• 62 Posts
  • 513 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • To paint a more complete picture, PrivacyGuides.org comes from the subreddit of the same name. When I was last there (about a year ago) some of the people behind that subreddit had a habit of pushing misguided views as if they were facts, and did so with an air of authority that came from their control of the subreddit and the site.

    My point is not to support either group, but just a warning: They are not “the privacy community”. Please take their advice with a grain of salt. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it is not so good.



  • I am not suggesting specific changes to your canary document. I am (a) explaining someone else’s question that you said you didn’t understand, and (b) pointing out that you might find better response if you clearly and briefly explained at the top of your post why you are posting it here.

    To underscore (b): This community is not typically used as a vault for warrant canaries. An argument could be made that they don’t belong here. I don’t feel strongly about it so long as they don’t become a common source of noise, but if you can’t find a better place for them, I think the least you could do is say in one or two sentences why you’re posting one. Without requiring eighteen thousand subscribers (and uncounted additional readers) to sift through off-site links, or make sense of a single field in a wall of monspaced copypasta that has no obvious meaning to the majority of readers.


  • I think you’ve misunderstood my comment.

    Warrant canaries are most noteworthy when they’re not published.

    Something cannot be a warrant canary at all unless it is published. Did you mean to say it is most noteworthy when it has been published at least once, and then stopped being published? That would be an example of what I meant by a “change” in my comment.

    Back to the original point: You said you don’t understand monk’s first question, so I tried to explain it to you: It was asking whether some change has taken place; some cause for alarm. A change in the document, or its removal, or a failure to update it.

    The only way to know that it’s not published is to – publish it. Widely. And routinely.

    Indeed. As I said in the last paragraph of my earlier comment.

    Edit: In the future, if you’re going to post canaries to general forums like this one, you might want to include a short explanation for community members who aren’t familiar with warrant canaries, or who wonder why you’re posting one here of all places. You didn’t provide any context. I understand the value of posting it, but to most people, your post can easily be seen as irrelevant noise polluting their news feeds.


  • I’m not GP, but regarding 1:

    Warrant canaries are only noteworthy when they are updated. GP is asking if this one was updated, as in whether some attestation was removed, implying that a warrant affecting that attestation has been served since the last one.

    If no such change has taken place, then it’s still useful to have a copy of the canary publicly archived (e.g. here) for comparison to future versions, but there’s no reason for the people in this community to spend their time reading it.





  • I won’t attempt a (unsupported) downgrade :- ).

    If you mean changing the apt config from trixie back to stable, that will be perfectly safe to do when trixie becomes the new stable. At that point, they will both be the same distro. The advantage of doing this is that you will automatically get the next stable release that eventually replaces trixie.





  • SimpleX has some interesting ideas, but also some shortcomings for people who want a practical messaging service. For example:

    • It is funded by venture capital, which calls into question its longevity, and if it does manage to stick around, suggests that it will be leveraged to exploit people once the user base is large enough.
    • Its queue servers delete messages if they are not delivered within a certain time frame (21 days by default). Good luck if you take a vacation off-grid for a few weeks.
    • No multi-device support. (This means a single account accessed concurrently from multiple independent devices.) The closest it comes is locally tethering a mobile device to a computer.
    • Establishing new contacts requires sharing a large link or QR code, which is not always convenient.
    • No support for group calls.

    I look forward to seeing how its design decisions develop in the coming years, but outside of a few niche use cases, it is not a suitable replacement for Matrix or Signal.