• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 4th, 2021

help-circle




  • I use uBlock Origin on Firefox with Javascript, remote fonts, and all 3rd party resources blocked by default, and I also use Yomichan with several J-J and J-E dictionaries for quick, high-quality lookups and making Anki cards.

    I have another profile with no extensions aside from cookies.txt to extract cookies so that I can use youtube-dl for those sites.

    And, if you can call it an add on, I use custom search engines for a lot of sites. As for the extensions I don’t use, I’ve disabled and removed the EME and Widevine DRM modules that Firefox ships by default because it’s proprietary and…it’s DRM. DRM is ridiculous and bad, and it only ever punishes people who don’t pirate content. It also empowers monopolies.


  • I agree. But it’s worse than what you’ve said here; Signal is only accessible on Android/iOS and not on the Pinephone and its myriad OSes, for example. People have to develop their own clients for Signal, but Signal has said that they will deny these clients access to the server. But there’s no way they’re going to develop Signal for these obscure platforms.

    Now, whether they’d actually do that is another thing altogether, but they’ve said they would, and they’ve done it before.

    As I mentioned before, Signal’s servers are hosted on AWS and Azure, which, even if that doesn’t concern you from a personal privacy perspective, Signal is funding these anti-privacy actors, and continued use of Signal increases its popularity, which increases the number of servers it needs to support users, which increases the amount of money it has to pay to these companies. So, by using Signal, you are indirectly financially supporting Amazon.

    That makes me a little uncomfortable.

    While you could make the argument that Signal’s servers can’t access your message content because it’s E2EE, metadata is still accessible, and probably accessible to Amazon and Azure, as they host the servers.

    And Signal is also making weird moves lately with MobileCoin, which seems directly related to withholding their server source code for over a year.

    Worst of all, you need a phone number to get Signal working. You could use a landline, or a free phone number, or a VOIP number, but you still need to do this to use Signal. Thankfully, it’s not limited to mobile numbers, because SIM cards are tied to your identity in some countries, but you need a phone number. This barrier to entry exists for no good reason. It exists for a reason (Signal was meant to replace SMS), but it’s not a good reason. Being given the option to link Signal to your phone is a good idea. Being forced to link Signal to a phone is dumb and annoying.

    Signal might be open source, but they’re doing everything they can to close it off, which really annoys me.

    But Signal isn’t proprietary, like @SudoDnfDashY suggested.