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Weird, I agree with Russia on something. I'm sure I won't agree on their suggested replacement though.
Signal and/or Simplex FTW.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Whilst WhatsApp is still owned by meta and I'm sure the US military would have a lot use for the metadata they collect, let's be honest, I'm sure Putin would prefer if Russians switched to a platform they can spy on themselves
Vcontact exists for exactly this reason.
Yes that's why China bans most private messengers.
I've read that MAX (typical horse taste of modern Russian official names, similar to Rosgvardia, Gosuslugi, Rostech and so on ; Soviet-time many-many-many caps abbreviations are boring, but somehow better) in its current early versions is a piece of spyware looking like Telegram, literally saving passwords and banking data and browsing history. Well, I'm almost certain Telegram itself is not much better.
Installed Briar on my phone and persuaded my sister, and to my grandma's today.
I like the idea of these meshes but until Linux phones become a practical option it doesn’t matter. Apple will restrict the hardware, Google will let Gemini spy on anything that passes through the phone, the phone situation is a mess.
I don’t really blame governments for that either. I blame fucking business majors.
They actually don't yet have mesh routing, it's more like an automated sneakernet over BT and shared Wi-Fi right now, until you have access to global Internet. Like ships at high seas exchanging mail and news.
Briar has an alpha stage client for Linux phones among other things, unfortunately I use FreeBSD right now and don't want to reboot to try it, and without rebooting there are some problems under Linux JRE under Linux emulation, and under native JRE it swears at unknown OS.
Can we have the same in the EU too, please?
Meta is a security threat outside of Russia too. No privacy should be expected when using their services
Yes, so like 12 years ago I was thinking - maybe they won't do such bad things, maybe it's a purely hypothetical possibility, surely someone will catch them outright spying.
Yet suppose that back then Zuck rolled out an update with hidden functionality to spy at some underage girl, and then rolled it back. Who would check every FB application update? And if the hidden functionality looked enough like a bug (matching only a handful of device IDs of millions), then who'd become suspicious? There have been many updates with many bugs.
And Zuck surely behaves as if such thing happened many times.
I just hope more people in Russia will switch to Briar, it IMHO seems to have all the necessary Telegram-like functionality other than channels, votes, video uploading .... But that's probably intended, too much data to synchronize. Text and pics are a lot.
when using their services
Have I got some bad news for you...
Meta is an arm of Russia propaganda machine
Meta is playing all sides, and would personally kill children of any country for a fiver
On the one hand, i support independence from the US.
On the other hand, the messenger i'm using better be hosted in another country, so it's less likely that local law enforcement can spy on my communications.
it's less likely that local law enforcement can spy on my communications.
Most developed nations at this point have some sort of data-sharing treaty. So some other country not subject to local laws spies on you, then just shares that information with your local country, and vise-versa, and voila everyone on the planet has just skirted any and all consumer privacy protections.
If Ruzzian leaders say whatever arbitrary thing is a threat, what they mean is its a threat to the status quo and the elites and they want the people to nip it in the bud for them
I didn't understand anything, but it's interesting
The threat to security is not really Russia and its people per se, its the security threat to the elite and their bullshit interests.
A threat to them does not necessarily reflect an actual problem for the people and their safety, its to protect thr rich and influential and allow them to keep fucking with stupid crap
They are bad, and we are all good, did I understand everything correctly?
Not at all. But that's intentional, maybe?
I imagine what would happen, say, if a popular Chinese messenger app existed in America. How long would it last without censorship and being banned?
You mean like TikTok?