661
People hoping to get randomly added to war chats lol
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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i'm more curious about getting on their venmo friend list.
"hey, it's uh, vlad. i need 200k for the um, rigging of the midterms in uh, wisconsin. thank you."
Just send like a request for a few thousand dollars and put the description entirely I'm Russian lol
I would ruin it by posting my balls immediately
Bad actors are sowing distrust by implying that Signal is not secure. Always remember that the powers that be don't want the public to have encrypted comms and would love to ban private messaging apps altogether. I could also be completely wrong and Signal is in fact a fed honeypot...
The code is open-source though, and I'm hoping that individuals more learned than I would surely alert us if there were any backdoors/exploits...
There are many things you can complain about when it comes to signal, but overall it's a huge improvement from unencrypted messengers like discord and definitely a ~~step~~ leap in the right direction
You have to be very tinfoil hat to believe that this current administration is capable of anything so sophisticated as a misdirection.
Bad actors are sowing distrust by implying that Signal is not secure. Always remember that the powers that be don’t want the public to have encrypted comms and would love to ban private messaging apps altogether.
Wrong logic, trying to guess what they are doing. I mean, if you were a god-level poker player, then maybe, but most people are not and god-level players lose too.
and Signal is in fact a fed honeypot
Being competitive and protected from network effects (decentralized, p2p, federation, one standard and many implementations, all that) can hurt being secure. The complexity of being both may not be practical.
The point of Signal is academic level security. It has a clear model and is not doing anything to make it more complex.
Which is why it is centralized, leading to suspicions and accusations of being a honeypot.
The code is open-source though, and I’m hoping that individuals more learned than I would surely alert us if there were any backdoors/exploits…
That's a wrong hope in any case.
Next up:
- Signal getting banned in US govt
- Signal getting banned in the US
- Signal servers seized, devs detained
- Signal protocol repos removed from M$hub
The chat space is problematic.
- There are a lot of apps that don’t encrypt at all (e.g. Google chat, discord, etc)
- There are apps that encrypt but they are subject to jurisdictions that can or may in the future force backdoors (e.g., Chinese apps, possibly telegram, possibly US apps in the future)
- There are apps that encrypt, are in countries that are privacy focused but are not for free (e.g., threema)
This contributes to a fragmentation that makes WhatsApp the app that-you-must-have
Sure it is supposedly encrypted but I would not bet my money that is without back doors
Whatsapp to messengers is what internet explorer was to browsers lol. Slow, bloated, unfree, universally hated, but still somehow universally used
Ain’t that the truth
I mean honestly, feature wise, it's pretty good in my opinion. It has some very useful features Signal lacks (e.g. live location sharing) and it's not slow or badly designed in my opinion.
I still prefer Signal since I don't like Facebook, but realistically speaking WhatsApp is pretty good.
Not in the US, pretty much nobody uses it here. Which is really odd to me, since it's so prevalent elsewhere.
IIRC it's because US cell carriers don't charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS
That makes sense, SMS is essentially free here.
It is elsewhere now it's just in the past it used to be stupidly expensive to send SMS.
It's wjere text speak came from, I believe they used to actually charge by the character so if you wanted to tell somebody you'll "be at the train station in 15 minutes" that's quite a lot of characters, so that became "@ stn n 15" which is almost incomprehensible these days.
When WhatsApp became available everybody went over because suddenly you could communicate like humans, after the phone company's realized that the jig was up they lowered text prices but by that point everyone had gotten used to just using WhatsApp. Then Apple came along with iMessage and no one could see the point because it only worked on iPhones whereas WhatsApp work for everyone.
Text speak mostly came from typing on dumb phone number pads to enter text. Like if you wanted to type “hi” you would have to enter “4-4 pause 4-4-4” As you might expect 5 putting presses with a pause between some of them just to say “hi” got painful. Thus the shortening.
Text messages were always charged per message. But each message was limited to 160 ascii characters or less if you were using other encodings. You could send 1 character or 160 characters but it cost 20 cents (at least where I grew up) either way.
This is all separate from l33t speak which is a whole different thing.
T9 made this way better.
Oh yeah, I remember realizing my new razr had that and started going text crazy.
I felt the same way the first time I discovered swipe-to-type on a smartphone! 🤣
I'm not sure why this had 0 votes, but it's true. I'm old enough that my first cell phone experience was a bag phone from the 1980s.
Texting wasn't even a thing for a while, but once it started, it was charged per message with like a 16 character limit. Then that limit was expanded, but it was always per message, not per character.
But, actually typing out a message was a pain the ass. There were no keyboards at first. You used the letters on the number pad to send your messages.
When T9 texting debuted that was a GOD SEND. Only needing to tap a lil number once to guess your word? Holy crap!
That is if you stay within one country. I still get some insane charges if I text someone 60 kilometers away because it's international.
It still expensive to use your phone abroad that hasn't improved
It did actually. I don't pay for sending a message or calling my neighbour if I go to the next country or Bulgaria. The EU made it law that roaming is free.
What still costs money is if you send a message in the NL to the NL if you have a Belgian number for example, which makes it so that you still have to get a new number each time you move countries. Or rather the bigger pain is calling my mom who lives in a different member state, that I can't really do without incurring insane charges.
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For the people who want to use Signal but are stuck in WhatsApp land because all their contacts are on WhatsApp, you should download WhatsApp business and create an automated away message that says that you are only available via Signal and with a link to your Signal account (if you use a Signal username. ) People in my contacts are slowly switching to Signal.
I did something similar with Twilio. When you call or text my number you get a message about how to reach me. The Twilio SDKs are pretty good. It's just a few lines of code.
Signal has been with me for a decade. Have had Matrix/Element installed for years but no one i know uses it
hmm havent heard of this one yet. Looks promising, gonna try it later. Thanks!
For people seeking an interface similar to signal, I suggest Session. It's a fork of signal that onion-routes the messages (they have their own onion routing network, not TOR). There are no user IDs stored anywhere, you message people through their public keys. From the user experience side of the coin, it's a little on the slow side tho.
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