Spyke

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privacy

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Is it okay to give WhatsApp contacts permission?

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sure, but someone would find out if WhatsApp didn't e2ee their messages, which is the most important thing

Not necessarily. Code can be obfuscated.

Well you literally can be, because if it was not someone would find out instantly, it'd be a huge thing and meta would suffer greatly if they lied about e2ee

"Instantly", yeah, sure... WhatsApp isn't really used for secure communication (I wonder why), but by normies who don't know any better. I doubt most users would care if something like this came to light.

Sealed sender...., also signal is private, not anonymous, if you want both, simplex is ur friend

Sealed sender has nothing to do with this, as it applies to messages. You can still build a profile of users based on which users submit which hashes for contact discovery, without the need for them to send any message to those contacts at all.

well that's not the same situation the robber wouldn't see everything, the hw component would.... also other doors have the function of keeping heat inside, not keeping robbers aw

Not necessarily true, and also not really relevant to the analogy. If a hardware component would spy on basically everything, I'd find it weird to just say "Hey Intel, you already have all my data any way, so I'm just going to freely give it to Meta as well."

Well again if it did something like that, we would know thanks ro reverse engineering

You're putting too much blind trust in reverse engineering. And since you seem to be insistent on naively trusting Meta and proprietary applications, I won't try to convince you otherwise. Have fun, I guess.

privacy

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Is it okay to give WhatsApp contacts permission?

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yes you can verity that it is secure by reverse engineering, just like someone can read the code, someone can reverse engineer it.

No, you can't, at least not reliably. Reverse engineering is nowhere near as simple as "just like someone can read the code".

It DOESN'T, they literally state that they don't have encrypt metadata and can share it with other meta services

I don't keep up with whatever WhatsApp is doing, so nice to know that it's already worse than I thought, but it doesn't really change my point.

which honestly as long as the messages themselves are encrypted is sadly still a much better option than sms

If I could be certain that the messages are in fact encrypted as claimed, I'd agree.

thanks for proving you don't know, even the signal server doesn't know ur contacts...

They do, just not in the way you probably think. Unique identifiers (which phone numbers typically are) can always be used to track users, even if they're just stored as a hash value on a server. They don't immediately reveal the identity of a person like clear text phone numbers could do, but there's still information that can be extracted through metadata analysis. Though to be fair, this discussion is more relevant to anonymity than to privacy.

because it'd be above everything else and could see everything, no matter the sw ur using... so it'd be pointless anyways

Why would it be pointless? If some random person broke into your home, would you just open all the doors because apparently doors are pointless? Having one entity spy on you is a weird excuse to let another one do the same. I mean... you do you, but I think it's a weird mentality to have.

Just like with whatsapp...

Not really, as any unwanted traffic to WhatsApp's servers would just get drowned within wanted traffic, making it effectively unnoticeable to the user. The same can't be said for hardware that tries to connect somewhere despite no software on that device being allowed to connect to the internet.

privacy

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Is it okay to give WhatsApp contacts permission?

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Of course closed source software can be secure, but given that you can't verify that it actually is, it's better to treat it as if it's not. And I'm not saying that WhatsApp isn't encrypted, but we can't know if this also applies properly to metadata, or which encryption algorithm is actually used, if the keys are really only accessible to end users (i.e. if it's really E2EE), etc.

It's not unreasonable to think that Meta (or any other Big Tech company) makes their products just secure enough to not allow just about anyone with the right abilities to exploit weaknesses (which would obviously hurt their business), while still retaining the ability for themselves to have access to at least some of the data.

Also, how is it a good idea to give a signal my contacts if it's not okay to give meta my contacts?

Also, if you don't accept this argument, then how do you know there's not a component in your phone that listens to everything you say that's above system level?...

You seem to be treating privacy like an all-or-nothing situation. There's different levels to privacy, with different realistic possibilities and threat models. To give you the short answers to both questions: It's not a good idea to give Signal access to your contacts, and I indeed don't know if there's a component in my phone spying on everything. But there is nuance to both.

First off, Signal's Contact Dicovery Service is open source. Of course there's still a level of trust required regarding Signal's operational integrity, as we can't know if this is really what runs on their servers, but at least the Signal Foundation doesn't have a history of countless known privacy violations like Meta does, which means it all comes down to how much you trust either of those organisations. So even though I wouldn't recommend granting Signal access to your contacts and personally prefer messengers without such a feature (e.g. SimpleX), I also don't yet insist on recommending against it.

As for the hardware: Assuming that there is indeed some component spying on me, why would this be a justification to become careless about privacy on the software level? And the real difference between the arguments is the availability of alternatives. While there are quite a few open-source messenger alternatives, the same can't be said about hardware. And it's unlikely for there to be anything on the hardware level that could be spying without anyone noticing, at least if we assume that this hardware would send this data somewhere, which one would surely notice when analysing network traffic or by checking for emitted radio frequencies if the manufacturer had the genius idea of using mesh networks instead.
However, certain components could certainly be used as a backdoor for state actors if they gain physical access to a device, so I'm still advocating for open hardware and firmware.

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Zelensky threatens to attack Belarus

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piracy

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All take, no give

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Unless you forget to bind your torrent client to the VPN interface. Found that out the hard way and had to pay 600 € for like 10 seconds of accidental seeding, and that was after negotiating with the law firm, else it would have been around 1k €. So yeah, the commenter above was not kidding with torrenting in Germany being dangerous, even the slightest error in your setup can be pretty expensive. Now I only use i2p torrents to be on the really safe side, and also because I want to see the network grow.

piracy

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Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong?

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And that's why I was wondering if the question was asked verbatim. Stallman doesn't seem to know what the word means either.

I don't get what's supposed to be so controversial about the first part, though. Many countries already have their age of consent somewhere around 14, often including Romeo and Juliet laws (i.e. not indiscriminately), so not really an unpopular take, and I can't say I disagree with him there.

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Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

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You'd agree of course, that pedophiles should be removed from society?

No, I would most definitely not. In the same way that I would not agree that we should remove all men from society just because they make up the majority of rapists.

Is the idea of shaming pedophiles and pedo apologists some kind of line in the sand that shouldn't be crossed in your eyes?

Yes.

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Free speech activists condemn UK entry ban for Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur

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For all intents and purposes, none is more serious than the other, there's no practical difference. And if they wanted to take a closer look, they could have done that before approving the ETA. Doing this right now is a politically motivated action, not because of actual public safety concerns or whatever. It also doesn't help that it was revoked days before the scheduled visit, as a visa application won't be approved in time.

wir_iel

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wir🚮iel

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Vitali sperrt den Dreijährigen in den Wandschrank, nimmt ihm alles weg, gibt ihm dann nur minimale Vorräte und schlägt auch immer mal wieder zu. Wundert mich nicht, dass der Dreijährige sich dagegen konstant und auf jede erdenkliche Weise versucht zu wehren.

europe

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Womens rights

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This, and it doesn't have any symbols or practices associated with it in the first place, so what would one even ban? Atheism isn't a religion, it's the lack thereof.


Edit: Context, because a mod banned the person above for the laughable reason of "Reddit Atheism". IIRC, The comment was something like:

Atheism is not the one oppressing and indoctrinating people

How anyone could take offense to this is beyond me. Do we genuinely support religions in this community? And on an ML instance no less? It seems like religion really is the opiate of the masses...