Privacy

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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 :)

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Signal has been blocked by Venezuela and Russia (www.theverge.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

154 comments fedilink hide all child comments

"Signal is being blocked in Venezuela and Russia. The app is a popular choice for encrypted messaging and people trying to avoid government censorship, and the blocks appear to be part of a crackdown on internal dissent in both countries..."

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Matrix isn't secure depending on how you use it. It also doesn't protect individual identities terribly well.

Simplex Chat would be the better option however the main Simplex Chat server and matrix server could end up blocked as well.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Matrix is entirely self-hostable, and you can turn off both federation, and the requirements for any linkable identifiers.

Signal by contrast requires your phone number, isn't self-hostable, and is based in a five-eyes country.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Matrix doesn't protect metadata, which is arguably just as (if not more) important than message data. Signal by contrast does protect metadata and proper implements Perfect Forward Secrecy for all chats. I do think Signal's centralized design and phone number requirements problematic, but Signal still has many merits. Such as its massive user base for a AGPL-only project.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

for a AGPL-only project.

Citation needed. It is undisputed that the software that runs on their servers is not identical to the code they release; if they release at all because sometimes they just stop for a year, until people complain 🫠

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

plenty of servers for both though

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Couldn't they block them too? Monitor the domains people connect to, check if it's a Matrix server and block it if it is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The overwhelming majority of users are on the main servers. It also impacts self hosted Matrix servers that use the matrox.org identity server.