Privacy just as Security is a never ending story.

Signal was once even recommended by Snowden.

According to “wired” the Signal encryption is solid and widely adopted by a lot of companies… but are the their servers without backdoor?

“1984” seems to make for a very profitable business model: “What exactly is Facebook up to?” (they bought WhatsApp ($19Billion!!!) and Instagram($1B in Cash))

“Facebook” (and Google, Apple & M$ tries too) “lives on the data it obtains about its users.”

“The more detailed this data is, the more targeted Facebook can place ads – and the more accurate an ad is, the more valuable it is.”

“This involves a lot of money: In the third quarter of 2014 alone, Facebook generated more than three billion US dollars in sales, about 90 percent of which comes from advertising.”

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/faq-facebook-neue-nutzungsbedingungen-101.html

but it does not end with advertisements… Google is making a massive push into BigHealthData.

While it makes sense to monitor the environment for hazardous chemicals and one’s vital signs for any problems… (e.g. too less Fitness, says the Fitness Tracker) it shall done with very transparent Open Source systems only, so the user is in complete control over the user’s data (and can share it with a doc if user wants to… via an usb stick or Mail-Attachment.encrypted)… but not via the Google Cloud (as Google plans to).

The idea behind all this BigHealthData gathering is automatization of the HealthSector aka replacing humans (doctors, nurses) with machines.

Japan experiments with care giving robots, the Chinese try to replace the Dentist with a robot.

back to topic:

everyone who has:

knows… that it-security & privacy is not just a fancy fashion choice.

The more the system knows about the user, the more precise the manipulation, the more control it can gain.

(BigPharma (of course) just want’s to know what are the most profitable markets, maybe the costs for developing & testing new medicines were set artificially so high, so that small companies can not compete?)

So computing won’t go away any time soon and thus mankind needs to develop systems process and store very personal data in a responsible (encrypted, so only the user has access and can grant very fine grained what doctor get’s to see what data) way.

or even better: have all the user’s data on the user’s self-hosted machine (also encrypted, with only very close friends knowing the decryption password, in case of an emergency).

desktop client that syncs with mobile 🙂

what really is cool about Telegram… it has a desktop client, that syncs with the user’s mobile client (thus all the chats and data and media are in sync)

SIGNAL has that too 🙂

for latest how to install instructions, check on official page: https://www.signal.org/download/linux/

# NOTE: These instructions only work for 64 bit Debian-based
# Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint etc.

# 1. Install our official public software signing key
wget -O- https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | gpg --dearmor > signal-desktop-keyring.gpg
cat signal-desktop-keyring.gpg | sudo tee -a /usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg > /dev/null

# 2. Add our repository to your list of repositories
echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg] https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial main' |\
  sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list

# 3. Update your package database and install signal
sudo apt update && sudo apt install signal-desktop

Not on Linux?

as Linus always says: “show me the src”

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

(mostly Java?)

the comapny behind this Open Whisper Systems

a complete goodbye?

guess no.

Because… loads of contacts will be unwilling or unable to migrate to any other messenger.

Loads of elderly users in Germany are so happy, that they finally are “cool” and able to send pictures with their phones… that they hardly understand the fuss… why they should switch to another application.

So there will be a need for those who want to switch completely to have a form of backward-compatibility with those users.

and there is a possibility:

buy another smart phone… and move the simcard…

so the setup is like:

  • SmartPhone A (stationary, wifi only)
    • will have no sim card (Wifi only)
    • keeps running WhatsApp and Telegram but check less frequent
    • will stay at home… so no location GPS tracking data
    • give it to kids for installing games with trojans & viruses etc X-D
  • SmartPhone B (mobile, LTE & wifi)
    • will (of course) be running the latest available LineageOS without Google Play services (Signal does not need them, it might need them for push notification, but if pull notification is okay with the user, no Play Store needed)
    • software minimalism: will have installed only the absolutely necessary apps such as banking and firefox browser

this setup also makes sense from a security perspective.

the (mobile) phone network infrastructure, seems to be like the mail system: security was simply not an issue 20 years ago and thus it is possible to fake sender-addresses and caller-phone-numbers.

https://dwaves.de/2019/11/04/whatsapp-hacking-nso-group-trojan-by-phone-call-ss7-insecure-telco-phone-infrastructure/

https://dwaves.de/2020/03/16/costly-identity-theft-sim-swapping-stealing-identity-attack-on-mobile-phone-companies-staff-spanish-and-romanian-police-arrested-26-individuals-theft-over-e3-5-mill-3-9-mill-by-hijacking-people/

Links:

Open Whisper CEO: https://twitter.com/moxie

Matthew Rosenfeld aka Moxie Marlinspike leaves as Signal CEO https://signal.org/blog/new-year-new-ceo/

no RSS feed of the blog https://signal.org/blog/ could be found

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/in-epic-hack-signal-developer-turns-the-tables-on-forensics-firm-cellebrite/

https://twitter.com/signalapp

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