> To see Sid use his motivation and resources to solve his own problem is the core message (IMHO) of the hacker community.

Hacking is about exploration beyond the known, and iterating towards a clear understanding.

Like the evergreen comic, "How would you like this wrapped?" by John Janik

For decades policymakers have been trying to sell us the same surveillance state they accuse their adversaries of having, wrapped as either security or protecting children.

https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg

Fool me once...

A lot of vim users use comma as the leader key so this is probably natural for a lot of folks.

Also seems convenient to be able to type ,<tab> to autocomplete over your custom commands, in case you forgot the name you assigned them.

Incredible popular software lore here. Calibre and Kitty are two of my favorite pieces of software in the world.

Obligatory reference to Simple Made Easy https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

I watch this talk about once per year to remind myself to eschew complexity.

Wireguard ships with the Linux kernel so you only need to receive ~60 bytes of configuration information.

Wireguard is also easily censored and is already censored in the places that censor VPNs.

Is that true? I thought wg-quick etc were just convenience functions and that it's relatively trivial to use iproute2 to configure a VPN link

You don't need wg-quick. You do need the "wg" command.

Signal has a central, proprietary server. It's between impractical and impossible to run your own Signal server like you can with Matrix, Revolt, or Delta Chat for example. BlueSky has a similar approach (compare to Mastodon).

Also Signal requires a phone number to sign-in. It's not exactly private. AFAIK the proprietary server can glean your IP, your phone number, who you talk to, and when you talk to them. This type of metadata is valuable information.

The WhatsApp co-founder gave Signal $105M in 2018. Signal costs ~$50M/year to run. It's also funded by wealthy donors such as Jack Dorsey (Twitter, BlueSky, Square). BTW Jack is now pushing Signal to integrate Bitcoin.

When evaluating the "ethics" of a chat platform, we should factor-in the metadata, soft power, and eventual leverage that centralized (controlled by a few) platforms like BlueSky and Signal afford to wealthy folks who are bankrolling it.

> Signal has a central, proprietary server.

The signal-server repository is open source

Critical portions of the server are not FOSS. Also the core software forces you to join their servers.

Also we have no proof that they are running the server software published on GitHub. This concern is exacerbated by the fact they didn't publish server code updates for many months.

I mean sure, but also, the client app source code lets us know that unencrypted data is not sent to the server. So at best they could perhaps be collecting some additional metadata, but I don't think it's a whole lot

And it doesn't matter if it's open source or not. because messages are encrypted P2P.

> AFAIK the proprietary server can glean your IP, your phone number, who you talk to, and when you talk to them. This type of metadata is valuable information.

To the best of my knowledge, so can matrix.org or whatever servers you connect and federate to. This is required to route messages between users. What is your point?

*Riot -> Element

Oops I meant Revolt, the Rust-based alternative to Discord. Updated. Thanks. https://github.com/revoltchat