Technology

Signal is considered one of the most secure messengers.

I mean lol, they require a phone number to sign up, which you can only get with an ID in many countries. You chat with a gestapo officer and they know where you life.

Signal IS GARBAGE. Fucking garbage article, gaslighting bullshit. Fuck this timeline. Honestly this article is fucking terrorism.

About freedom, not freedom and various other things - might want to extend the common logic of gun laws to the remaining part of the human societies' dynamics.

Signal is scary in the sense that it's a system based on cryptography. Cryptography is a reinforcement, not a basis, if we are not discussing a file encryption tool. And it's centralized as a service and as a project. It's not a standard, it's an application.

It can be compared to a gun - being able to own one is more free, but in the real world that freedom affects different people differently, and makes some freer than the other.

Again, Signal is a system based on cryptography most people don't understand. Why would there not be a backdoor? Those things that its developers call a threat to rapid reaction to new vulnerabilities and practical threats - these things are to the same extent a threat against monoculture of implementations and algorithms, which allows backdoors in both.

It is a good tool for people whom its owners will never be interested to hurt - by using that backdoor in the open most people are not qualified to find, or by pushing a personalized update with a simpler backdoor, or by blocking their user account at the right moment in time.

It's a bad tool even for them, if we account for false sense of security of people, who run Signal on their iOS and Android phones, or PCs under popular OSes, and also I distinctly remember how Signal was one of the applications that motivated me to get an Android device. Among weird people who didn't have one then (around 2014) I might be even weirder, but if not, this seems to be a tool of soft pressure to turn to compromised suppliers.

Signal discourages alternative implementations, Signal doesn't have a modular standard, and Signal doesn't want federation. In my personal humble opinion this means that Signal has their own agenda which can only work in monoculture. Fuck that.