Honestly I think it was fine, I don't think it reached annoying levels. I enjoyed reading the thread here and I wouldn't have found it without that comment!
On the other hand Signal is encouraged by people like Edward Snowden (who I assume is paranoid enough about American big corps). The clients are open source and feature a strong E2EE, which is called the Signal protocol and is used by many other clients nowadays because it has such a good reputation. There are lot of efforts to reduce metadata further.
Just dismissing it as "smells funny" is not a valid criticism.
But you can't verify that the open-source matches what's on the Play Store, you can't link to the official server with your own build, and you can't run your own because the server is no longer open source. (Last released a year ago)
Rosenfeld’s admitted that they don’t NEED need your phone number, so why does he still need it? I didn’t give Zucc my phone number, I didn’t give it to Suzy, Jeff, Larry, or Sergei. So why’s Rosenfeld need it? He doesn’t, but he does. It’s “easier” this way.
> There was no blackout _yet_, but it was very close.
Where do you get that from? None of the sources reported a close blackout, as far as I understood it there was a lot of emergency capacity left. We weren't even in the emergency frequency range, as the other commenter pointed out.
Even the linked article just states that those interventions got more often after shutting down coal+nuclear, but it's not critical, it _only_ costs money to compensate the operators: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redispatch_(Stromnetz)
It's probably much less money than all the nuclear subsidies.
It was founded by Max Schrems, whom some of you might now for his lawsuits against Facebook a few years back, which ended the EU-US Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield data trade agreements.
It's mainly EU-centric which might be the reason why people here haven't heard of it before.
It's incredible what one dedicated man can accomplish through the court system. Makes me wonder what the world would be like if we just spent a little time educating our children about their digital rights in school.
I assume they do that do avoid comments on old issues. If they are already using bots like that they are probably barely able to respond to new issues, so comments on old issues will never be read anyways. By forcing users to open new issues, it increases the chance for replies.
That's at least what I understood from bigger repositories. It's not great and most maintainers are aware of the several shortcomings of that practive, but especially in huge repositories there are so many new (and sometimes low effort) issues daily that some maintainers are simply overwhelmed.
> simple way to get something running where I could easily onboard friends/family
He's not talking about himself, he's talking about (non-IT) friends and family. Most of them probably would be barely able to find the register dialog on HN, that's at least what I would say about my non tech-savy friends. A good chunk of them doesn't even have a PC.
For those people, Signal is optimal. Its onboarding and usage is a lot easier than Matrix.
Baloney. If they're that inept, GP is going to have to do it for them anyways. He should save himself some trouble and start with something he won't have to replace in 5 years when precisely the same thing that happened at WhatsApp happens to signal.
Not exactly sure what you are talking about. People are fleeing from Whatsapp because it's owned by Facebook (which has one of the worst privacy reputations), because it's closed source and because facebook can replace your E2EE private key if they want so the E2EE is pretty useless. Facebook could also use the metadata if they want, which is pretty valuable.
Signal on the other hand is a nonprofit run by trusted people like Moxie Marlinspike, it's accessible to casual (non-IT) users as well (unlike XMPP) and it's fully open-source. It also minimizes metadata, like with the Sealed Sender functionality.
Because in contrast to Matrix it looks much more accessible to the average user. Not all of my friends are in IT and want to/are able to use matrix.
Signal is also nonprofit, fully opensource and minimizes metadata to a minimal amount (e.g. [0]), so it might not be as good as Matrix, but it's certainly not as bad as Whatsapp.
I'm sorry, but where did you get that information from? The FAQ only states:
> Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive.
That makes sense, why would you re-encrypt the messages with the end-to-end-key which is individual for each chat, if you could simply use a symmetric encryption for backups?
So the statement
> It is encrypted with a per user key known to WhatsApp.
could still hold true, there's no information contrary to that in the FAQ (but no information indicating another kind of encryption either).
