If the E2EE is enabled and the client software source is available and reproducible, then, indeed, it could be called Telegram or anything else, it doesn’t matter.
The particular issue with Telegram is, as you say, the default setting. And also that its encryption algo is not universally trusted.
Damn, now I want this too!
As others have said, all it does is pull in any other config files in that may be in that folder. And storing them separately like that is much better for backup and portability.
Ubuntu doesn’t do this.
This is exactly my take. It basically holds for Signal too.
The question of self-censorship is too often overlooked IMO. The knowledge that nobody is reading your messages except their intended recipients is empowering and liberating. No one is filling a database with information about you and your friends, because they can’t. You can say exactly what you would say at the dinner table and not think twice about it.
In a police state with mass surveillance (we all know the big examples) you don’t have this privilege. Whether or not you think about it consciously, you are constantly monitoring and policing what you say - and therefore ultimately, to some extent, what you think.
I’ve been in a couple of those places recently. I can tell you that just the banal act of using Signal there (sometimes over VPN) felt almost exhilarating, like jumping the prison walls.
In historical terms, free speech is a vanishing rare thing. It absolutely is not the norm and it bothers me that so many people in the West don’t seem to know this. We should not take it for granted.
If the client software is open source with reproducible build, then you don’t need to care about what’s running on the server. You will never have any means to confirm what’s running on the server, because you don’t control the server. That is why EE2E was invented.
This is the ideal scenario as I see it, in order of importance:
As I understand it, the goldilocks solution is therefore the Matrix stack. BUT! It’s hard to set up and nobody uses it!
The best real-world option, with feasible UX and an existing critical mass of users, is therefore Signal. It only fully meets the first criterion, yes. But personally I give it a bit of credit for the second too, in that it belongs to a non-profit foundation with multiple stakeholders, somewhat like Wikimedia. Signal will do while we’re waiting for a proper email-like open standard for secure messaging.
Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If everything’s bad then there’s no reason to care, and if nobody cares then everything will be bad.
For things to get better, or not get worse, cynics depend on others to care about those things. To me that feels terribly like freeloading.
Can confirm. I have used one or the other exclusively for 20 years. Mostly on laptops. And these days with just a tiling window manager and terminal.
It just works.
Exactly. I’d say this is currently the best everyday example of the phenomenon.
IMO you’re doing it the right way.
If there’s a single indicator to pay attention to, it’s the source of funding. Where does the media outlet get its money from?
Next is professional ethics: does it employ real journalists? Journalism is like medicine, it’s a profession with a code of conduct. In this case, a commitment to factual accuracy, a good-faith search for the truth, fairness in choices about what to cover, transparency about sources, etc.
And if you feel the journalists are doing a bad job, then go back to point 1 and ask: Who is paying them? Are you? The reason for today’s crisis in journalism is not that journalists are lazy or evil, it’s that the internet cratered their business model. More of us need to step up and pay. It’s that simple.
I have a couple of paid subscriptions. If that’s the cost of living in a properly informed society, it’s a great deal.
OK. Not sure how far that recipe gets us in practice, but it’s a respectable argument.
You’re not my audience,
That’s a good point and I work to this principle myself. So my observation was pretty redundant, yes.
I already know you’re anchored in your convictions
To the extent you know anything about me, I also “know” that your own convictions are just as unmovable.
Looked at another way, it’s a good thing to have convictions.
Not reasonable because you’re making a broad generalization
Generalizations are broad by nature, that does not mean they have no value.
But in reality the majority of people who oppose immigration also oppose LGBT+ and freedom of religion so it’s unlikely they’ll use this argument.
Can’t speak for the USA but that is absolutely not the case in Europe.
Otherwise you make some decent points. In any case, IMO discussions like this would benefit if we accepted from the outset that nobody is going to be convincing others to change their opinions. The best that can be hoped for is to understand the opposing side better. That would be an achievement in itself.
These sources don’t prove anything. This is about values. If you want to convince people who are not already on your side then you need to begin there.
That’s a specific case that doesn’t falsify my claim that most people in this discussion, here, are inflating away the meaning of the word Nazi so that it equates to, roughly, “somebody I don’t like who is to the right of me politically”.
This precise argument can also be made to justify a tightening on immigration from countries where religious intolerance is the cultural norm, on the grounds that “if you allow [them] to spread their ideology eventually there will be enough [of them] to be able to take the power by force, and when they do they’ll setback all of the tolerance that was advanced”. Reasonable?
My thoughts are that most people in this discussion have little idea what the word Nazi actually means and that therefore this silly question is a bit of an insult to the victims of Nazism.
Another option: encrypt a sparse file rather than a disk volume. Mount the file to local filesystem and open and close it there.
Fair enough!
So you would suggest to get bigger and bigger storages?
Personally I would suggest never recording video. We did fine without it for aeons and photos are plenty good enough. If you can still to this rule you will never have a single problem of bandwidth or storage ever again. Of course I understand that this is an outrageous and unthinkable idea for many people these days, but that is my suggestion.
The local-plus-remote strategy is fine for any real-world scenario. Make sure that at least one of the replicas is a one-way backup (i.e., no possibility of mirroring a deletion). That way you can increment it with zero risk.
And now for some philosophy. Your files are important, sure, but ask yourself how many times you have actually looked at them in the last year or decade. There’s a good chance it’s zero. Everything in the world will disappear and be forgotten, including your files and indeed you. If the worst happens and you lose it all, you will likely get over it just fine and move on. Personally, this rather obvious realization has helped me to stress less about backup strategy.
The message is encrypted using a key. The key exchange was done over a direct secure channel to the other client, in much the same way as you connect to your bank’s website using HTTPS. The server therefore does not have the key and can only see encrypted text.
Assuming the client software has not been compromised at either end, then the server will never see anything other than garbled ciphertext.
BTW, this is also the case with Whatsapp, for example. But the problem with Whatsapp is that the client software is closed source. So you have to trust them not to, for example, surreptitiously phone home with a separate copy of your message. Very unlikely but you have no way to check when the client software is a black box.
But what’s running on the server is not the issue in either case.