Radioactive Butthole

I think this is a really interesting read on the matter: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html

Christianity has gone completely off the rails and isn’t the answer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a god.

Maybe god itself doesn’t have free will and is only acting according to a proscribed set of fundamental laws.

If everyone remembered your past lives you could be held accountable for actions “you” never took. Imagine being born only to find out that your last life was a serial murderer and you have 300 consecutive reincarnations left before you’ll ever experience freedom again.

No, I think its better that we don’t remember. Plus, life wouldn’t be at all novel if you’ve already experienced everything there is for you to enjoy.

I came here to talk about general relativity but you beat me to it!

Yeah, lots. Lots and lots.

In what way was Signal coöperating with Ukraine before? Signal only has access to when you created your account and the last time you connected to their servers; that’s it.

In what way did Ukraine honestly expect to utilize this information in their war? I can’t find any evidence that they’ve coöperated in the past, or that this would have been actually useful information. We have court cases proving they only store what they say they do:

everything in Signal is end-to-end encrypted by default, the broad set of personal information that is typically easy to retrieve in other apps simply doesn’t exist on Signal’s servers,” the company wrote. “The subpoena requested a wide variety of information that fell into this nonexistent category, including the addresses of the users, their correspondence, and the name associated with each account.”

Signal went on to further note that it “doesn’t have access to your messages; your chat list; your groups; your contacts; your stickers; your profile name or avatar; or even the GIFs you search for.”

The only data Signal was able to hand over for the accounts listed in the subpoena were the times and dates when they were created and the last time they connected to the app.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/signal-grand-jury-subpoena-data/

Also, Ukrainians have and continue to use Signal every day. This isn’t like Starlink turning off internet for Ukraine but not Russia; its Ukraine asking for information that doesn’t exist and then getting upset that they didn’t get the non-existant data. It’s a complete non-story designed to get you to use weak messaging apps, don’t fall for it. Signal doesnt want to cooperate with any government and this is a good thing for privacy. If Signal could give information to Ukraine on Russians, it could also give Russia information on Ukrainians. But Signal can’t give anyone information on anyone, and it needs to stay that way.

Slava Ukraini, Fuck Putin.

That’s fair. My only real gripe with Signal is that it isn’t federated. Matrix isn’t ready for the general public and I’m doubtful it ever will be, so in the meantime Signal is the next best thing.

source for audits

Not me, but someone on the signal forums helpfully compiled many of them; there are a lot more than I thought! https://community.signalusers.org/t/wiki-overview-of-third-party-security-audits/13243

That is completely reasonable and in every other instance I would encourage this, but there really isn’t a secure, private (those are two different things; WhatsApp is (probably) secure, but definitely not private) alternative to Signal at the moment. Even if one did exist, it likely isn’t compatible with Signal and would only serve to fragment messaging even further until it has more users than Signal already does.

I guess, I just want to encourage you to make changes where it really matters. Absolutely dump Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other for-profit American manufacturing and services. But boycotting Signal doesn’t really help the way you want it to.

Ultimately you have to decide what is best for you and I obviously can’t and won’t force you to use something, but I hope I can at least provide some perspective.

It is a us based non profit that doesn’t store any information about you, your contacts, or any of your metadata, and encrypts all of your data in transit and at rest, using a strong open source encryption protocol. Signals privacy is so strong that when delivering a message, they cannot tell who the sender is. It is developed out in the open and has been independently audited like four times.

Also you don’t need to purchase the app so boycotting it really only harms you since every other messaging app (that isnt self-hosted) is objectively worse in all of these measures, or has no network effect.

Don’t punish orgs who are doing things right.

Gen Z/A are good at using tech, but they don’t really know anything about how it works. I work in IT support and it can honestly be a tossup sometimes if the person who doesnt know how to clear their cache is a boomer or not.