Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Signal Server is effectively closed source software right now (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Signal Server repository hasn't been updated since April 2020. There are a bunch of links about this here but I found this thread the most interesting.

To me, this is unforgivable behaviour. Signal always positioned themselves as "open source", and the Server itself is under the best license for server software (AGPLv3 -- which raises questions about the legality of this situation).

Signal's whole approach to open source has constantly been underwhelming to say the least. Their budget-Apple attitude (secrecy, i.e. "we can never engage the community directly", "we will never merge/accept PRs", etc) has lead to its logical conclusion here, I guess. I have been somewhat of a "Signal apologist" thus far (I almost always defend them & I think a lot of criticism they get it very unfair) but yeah I'm over Signal now.

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

While Dendrite is better in many ways, AFAIK it does not solve the fundamental architectural problem of immutable and permanent history room metadata. As a result of that, database storage use is growing indefinitely (easily into the hundreds of gigabytes) and there is no real solution to that anywhere in sight. In addition I think it also is a massive privacy issue, as this immutable and permanent history room state data is synchronized across any server that has a member joining a chat. Yes I am aware that this is a "feature" of matrix, but IMHO a really bad one and resilient federated rooms can also be implemented in different, less over-engineered ways.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 years ago (1 children)

massive privacy issue, as this immutable and permanent history room state data is synchronized across any server that has a member joining

This is terrible.

Matrix evolved evolved in a very messy way, starting without encryption and hacking it in later on, and now it's even trying to become P2P. I expect more serious privacy-breaching "features" to come out over time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Not really, that was a feature that was there from the very beginning and Matrix also openly advertised this. The problem mainly comes from people projecting their wishes onto them and the Matrix team (for commercial interests/ego I guess) not vehemently denying that privacy is mostly an afterthought in the system's design.