Getting rid of monoculture via transports and cryptography being pluggable (meaning that the resulting system would be fit for sneakernet as well as for some kind of federated relays as well as something Kademlia-based, the point is that the common standard would describe the data structure, not transports and verification and protection).

It was intended as an ICQ replacement, and its advocates even managed to sell it as that for many normies. It became supported, with federation or not, by many email service providers, social networks, and so on. Then that support mostly vanished. Its users percentages are not inspiring.

In short - something “everyone being able to look upon” is not an argument. The real world analogies are landmines and drug dealers and snake oil.

Even with state-level resources, it’s pretty well understood some mathematical problems underpinning cryptography are computationally beyond the reach of current hardware to solve in any reasonable amount of time.

You are not speaking from your own experience, because which problems are solved and which are not is not solely determined by hardware you have to do it by brute force. Obviously.

And nation states can and do pay researchers whose work is classified. And agencies like NSA do not, for example, provide reasoning for their recommended s-boxes formation process. For example.

Solving problems is sometimes done analytically, you know. Mostly that’s what’s called solving problems. If that yields some power benefits, that can be classified, you know. And kept as a state secret.

Are you in the dark ages? Beyond code review, there are all kinds of automations to catch vulnerabilities early in the development process, and static code analysis is one of the most powerful.

People putting those in are also not in the dark ages.

Stop right there: I don’t need to. It’s wide open for review by anyone in the public including independent security analysts who’ve reviewed the system & published their findings. That suffices.

There are things which were wide open for review by anyone for thousands of years, yet we’ve gotten ICEs less than two centuries ago, and electricity, and so on. And in case of computers, you can make very sophisticated riddles.

So no, that doesn’t suffice.

They don’t.

Oh, denial.

Again, anyone in the public including free agents can & do participate. The scholarly materials & training on this aren’t exactly secret.

There have been plenty of backdoors found in the open in big open source projects. I don’t see how this is different. I don’t see why you have to argue, is it some religion?

Have you been that free agent? Have you participated? How do you think, how many people check things they use? How often and how deeply?

Information security analysts aren’t exceptional people and analyzing that sort of system would be fairly unexceptional to them.

Yes, but you seem to be claiming they have eagle eyes and owl wisdom to see and understand everything. As if all of mathematics were already invented.

Legally obligating backdoors only limits true information security to criminals while compromising the security of everyone else.

It’s not about obligating someone. It’s about people not working for free, and those people working on free (for you) stuff might have put in backdoors which it’s very hard to find. Backdoors usually don’t have the “backdoor” writing on them.

I do agree, though: the surveillance state has so many resources to surveil that it doesn’t need another one.

Perhaps the reason they have so many resources is that they don’t miss opportunities, and they don’t miss opportunities because they have the resources.

Using mono ulture as a word doesn’t change the meaning here. If anything, its a pathway for the foal you ascribe.

Of course it does. Federation can be a monoculture too (as it is with plants). A bunch of centralized (technically federated in IRC’s case, but united) services, like with IRC, can be not a monoculture.

Monoculture is important because one virus (of conspiratorial nature, like backdoors and architectures with planned life cycle, like what I suspect of the Internet, or of natural one, like Skype’s downfall due to its P2P model not functioning in the world of mobile devices, or of political and organizational one, like with XMPP’s standards chaos and sabotage by Google) can kill it. In the real world different organisms have sexual procreation, as one variant, recombining their genome parts into new combinations. That existed with e-mail when it worked over a few different networks and situations and protocols, and with Fidonet and Usenet, with gateways between these. That wasn’t a monoculture.

Old Skype unfortunately was a monoculture. Its clients for Linux (QT) and Windows and mobile things were different implementations technically, but with the same creators and one network and set of protocols in practice.

I still think the existence of crypto is a massive boon to many

That’s the problem, it’s not. You should factor psychology in. People write things over encrypted channels that they wouldn’t over plaintext channels. That means it’s not just comparison of encrypted versus plain, other things equal.

even in a “flawed” implementation with the “control” being on the side of corporations - tho if they are smart, they’d never store the keys themselves, not even hashes.

And that’s another problem, no. Crooks only steal your money, and they have adjusted for encryption anyway. They are also warning you of the danger, for that financial incentive. Like wolves killing sick animals. The state and the corporation - they don’t steal your money, they are fine with just collecting everything there is and predicting your every step, and there will be only one moment with no warning then you will regret. That moment will be one and the same for many people.

Unless you’re part of the signal project, I doubt you know the exact implementation and storage of data they do.

What matters is that the core of their system is a complex thing that is magic for most people. You don’t need to look any further.

Still, thanks for summarising your lengthy post, even if I had to bait you into it. Sometimes, brevity is key.

EDIT:

Still, thanks for summarising your lengthy post, even if I had to bait you into it. Sometimes, brevity is key.

Yeah, I just woke up with sore throat and really bad mood (dog bites, especially when the dog was very good, old and dying, hurt immunity and morale).

that’s a lot of words to say you generally accuse any programm that isn’t federated of having an agenda targeted at its userbase

No, that’s not what I’m saying. I used the word monoculture, it’s pretty good.

And lots of social woo-woo that doesn’t extend much further than “people don’t understand cryptography and think it’s therefore scary”.

Not that. Rather “people don’t understand cryptography, but still rely upon it when they shouldn’t”.

A pretty weird post, and one which I don’t support any statement from because I think you’re wrong.

I mean, you’ve misread those two you thought you understood.

Perhaps you need to get some sleep if you don’t understand what I’m talking about.

I don’t think you understand anything you wrote about. Signal is open source,

I don’t think you should comment on security if “open source” means anything to you in that regard. For finding backdoors binary disassembly is almost as easy or hard as looking in that “open source”. It’s very different for bugs introduced unintentionally, of course.

Also why the hell are you even saying this, have you looked at that source for long enough? If not, then what good it is for you? Magic?

I suppose you are an illustration to the joke about Raymond’s “enough eyeballs” quote, the joke is that people talking about “enough eyeballs” are not using their eyeballs for finding bugs\backdoors, they are using them and their hands for typing the “enough eyeballs” bullshit.

“Given enough good people with guns, all streets in a town are safe”. That’s how this reads for a sane person who has at least tried to question that idiotic narrative about “open source” being the magic pill.

Stallman’s ideology was completely different, sort of digital anarchism, and it has some good parts. But the “open source” thing - nah.

is publicly audited by security researchers,

Exactly, and it’s not audited by you, because you for the life of you won’t understand WTF happens there.

Yes, it’s being audited by some security researchers out there, mostly American. If you don’t see the problem you are blind.

and publishes its protocol, which has multiple implementations in other applications.

No, there are no multiple implementations of the same Signal thing. There are implementations of some mechanisms from Signal. Also have you considered that this is all fucking circus and having a steel gate in a flimsy wooden fence? Or fashion, if that’s easier to swallow.

Can you confidently describe what zero-knowledge means there, how is it achieved, why any specific part in the articles they’ve published matters? If you can’t, what’s the purpose of it being published, it’s like a schoolboy saying “but Linux is open, I can read the code and change it for my needs”, yeah lol.

Security researchers generally agree that backdoors introduce vulnerabilities that render security protocols unsound.

Do security researches have to say anything on DARPA that funds many of them? That being an American military agency.

And on how that affects what they say and what they don’t say, what they highlight and what they pretend not to notice.

In particular, with a swarm of drones in the sky at some point, do you need to read someone’s messages, or is it enough to know that said someone connected to Signal servers 3 minutes ago from a very specific location and send one of those drones. Hypothetically.

Other than create opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit, they only serve to amplify the powers of the surveillance state to invade the privacy of individuals.

Oh, the surveillance state will be fine in any case!

And cybercriminals we should all praise for showing us what the surveillance state would want to have hidden, to create the false notion of security and privacy. When cybercriminals didn’t yet lose the war to said surveillance state, every computer user knew not to store things too personal in digital form on a thing connected to the Internet. Now they expose everything, because they think if cybercriminals can no longer abuse them, neither can the surveillance state.

Do you use Facebook, with TLS till its services and nothing at all beyond that? Or Google - the same?

Now Signal gives you a feeling that at least what you say is hidden from the service. But can you verify that, maybe there’s a scientific work classified yet, possibly independently made in a few countries. This is a common thing with cryptography, scientific works on that are often state secret.

You are also using AES with NSA-provided s-boxes all the time.

I suggest you do some playing with cryptography in practice. Too few people do, while it’s very interesting and enlightening.

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.

It made very different people millionaires and billionaires. Some local businessmen (a very American type in stereotypes, something between a conman and a normal mom and pop business owner), some professors with good understanding of mathematics involved, some translators for big people, some red directors who converted their Soviet power into new power.

And in my childhood I thought they are all thieves, my worldview is more nuanced now. Life is complex.

People talk of KGB as of the main important target of all potential lustrations in the future, but Eugene Kaspersky is KGB, and of people meaningful in Russia he’s honestly very fine. Some people talk of Yeltsin as someone good, but he was a Politburo member. People who remember general Lebed sometimes think he was killed because he was an honest patriotic politician, and he surely made the impression with that simple Soviet flat with a rug on the wall, that Siberian manner of speech, those pacifist and humanist things he would say in interviews (he managed to say without accusations and conflict that people who are mafia or terrorists or both for one government are friends for another and this is business as usual ; he also managed to say without losing any dignity or surrendering any important point that Russians can’t fight more wars after the XX century and that people fight to live in peace, these seem pretty obvious, but some obvious things don’t sound good on TV), except when he was made governor of his part of the world, he quickly became, eh, a normal governor - with new realty and a lover in Moscow, with very expensive idiotic PR actions (like that campaign with Alain Delon in the middle of a depressive Soviet junkyard with a Lenin statue endorsing Lebed), and so on, somehow the memory of him omits those few last years of his life, before the helicopter crash.

Now when I think about it, I didn’t think they are all thieves, I knew life is complex and that I don’t personally know all these people.

So - American billionaires don’t want to be trillionaires, I think. They want to be princes. Perhaps patricians. Or maybe mandarins. The issue is that they are blind to how all three things existed, using them as labels for their own dream of power over humans without complications. Princes were subject to God, Pope and their suzerain, multiple such sometimes, like in Brittany or Holsten or … Patricians obeyed the customs of their republic, whose first citizen usually was a plebeian - the man who was first named “first citizen” notably was, and his cognomen is now used to refer to emperors. Mandarins lived in the kingdom where the only unbreakable law was the mandate of heaven, and weren’t considered better people - certainly no more than as far as their emperor had it.

I believe we will endure. I don’t know about the USA, but maybe it’s for the best that this project goes to version 2.0 .

Russia is 1) not that powerful by far, 2) its elites, those very ones spoken about when expressing these conspiracy theories, are pissing hot water from a mere hint of being friends with any US administration.

They have sort of an inferiority complex, there was recently a damned TV report, apparently, about an American diplomat visiting a cafe and ordering a cheburek (Central Asian street food). It’s so much bootlicking that one can confidently say Russia’s elites are much bigger US fans than Russians in average.

They might be unintentionally making the effect you described upon the US, while trying to somehow become part of its processes, but it’s a small nudge compared to the more serious reasons.

I think this is because the people who are now Russia’s elite came to power in the 90s, a lot of ex-Soviet people looked at the situation pretty simply - as in “we were the losing superpower in this cold war thing, now it’s ended and we are friends, so we are going to become like America in those movies with white middle class people all owning cars and houses”, and those of them who were doing politics, apparently, wanted to have their own political system as “cool” (or whatever, some immeasurable feeling) as the American one.

The Iron Curtain was a huge mistake, people who put it in place were thinking in 30s categories when the 30s were long gone. People inside thought that they only put barriers before you to protect something you’d want to have. A generation of Soviet people grew with that feeling, where everything Soviet was boring and bad, and everything Western magical and good. It wasn’t even about freedom or morality. Just about “coolness”. People breaking the USSR in the 80s and 90s knew that the world around it isn’t virtuous and kind, but they thought it’s “cooler”. Everyone thinks they’d do well when put into an adventure, when safe. Nobody thinks they’ll be some guy who gets eaten by a crocodile on the second page, or a coward, or an idiot, or a sucker.

So. When the Russian “wide mass” realized that for the West it consists of suckers and crocodile fodder, it became disillusioned and the wound healed, except for some rare idiots who kept believing into that picture, not being exposed to reality.

When the Russian elites realized that, they just decided to lower the bar, and be content with playing US sometimes, and getting US citizenship for themselves and their children, and being there often, and playing with US politics. I don’t think it’s directed at somehow corrupting and undoing the US, simply not enough power. They are just regularly touching in the shop something they can’t afford to buy.

He bankrupted a casino, he knows what he’s doing.

I suppose that’s why the people paying for his campaign chose him, to bankrupt a nation you need someone this talented.

Why do they need said nation bankrupt I don’t know, maybe to make it fail while the failure will still be not too gigantic to recover from, and maybe for yet another pump-and-dump scheme, except this time with a country and not an industry. Depends on how optimistic you are about their motives.

In ex-USSR that happened as something destructive, but in USA honestly it’s normal, using institutional pressure to help friendly businesses. Trump is unusual only in how grotesque he is in his position, but history saw Talleyrand.

And US sanctioned Japan just because some of its businesses couldn’t compete, which didn’t kill Japanese car industry, but hurt Japanese computer industry, and sent Japan into recession from which it didn’t quite recover.

About driving users off - that doesn’t really happen unless you intentionally break everything. VKontakte be the experiment showing this, except TG was later made based on VK makers’ experience with social stuff, and was very successful, and is now basically the most convenient messaging\social platform. When something FOSS manages to reproduce the experience of TG, then FOSS messaging and social systems stand a chance. So - some of the life moved from VK to TG, but it’s more of VK’s experience stagnating and being too complex and overloading, not of people fleeing it.

And it’s going to be governed by uncle Larry’s company.

You know, actually this is so grotesquely American that I’m enjoying looking at it from far away.

And it might look nice when you over there are done with the circus and then done with killing each other.

To separate his views from fascism, you need a dimension most people don’t have on their political views map.

The idea, I think, is that the US with the Internet and, as a little part of it, Thiel’s company, is analogous to Sauron.

And us all around, who think it’s a common medium everyone can use to all-human good, are analogous to Denethor or at least Saruman.

And also American conservatives are weird, despite everyone trying to explain them they are monkeys, they tend to look for some “white culture” in Europe and in Tolkien’s writing not in the least.

What matters is that, the same way as evolution or even their ML-based latest toy, societies react to poison. You don’t have to direct the reaction or to muster resources for it. The best way it happens is by them fulfilling their plan to its full possible extent and then seeing that they are out of potential, and their adversity is now immune.

It’s like with warfare, smarts and discipline, resilience and maneuver, sophistication and simplicity, - these all are good or bad in their fitting places, there’s no rule than one is better than the other ever. In our world the worst a hypothetical adversary to the USA could do is to make an antidote. This poison is not deadly and building immunity is the best way at approaching it.

It’s not “they count”, it’s a working conversion. Which is why it’s being stuffed everywhere.

Recognition absolutely trumps everything. You’ll be more suspicious of a noname good thing looking good and cheap than of recognizable bad thing looking bad and expensive.

New frontier, my sweaty arse.

I was reading about helium-3 mining in the same magazine for children where I was reading about “The Mummy” filming process, genetically modified small tigers as pets in the future, reconfigurable clothes made of nanobots, aliens and Median state.

Or maybe in a bit different one, both were cool, one was more “popular science” minded, another was yellowish, but entertaining. The former was called “Young erudite”, the latter “Miracles and mysteries of the planet Earth”. Honestly I think I’m going to look them up, if they are still printed. Perhaps get a subscription.

EDIT: Forgot to say the latter magazine for kids had its last issue released in year 2010. Which was the point of my comment, nothing new in talking about mining helium-3.

While I would prefer both Discord and Telegram to have alternatives, they are popular for a reason. They are in experience what the Internet was in the 00s to the people actually using it a lot.

There are bigger platforms, which drive engagement and collect data as their business model, and they are convenient for everyone making decisions, except they don’t solve any problems too well. Like a casino. It doesn’t lead to anything good, but it’s entertainment in itself.

TG and Discord are good at solving problems. They are Internet communication optimized - subscribe to a channel (or in Discord join a server, TG too has subchannels now, making a channel with subchannels similar to Discord) and say what you want to say, and read what you want to read.

Needless to say that this is pretty similar to IRC of old, and a reiteration of IRC with less load on servers, better security, structured messages, file transfers … would perhaps be nicer, but a business model should be devised for such.

USA is a private surveillance state.

Goes well with being a private apartheid state (“it’s not us, it’s just zoning laws and municipal control over development and a little bit of preference for demolishing black districts for transport development, and some deurbanization seasoning, and public railroad transport defunding topping”, as a result white middle class racists can live as usual never having to make obvious racist choices ; as a result they also think the world is like their fucking big village).

Or private fascist propaganda out of every corner.

Notably private censorship turned out to be a solvable task, takes an American to make that.

Let’s please remember the particular American academic culture. It looks funny and very attractive when shown in Indiana Jones movies or something like that, with a rosy flavor. But IRL plenty of people important in that and, well, directing the development of said culture are power-tripping rockstar-feeling idiots. If you compare American professors to German professors, you might see an ocean of cultural difference.

People who make up said power are the very ones undoing it.

The US doesn’t make anything and a lot of what it does make is bullshit like the entire corn industry. Much of the “value” in the US is speculative and, for lack of a better way of putting it, a complete and utter fantasy. As soon as that house of cards starts to become unstable and the world moves away from the USD then the US economy is going to implode so hard that it would make a black hole blush.

That’s just the latter part of any cycle of life and power. You conquer reputation and eventually you start using it to reinforce the actual value, and that leads to increasing degradation.