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Digital Fingerprinting

CosmicRiver said:
Yes i agree, you're right. It's not much for my convenience but for other people. I would prefer using Signal but no one uses it...

It makes sense... anyway speaking of Telegram i think that Telegram is much more used than Whatsapp by criminal groups and for illegal activities in general, often just because of its reputation, despite most chats being nonencrypted and the protocol being closed-source. They probably are less likely to collaborate with the police not because they can't but because they don't want to.
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I recall the Telegram founder being arrested in France last year. I haven't followed up on the story but I think it was related to the use of Telegram by Russian soldiers. They probably want a key to the backdoor to break encryption on military comms, among the other reasons.

I remember a few cases of Apple refusing to unlock criminal's phones for law enforcement. But I haven't heard it happen in years; I assume they strong-armed Apple into compliance.

The government's use of Signal makes me a little hesitant. Idk whether to take it as an endorsement of it's privacy, or if sharing an app with politicians is too close for comfort.
 
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Icon said:
The government's use of Signal makes me a little hesitant.
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To be clear, I don't think Signal is the best alternative either, and I don't use it personally. It's centralized and requires a phone number. I just recommend it to the average user given that it's very superior and much less suspicious than other popular alternatives, so it will be a huge improvement compared to those. For particularly security minded people, I would recommend a XMPP account or one of the many peer-to-peer ones such as Briar or Simplex.
 
Nydex said:
@dreamer042 thanks for the detailed explanation, that's really helpful! Your setup more or less matches mine - I use LibreWolf set to the strictest possible privacy settings and have only 4 addons - ClearURLs, DarkReader (no idea how unsafe it is but I can't suffer the flashbang of opening google docs late at night in my dark room...), Decentraleyes and Temporary Containers.

It's important to reiterate that every additional extension one adds to their browser is a potential attack vector, so basically always use only what you really, really can't go without. Interestingly, I haven't felt the need to install uBlock as LibreWolf seems to be successfully blocking everything it needs to. I'm actually quite happy with that browser.

Lovely thread.
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I seriously debated adding *use darkmode* and including darkreader as a quality of life addon as well, but decided it didn't really fit the general "keep it simple stupid" target of the tutorial. When I install browsers for others I just do the simple layout outlined above. When I do my browser, darkmode, darkreader, and youtubenonstop are 100% essentials. Not vetted to be safe, potentaily huge attack vectors, but I need real 100% darkmode on everything and I can't deal with "are you still listening?" every 5 tracks. It's gotta be done.
 
northape said:
It is truly a sad day. A backdoor in our devices was prepared long ago, most likely. All they needed was a green light. My head is empty, and I do not know what to say…
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The scanning is on the server side, so of you use a trustworthy OS and either a peer to peer or a federated and encrypted message system it won't be exposed to dragnet surveillance.

But yes, it's not good at all, most people won't do any of that and won't even be aware that this passed.
 
blig-blug said:
The scanning is on the server side, so of you use a trustworthy OS and either a peer to peer or a federated and encrypted message system it won't be exposed to dragnet surveillance.
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I read somewhere before that they wanted a backdoor on a system level in smartphones, but I might have misunderstood.
 
northape said:
I read somewhere before that they wanted a backdoor on a system level in smartphones, but I might have misunderstood.
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There was indeed a proposal for mandatory client-side scanning, but that didn't pass either, and it's not included in what has been approved now.

So there are still ways for people with enough awareness to communicate privately. They keep boiling the frog though, and I suppose it eventually will be illegal.
 
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