this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024

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US Feds Are Tapping a Half-Billion Encrypted Messaging Goldmine (www.404media.co)

submitted 4 months ago by vegeta to c/technology

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (2 children)

https://archive.ph/tVQZO

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

One more step

Please complete the security check to access

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I do the audio captcha. Otherwise the images literally never end.

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

❓

I don't get that message on my VPN nor my torbrowser

You may want to change nodes or your endpoint.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I did not use Tor, just disallowed scripts

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Just use graphene and matrix, fucking dipshits.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Wouldn’t Signal or SimpleX be a better alternative to Matrix?

Given the state of Matrix clients and Matrix is designed to be federated (plus self-hosting is not simple and requires it’s own security precautions).

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If you're running a multimillion dollar drug operation and you're too incompetent to set up, or too cheap to pay someone to do in your place what most home-labbers could with a couple hundred bucks of hardware, then you're going to get caught and you probably deserve it.

Realistically xmpp over i2p or tor on a disposable live-booting OS would be the best answer. Shit even a one-time-use pay-as-you-go gas station burner woulda been better in most cases. Failing that, you should at least plant yourself in a corrupt enough country and just pay off the local law-enforcement.

If you can't do opsec and own your own comms, then why the fuck would you break international law like that?

[+] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

SimpleX as a very user friendly interface, uses decentralized server, does not requires your phone number or email and the server is really easy to set up (but not needed, for the regular user it just looks like any other messaging app)

Edit: I forgot to say that their app AND servers are open source.

[+] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

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

FAQ SimpleX funding and business model

https://simplex.chat/blog/20240814-simplex-chat-vision-funding-v6-private-routing-new-user-experience.html

Right now it is investors and donations.

[+] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

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

I low-key hope someone would fork it and make it live a life of its own.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I think a fork happening in a few years would be great, right now the app still need a bit of polishing but they are quickly improving it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yes, having a purely non-profit foundation from the start would have been better.

But, for me, it is still a better option than Signal or Matrix for messaging.

Signal is great but they need 10s of millions every year of donations. It means that they rely on the generosity of wealthy individuals to keep going. I'm worried it is not sustainable.

Matrix is better on this aspect since everything is open source, but the UC is not great on my opinion and I don't fell comfortable switching to it for regular contract with family and friends. To be fair it's been a while I haven't used it so I downloaded Element but I am blocked on the account creation (the verification email is not arriving).

To compare I tried creating a new account with SimpleX and in less than a minute I was ready to chat. They rely on investors for now and don't have a clear business model which is worrying but they are developping fast this way and being fully open source anyone could fork it at any time. The UX is great despite being heavily focused on privacy and security and have features that no other app have, you don't need an email or phone to chat and if they ever start to enshitify someone can fork it.

Do pragmatically I think it is the best alternative right now and I am curious to see how they evolve.

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

Simpler to manage and smaller attack surface.

Running your own Matrix server also means running your own host server, database, caches, reverse proxy, firewall, networking stack, etc… Keeping these things running and updated. As well as vetting and updating clients.

[+] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] rottingleaf 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Tox is a good idea with dubious realization (few devs, large codebase, seemingly stagnating).

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

I tried to use tox cli client and it's barely usable. Gui clients just half baked barely products. Adding to the piling bad reputation of the development team ( some fraud, adding backdoor ip leaks ) I think it's enough to bury tox

[–] rottingleaf 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Some time ago the project itself seemed nice (toxcore github included) and there were a few nice little clients which even worked, ratox was especially cool (a fifo client), I've made an attempt to switch friends\family to tox back then, and we used toxic and utox for voice calls with one my friend instead of skype.

However, since then it seems as if the changes were not positive.

It's really sad, because it felt as the closest thing to come ideologically to replacing skype with a free and open source technology. I'd say something architecturally similar to tox plus activitypub-connected directory\identity (and maybe history) servers would be a success.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I agree with you. The idea of tox was great, unfortunately implementation was not that much. Indeed imo loss for messanger apps / protos ecosystem

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

404 yet again with the scoop