The original post laids out why it's not possible to do well: privacy apps, sanctioned countries, apps made by people for themselves to avoid clouds and third parties, etc.

Simple example: I have a foss VPN app running on my phone to avoid censorship and surveillance in some countries I visit. While using this app is no problem, non-anonymous development might carry consequences to the developer in some dictatorship jurisdictions (which are plenty of). I'm not sure all devs of such system would be willing to give their ids.

Another example is that this way US can cut out countries and people they don't like from mobile usage (which basically equals to modern social life). Look into sanctioned judges of international court because US protects war criminals.

That's not universally true, there is a class of privacy coins whose txs are not (at least in theory) traceable.

I'd argue that's actually a more anarchist original view and transparent ledger is a bug of the first implementation, not a feature, and creates problem of the original money people are trying to solve (i.e. have electronic money without a government overreach, US using modern banking system as a political pressure tool, etc)

Exactly.

While trying to degoogling, removing most proprietary software and use sandboxing for everything that's still needed as proprietary, you would often hear that stupid pro-surveillance thesis: "oh, what's wrong in someone trying to show you relevant things in the internet to buy by your interests?".

Maybe now some people would think about it. That giving someone's leverage over youself is a ticking bomb until the actually scary people will use it as an advantage. That's humanity 101.

Same about non-encrypted emails, cloud AI providers, SMS/real-identity based auth and 2fa, telemetry. The industry is full of trash and has to be revived from VC garbage.

"what's wrong? Oh, it literally paints a target on your face that can be shot at if you happen to be brown".

Maybe the answers must be blunt and unpleasant.

Publicly reproducible attacks are great, because now we know where there the problem is and how to fix it.

You can be pretty sure some three-letter agency trash had been already using it around the world along with shady spyware startups.

Questionable privacy implications are the feature, not the bug.

Surely three-letter agencies, "unknown creators" of chatcontrol proposals in the EU and other state psychopaths care very much about the children!

No, they don't.

Mass surveillance and the leverage coming from that is the goal itself.

And i2p rust router https://github.com/altonen/emissary

And Cmdr. Benjamin Sisko.

Peldor joi

Why are saying that Firefox or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome? I haven't been using Chrome for maybe 10 years or more, so I'm genuinely interested. Even if you hate Firefox, something like Brave is felt the same way but without google's garbage. I heard there are new guys in town like Helium and other Chromium based browser which choose to remove telemetry, support manifest v2, adblocks and so on.

The browsing experience without constant upselling some trash and proper adblockers are magnitudes better.

> or even Chrome reskin can't compete with Chrome?

reskined chrome are still ultimately taking google's changes downstream. For a while, it may be OK, but what happens when google changes the web standards to suit themselves? Will those reskinned browsers fork the standard?

Firefox _is competition_, but not competitive based on market share.

The most compelling argument I've heard is around security, while Firefox does sandboxing, it is not as comprehensive as what went into Chrome.

I'd still choose Firefox over it for the reasons you've mentioned.

Standard wireguard is blocked by DPI in Russia, China, Iran, etc.

The soluton in the post for VPNs as in "censorship bypass", not as in "virtual lan over the internet for businesses". Like AmneziaWG or VLESS protocols.

But it doesn't make Signal bad. If Americans blindly process our messages without knowing what's inside, it's worse than not depending on them, but better than showing your private correspondence to somebody.

At least we don't seem to have things which are close by UX and security at the same time.

Simplex is fine, but still feels a bit raw.

Everything else is either untrustworthy because of the closed code or no e2e encryption or custom encryption schemes (WhatsApp, Telegram, any Asian messenger) or unusable from UX perspective (Tox, Matrix).

Simplex is a project by a fervent COVID conspiracy theorist FYI. (Evidence: his Twitter page)

And the internet is originally made by the US army (i.e. professional murderers). Doesn't make the internet bad as a technology.

Simplex is quite well designed. Even if it doesn't succeed, I think we'll see its forks and similar implementations.

Wouldn't that lend it credibility if your concern was privacy?

Clients are never used as relays in TOR. You never route anyone's traffic until you setup it yourself. And you can't miss that part, and it's not a default, and requires additional configuration.

Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".

> Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".

Well the purpose of using Tor is to prevent any network operators from knowing who you're talking to. Which AIUI is primarily a concern if either you're not allowed to talk to whoever ("great firewall" type things), or you risk getting in trouble for talking to whoever (Silk Road etc, or disfavored politics).

I guess if you're worried about hacks and doxxing rather than LE? Or if you only call things crime when they should be illegal rather than when they formally are?

LE relies on opsec failures which is very clear on their busts. They are incompetent hypocrite fools.