When it’s libre software, we’re not banned from fixing it.

Signal is a company and a network service and a protocol and some libre software.

Anyone can modify the client software (though you can’t actually distribute modified versions via Apple’s iOS App Store, due to Apple’s binary distribution system being incompatible with GPLv3… which is why unlike the Android version there are no forks of Signal for iOS) but if a 3rd party actually “fixed” the problems I’ve been talking about here then it really wouldn’t make any sense to call that Signal anymore because it would be a different (and incompatible) protocol.

Signal (the company) must approve of and participate in any change to Signal (the protocol and service).

Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.

I don’t know what you mean by “bait” here, but…

Escaping to a phone-number-requiring, centralized-on-Amazon, closed-source-server-having, marketed-to-activists, built-with-funding-from-Radio-Free-Asia (for the specific purpose of being used by people opposing governments which the US considers adversaries) service which makes downright dishonest claims of having a cryptographically-ensured inability to collect metadata? No thanks.

(fuck whatsapp and discord too, of course.)

it’s being answered in the github thread you linked

The answers there are only about the fact that it can be turned off and that by default clients will silently fall back to “unsealed sender”.

That does not say anything about the question of what attacks it is actually meant to prevent (assuming a user does “enable sealed sender indicators”).

This can be separated into two different questions:

1. For an adversary who does not control the server, does sealed sender prevent any attacks? (which?)
2. For an adversary who does control the server, how does sealed sender prevent that adversary from identifying the sender (via the fact that they must identify themselves to receive messages, and do so from the same IP address)?

The strongest possibly-true statement i can imagine about sealed sender’s utility is something like this:

For users who enable sealed sender indicators AND who are connecting to the internet from the same IP address as some other Signal users, from the perspective of an an adversary who controls the server, sealed sender increases the size of the set of possible senders for a given message from one to the number of other Signal users who were online from behind the same NAT gateway at the time the message was sent.

This is a vastly weaker claim than saying that “by design” Signal has no possibility of collecting any information at all besides the famous “date of registration and last time user was seen online” which Signal proponents often tout.

False.

You can configure one or more of your profiles’ addresses to be a “business address” which means that when people contact you via it it will always create a new group automatically. Then you can (optionally, on a per-contact basis) add your other devices’ profiles to it (as can your contact with their other devices, after you make them an admin of the group).

It’s not the most obvious/intuitive system but it works well and imo this paradigm is actually better than most systems’ multi-device support in that you can see which device someone is sending from and you can choose to give different contacts access to a different subset of your devices than others.

the music video is underrated

You can just make a group for each contact with all of your (and their) devices in it.

Messages are private on signal and they cannot be connected to you through sealed sender.

No. Signal’s sealed sender has an incoherent threat model and only protects against an honest server, and if the server is assumed to be honest then a “no logs” policy would be sufficient.

Sealed sender is complete security theater. And, just in case it is ever actually difficult for the server to infer who is who (eg, if there are many users behind the same NAT), the server can also simply turn it off and the client will silently fall back to “unsealed sender”. 🤡

The fact that they go to this much dishonest effort to convince people that they “can’t” exploit their massive centralized trove of activists’ metadata is a pretty strong indicator of one answer to OP’s question.

this is a good meme

The fediverse condemns free speech. The fediverse bans unapproved opinions and wrong think,

“The fediverse” isn’t a monolith; different instances have wildly different moderation policies. The instance-level federation-or-defederation paradigm is certainly limiting, but the existence of moderation does not mean anyone “condemns free speech”.

On the contrary, moderated spaces are actually an essential ingredient for enabling free speech.

Calling people mentally ill because of differences of opinion (as I see you are prone to doing) has a chilling effect.

Or, put another way, persistently being a jerk to someone is a way to censor them.

I consider my volunteer moderation activities here on lemmy to be a form of free-speech activism.

proving that the fediverse is an enemy to the principals of Edward Snowden.

Where do you think Snowden hangs out online? 4chan? Maybe? But the only place I know where he posts is, sadly, twitter (where he he last posted in January). Twitter’s moderation policies are ever changing subject to the whims of one guy, but it also has never been and never will be unmoderated. Do you think twitter is also “enemy to the principals of Edward Snowden”?

But it’s fun to be on here one in awhile knowing fhe right thing to say that forces people to come undone and expose their true personality.

You’re here because the unmoderated types of spaces you’re implicitly idealizing are actually inhabited by edgelords (and spammers, and CSAM). More interesting discussions online tend to happen in well-moderated spaces.

he followed up to simultaneously say he was joking while also doubling down 🤦

https://xcancel.com/theronster/status/1538239717032042497

it’s among the many OSes you can run in an emulator in your web browser at https://copy.sh/v86/

The network never went down.

You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan’s later OStatus site Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢

When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to the OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.

https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan’s own first post is “still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.” … but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren’t worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.

Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/

As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan’s URL shortening service ur1.ca which is also now long-dead.

imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) this was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.

🪦

The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else’s domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don’t know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢

sometimes a footprint represents humanity

sometimes, but in GNOME’s case i think it is not intended to be a human foot but rather the foot of a mythological creature (a gnome). note that it has a squashed aspect ratio compared to a human foot, and also has only four toes.

apparently it’s also problematic in some cultures: https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FootAndCulturalIssue

Extended explanation: I suspect the “back and forth” is likely a reference to the “poop back and forth” scene in Miranda July’s 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know.

Is this a spam campaign?

Five of the eleven comments so far (including one from OP) are all recommending the same service; all five are from accounts less than 2 months old with a one or two digit number of comments 🤔