were not from encryption failing, but traceable identities by an insider.

Buddy, that journalist didn’t trace anything, they just were added to a chatroom, saw what’s being discussed there, said oops, informed others and left it.

I’m sure you can set a nickname to your real name in Session too.

In a different time, and a different age, somewhere around year 2000. The Phantom Menace, The Matrix, Peter Jackson abusing LOTR fans. PlayStation before it got boring, Web before it got stupid, Sun Microsystems before it got dead, construction and aerospace and software design alike being done by actually competent people.

Microsoft did the barely necessary to be taken seriously.

This also helps child predators and other traffickers.

Having backdoors and means to create stalkerware and spy after people in various ways benefits those who have energy to use them and some safety. Lack of truly private communications also benefits them. The victims generally have very little means to ask for help without the criminals knowing that.

Human trafficking, sexual exploitation, drugs, all these things are high-value crime. They benefit law enforcement getting part of the pie, which means that law enforcement having better ability to surveil communications will not help against them, - the criminals will generally know what is safe and what is not for them, and they will get assistance in such services.

Surveillance helps against non-violent crime - theft, smuggling, fraud, and usually only low-value operations.

Surveillance doesn’t help against high-value crime with enough incentive to make connections in law enforcement, and money finds a way, so those connections are made and operations continue.

Giving more power to law enforcement means law enforcement trading it in relationship with organized crime. To function better, it needs more transparent, clean and accountable organization, not more power.

But all this is not important, when someone is guilt-shaming you into giving up your full right, you should just tell them to fuck off. This concerns privacy.

This also concerns guns. The reason it’s hard to find arguments in favor of gun (I mean combat arms, not handguns or hunting rifles) ownership is because successful cases for it are rare (by nature, that’s normal, you don’t need a combat rifle in your life generally, your country also doesn’t need a nuke generally, but it has one and many more), and unsuccessful (bad outcome, but proving the need for gun ownership) are more common, but hard to notice, - it’s every time you obey when you shouldn’t (by that I mean that you harm others by obeying).

Point being - no person telling you that dignity should be traded for better life has any idea. You are not a criminal for desiring and achieving privacy, you are also not a criminal for doing the same with means to defend yourself, you are also not a criminal for saying all politicians and bureaucrats of your country are shit-swimming jerks and should be fired, and even demanding it. And if someone makes a law telling you differently, that’s not a law, just someone forgot they are not holding Zeus by the beard.

Depends on your taste for stories and the general atmosphere. I think in better parts of Star Wars EU this would make sense (or it wouldn’t, but the right way, same as in reality).

I think there was an article recently about Session devs, first, having their protocol derived from Signal’s, second, not knowing what they were doing with that, which would discredit it pretty hard.

Also everything is traceable, it’s a question of effort and who you piss off.

Everybody agrees that disinformation is present in the relatively unregulated parts of the Internet and in crowds, but it would be hard to make people agree what is disinformation, outside of places like this with clear alignment.

Note how much fewer people agree that mass media are full of disinformation, that would be because mass media are man-made tools which give each their own kind of disinformation, a personalized poison. Same with social media.

My point was that where I live a significant part of population, including doctors, would consider the scientific idea of autism disinformation, and their own caveman bullshit not. This is similar to many other subjects and layers of existence.

So let’s please think for a moment before just blaming Telegram, the parts to hate about it are its clunky UI, lack of proper E2EE encryption, misguiding advertising, need for a phone number and a protocol which seems an untrackable mess (compared to better ones, not to what I can devise, of course), judging by alternative usable clients being too few.

Started reading the Kademlia paper, then tried writing a minimal realization in a file named “min.tcl”, it got big with something like e-news and contact directory, then “clean.tcl”, it got messy and grew something like a chat and a buddy list, then the new revision was called “dirty.tcl” and now I’m fixing what turned into horrible mess since it initially worked.

Not that I’m going to share a terribly messy one 2360 line tcl/tk script.

Just - how is this even happening, there are plenty of people smarter, there could have been a compelling standard, dozens of usable applications, herds of apologists and widespread usage of something that doesn’t take, say, 4 competent people more time and effort than this exercise took me.

Yes, yes, I know all that. I meant that all this conversation is rather useless because when actually compelled to do something, most people ignore principles.

While pedophile hunters seem barbaric to me, I don’t have kids.

I do have a dog, and dog hunter hunters, as in “people hunting dog hunters”, seem all right for me.

Cowards really like to inflict pain on creatures not well enough protected by the law. So hunting them is maybe good for the society.

So deontology and principles and morals only matter when they are challenged by one’s own impulses. Innocent until proven guilty in the court of law.