Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Every interaction I’ve had with that person is insane. Who even are they?
Among many other things, the person who created Mozilla/Firefox.
Thanks! I only knew them as yelling, cursing, and attacking others on mastodon person
He’s old and cranky like me 🤷
Haha! How did you simpsonify a photo of yourself?? That's so cool!
I know him as the guy who made his webserver respond to everything with a ballsack in an eggcup if your Referer is hacker news. Seems childish
More like one of many developers
Obviously. But it wouldn’t have happened at all without him.
Sorry but in this house we avoid jwz's opinions on things like the plague
He's like the Morrissey of foss
Man, I haven't seen a goat.se in years
Not trying to be pedantic, but the original was goatse.cx
Yeah everyone likes to call it "Goat-see" or "Goat-say", but it was originally supposed to be "goat-secx" i.e. "goat sex".
I think part of the confusion may be that when the site was taken down, the mirrors that sprung up were things like goat.se, etc.
I've heard it pronounced "goatsee" and said that myself back when the original site was live. You are 100% right on the intent of the name though.
That's probably the only reason I clicked it. Honestly, kinda regret that I did because the author just seems like a dude yelling at the sky because he's wildly critical of the smallest things but doesn't offer up any solutions.
Is this a random thought or should I not click the link?!?
Edit: oeuf. There it is. Nice.
okay
The fact that there are no interoperable third-party implementations, or even third-party builds/distributions of the Signal app
that's not true, Molly is perfectly fine
~~most~~ some of the stuff on that list isn't even true (at least not anymore) lol
Hard to take them seriously, if they can't even use a search engine to realize most of this is complete bullshit. What is this? A Twitter post?
What is this? A Twitter post?
Just about. JWZ is known for his cynical hot takes on tech in general.
I don't think any of his complaints are invalid, though his conclusions are uncharitable at best. Making a communication tool that's both reasonably secure and sufficiently palatable to people who don't know how to use computers to achieve broad adoption is a hard problem with no perfect solutions. If he has a better idea, well... he's a skilled and somewhat famous programmer; he's better equipped than most to implement it.
There are some fairly good solutions tho. Matrix is still kinda half-baked (specifically thinking about 2.0 and Element X) and Conversations has limited capabilities, but they are fairly easy to use
Edit: Although I would really wish Matrix had a 'normie-mode', with secure and reasonably easy to handle defaults
I use Matrix, and I've moved some conversations with people I met in public rooms there to Signal because it kept failing to transfer keys rendering it unable to decrypt messages. I haven't seen that in a while so maybe it's fixed, but I haven't been using it for one-to-one conversations lately.
Unfortunately, I've found most people have a lot of resistance to adding another messaging app. I don't really understand why that is, but it's true. Asking someone to install a messaging app when I'm their only contact who uses it and they have another way to contact me has a success rate near zero.
Yeah, I also had encryption problems, especially when I was running Conduit rather than Synapse. However, I never had such problems in XMPP with OMEMO.
Who is this clown "jwz" and why does his opinion matter?
He's someone that was a developer for Netscape and Firefox. I used to follow him but stopped doing so and now I find him quite annoying, haha
I agree with him in many things but he's always replying people like he's better than everyone which makes me think he must be a very shitty boss considering he's the owner of a club.
"Right about a lot of things but fucking insufferable" is an apt summary of JWZ
"Insufferable ass" doesn't begin to summarize my experiences with him. But he's been right about a lot of things.
This was exactly my experience.
Also got the same impression back when I used XScreenSaver from jwz. I looked in to customizing the logo shown on the login dialog and some of the screensavers, only to find a rather preachy write-up on the advantages of XScreenSaver and a very stubborn affirmation that the logo is hard-coded and should not be changed because it is the identity of the program or something.
Oh yeah, the Debian vs. JWZ XScreenSaver spat, that was royally stupid and led me to stop using it altogether
Kids these days...
Is there a better alternative? I don't see anything conclusive in the link on that front
It’s like a politician, “Look how bad the others are” and then not proposing anything better (because at this moment, there isn’t).
I sure don’t know. SimpleX is suggested, among others: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#good-alternatives