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Comment by psychphysic | Hacker News Reader

Bigger question how will safe messaging apps exit the market?

Will people need a number for a privacy friendly foreign nation to continue access?

This is what the micro-nations were on about, people trying to dredge sand up off reefs and take over drilling platforms since the early 1980s to establish "data havens". The long term trend is that no nation will ultimately resist backdoors on encrypted platforms, because militarily they cannot resist the pressure (internally or externally).

The micronation thing is silly, as is relying on a shrinking number of countries which claim they won't enforce these laws. We need satellite-based servers. If I were Musk and had that chain up in the sky, I'd open a simple E2EE Whatsapp for anyone who could ping them directly. At this point, anyone who wants private comms is going to need to go to space for them.

> If I were Musk and had that chain up in the sky,

If you were Musk, and if Musk were some sort of superhero fighter for communications freedom. If Musk wants private communication for himself and his friends, I'm sure he can manage it.

I shouldn't have said "If I were Musk". That's so douchey. I feel like my 90 year old uncle.

I should've said, "If I owned a global chain of communications satellites, I would..."

But then again, would I? I'm not so sure. I ditched and walked away from a really brilliant E2EE platform I had built before I launched it in 2012, whose purpose was to touch off and gamify democratic revolutions in totalitarian states, precisely because I had a dream about it being used by nazis in the west to carry out mass organized violence. I woke up and realized it probably would be used for that, and I shut down the whole project. As a matter of fact, I have a 14 page long handwritten note I wrote addressed to Elon Musk warning him not to do things like that when he tries to de-moderate Twitter, which (since I don't know him, and he wouldn't care) I never sent.

So yeah, even if I were him, I probably wouldn't do what I just said. But it was a really douchey way that I put it. Sorry.

Yes because Musk cares about “freedom of speech” as long as it is something he agrees with .

What makes you say that?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/12/16/...

I'm not going to read that. Unless you're the opinion columnist for USA today? Cause I asked you about your opinion.

Is it an “opinion” that Elon Musk blocked links to Mastadon and the account that was tracking his plane using publicly available information?

Or do you just refuse to read anything that contradicts your world view?

And we're into ad hominem attacks.

I'm sure I deserved that for asking your opinion.

You don’t need an “opinion” about whether Musk is blocking Twitter links he doesn’t agree with.

That’s an easily verifiable fact that you could have found out about just by reading the link you refused to read.

I apologize profusely for deigning to ask you to talk to me.

It's not an excuse but I thought your opinion might provide me insight, but your behaviour makes clear it'll be utterly worthless.

> And we're into ad hominem attacks.

Where?

You asked about why they have that opinion. They provided a link which covers the reasons they have the opinion they have.

All they did was reply with a link.

For all I know it's selling me essential oils.

Is it so much to ask for some basic human decency?

Or just used decentralized e2ee comms that already exist?

Any good ones? Last I "used" was BitMessage I ran it for maybe a week and never looked back.

Try Matrix.

Ah didn't even occur to me.. of course. I have been running my own server for a few months using Oracle free tier. Think I'll stick to matrix.org going forwards.

Sadly, a centralized, monetized space-based signaling system seems less like pie-in-the-sky to me at this point than does any particular decentralized platform gaining sufficient network effect to become a widely used standard.

The apps would be delisted in the UK app stores and will eventually stop working for existing users when not updated. That's also a security issue in itself.

It'll be a matter of installing the app "from unknown source" then?

Can't do that on iOS.

Technically you can, but the hoop jumping isn’t ideal.

If only iOS devices had web browsers…

No one using authoritarian computing platforms will fare well at resisting authoritarians.

Which, unfortunately, is a rather risky situation considering for instance all the rogue ChatGPT-branded extensions and apps people downloaded without a second thought to their legitimacy.

We have been conditioned to view branding as the certificate of legitimacy, and that simply is not true for the Internet where branding can be copied and pasted in seconds.

I doubt they still do it but for whatever reason for a while WhatsApp loads to offer it's APK on its website.

Bet it saw very few installs wonder if we'll go full circle.

The risk can be reduced with open source code, verified by the community. Usually when the "branding" gets too authoritarian, people reach for the FOSS version that seems the most trusted.

Or get signed and trusted apps from a community run alternative "app store" like F-Droid, Arch, or Debian.

For something like this you must start blocking at the network level, simply allowing the traffic would make these trivial to bypass via even something as simple as a web browser.

Stop using centralized software distribution systems. F-Droid, Debian etc are run by international communities, support Tor, and cannot be censored as long as we maintain access to the internet.

Federated message systems like Matrix already exist and are unaffected even if legislation like this passes.

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