It may be initially inconvenient, but you can choose a bank that offers 2FA/TAN beyond the smartphone app.

Not sure what healthcare apps you mean. There’s lots of categories, so won’t comment without clarification.

Same for employers tbh. Would love an example. (Besides: work apps can’t be forced on your private phone in most places.)

I live in “modern society” and do own a smartphone, but I’m aware that it’s a convenience, not a necessity.

I have multiple young-ish (30s) friends that don’t own a phone (not just smartphone; any phone), and basically all people I know above 80 years don’t own one either.

You can absolutely live a perfectly fine and good life without a smartphone. You’re just drawing the line where it’s convenient for you.

Or let’s put it in more familiar words…

[Owning a smartphone] is not “participating in society”, this is participating in, contributing to, and directly benefitting from the very thing they’re complaining about.

Quick! Get this person a series A, B and C funding!

Yeah Librewolf is amazing. I dialed some if the ootb settings back for usability, but all the “new” stuff Mozilla adds is filtered right back out upstream, so I never even see it.

But… That would force them to provide a great user experience in order to retain users!! That’s an unacceptable burden on the largest companies in the world!!

Yeah. Honestly. For platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, mandate chronological feeds of only people you have followed, paginated at like 30.

They saved lifes.

Glad to have cleared that up for you 👍

No

That’s not a physics statement btw. I just think that you, personally, are too slow to be able to do that. Offense intended.

Yeah. I think this is one of the best examples of letting nix do the hard stuff for you.

I think the text is somewhat dubious in its arguments, but this (and the arguments built on this assertion) is just plain wrong:

[Signals servers have] a few important pieces of data;

Message dates and times Message senders and recipients (via phone number identifiers)

Signal clients implement the Pond protocol. As a result, Signals servers know who a message is for (obviously, how else do you get the message) but cannot know who it is FROM.

I’ve been playing around with implementing a secure/private messenger demo for myself, and have been consistently impressed with how privacy preserving Signal is when reading their papers and code. I wish it was selfhostable, but apart from that, it’s great.

The server would be NICE to be OSS, but ultimately, privacy breaches are prevented client/protocol side.

This doesn’t make a call to government servers.

The app (or desktop application BTW, incl. Linux) reads your national ID’s NFC tag, once. When you need to prove your age, the app locally computes a zkp that only tells the site “at least 18yo yes/no”.

Note that every EU country has a form of national ID, and the digital capabilities of these IDs are already used for a bunch of stuff (e.g. taxes, bank account creation,…). This doesn’t worsen the privacy situation for EU citizens, but instead ensures that no privacy-unfriendly solutions emerge.

You’re not talking about growing up, you’re talking about giving up.

I rely on xdrip+ for getting blood clucose measurements. That app is not on the play store.

So, in case I’ll loose my phone and have to buy one (or even just need to reset it) I’m 24hrs without blood glucose measurements…? Yeah that sounds great /s.

It ensures that non-power users stay in the clutches of Google.

Yrs, you need to update.

Is this some sort of public tracker issue I’m too private trackers and Usenet only to understand?

Funny, I’ve also already read that 😄 Good blog and article.

What blog?

Ha, thanks, I’d already read that. And I do, mostly, agree; the OMEMO implementation is not great both from the security perspective discussed in the post, as well as the UX (not being able to decrypt old messages on new devices at all).

That being said, I primarily want a selfhosted, federated messenger which also takes privacy and security seriously, and at least for the former, XMPP is really refreshingly good.

Ugh. I’ve always liked Matrix (and was not bothered too much by the metadata leaks because my home server was not federated anyways), but after noticing some issues and finally reading up on the actual protocol spec a couple of weeks ago… oof. Yeah. No.

Set up XMPP for now. Works really well and the protocol seems so much saner. Unfortunately, it too has some annoyances that are unacceptable to me in the long term. I’m this close to saying “fuck it” and wasting the next couple of years of my life on a new protocol that no one is gonna use. (Cue the XKCD here.)