Telegram is giving away FREE Premium subscriptions! All they need from you is to use your cell phone as a relay to text out their OTP codes! And the recipient of the OTP sees your phone number! What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?
PLEASE don’t use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it’s totally FOSS, you can self host, there are tons of front end clients to choose from. Or even use Signal. I have my own issues with Signal, the fact they don’t allow third party clients, you can’t self-host, they have a proprietary shim in their stack that only they know what it does, they were pushing crypto, etc, but at least Signal is better than this garbage.
People in the privacy community need to get over the unrealistic dream that regular people will adopt Matrix when we can’t even get them to use Signal. The only way Matrix will have mass adoption is through getting a lot of corporate clients. Then the workers might choose to use it personally too after being familiar with it.
Sometimes even anything other than SMS kn the US because ppl just assume everyone have iPhones
Far from the truth. Most of my U.S. friends own androids.
My entire extended family only has iPhones and my wife and I are the only ones with android, gotten a lot of them on telegram to be able to have large group chats working well for everyone to have a good experience.
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Which is okay. I was pointing out that it’s not true that “ppl just assumes that everyone has iphones.”
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My wife and a few family members use telegram, it’s perfectly fine for using as just a regular chat app, you can join spam or sketchy groups but if you don’t join premium or enable contact access, and generally be smart about using it, etc you will be fine.
My wife knows that if she doesn’t use Session, she needs to call me and hope I pick up. Granted, she only uses it with me, but that’s already a win in my book.
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Could be the case. But we agree that she doesn’t have to use it if she doesn’t want to, and I don’t have to use any of the mainstream stuff if I don’t want to. We trust each other to no end, to the point that our biometrics are in each other’s devices, and we leave them laying around regularly. I can see how that could be a sure way to bring issues into a relationship, but thank God, that’s not our case. As for other people, I couldn’t care less. My kids have no access to devices yet (except their Linux PCs built by themselves), so all is great in my life.
My girlfriend said she prefers it knowing I couldn’t get other girls to talk with me over XMPP 😂
Smart girl, haha!
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I appreciate the thought. Each of us should do what we can while making sure it’s not detrimental to our lives in any way, shape or form. We’ve been married almost 14 years now, and I’ve been asked by some guys sometimes if she was my girlfriend by the way my wife and I treat each other. This comes from being fully open with each other, and both of us willing to go over every disagreement with research and evidence only. This has led to her moving her password manager to my self-hosted Vaultwarden, her getting Yubikeys and me having Signal on my phone’s secondary profile to send/receive messages and info to/from her side of the family. You have the right idea, probably more spot on than my ideas, for sure. From what you say, I think you’ve struck a better balance than I have. As for my kids (10 and 8 years old right now), my boy wanted a PC when he was 5 nearing his 6th birthday (2 years ago), he told me that he wanted his gift to be a PC. So we went out over the course of 2 months or so to buy each of the parts. The day before his BD, which was a Saturday, he had to put it all together (under my supervision and directions, of course). It took him 12 hours 😁. He chose ZorinOS (against my better judgment) as his OS, and I walked him through the whole process of installing, from downloading the ISO to final first boot (that was on his birthday, almost 4 more hours 🤣). Totally worth it. My daughter was 7 going in 8, and when she saw that she asked me for the same for her BD. Same process, only with her it took just short of 10 hours for the whole thing, and she chose PopOS. But in my boy’s defense, at those ages boys do tend to be lazier than girls, and take more breaks, plus he was 2 years younger. My mother-in-law wanted to murder me, saying it was abusive. But my kids now know the basics of building a PC. The gift is not the computer, but the knowledge. I think every nerd with children should do the same (keep the geek going for generations, lol).
What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?
No jokes, I’d like to know. How is it different from sending sms to random numbers?
… people just send SMS to random phone numbers?
No but what exactly stops anyone from doing that? A privacy consideration? I’d think it’s just a waste of time at best.
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People don’t need to get an sms from you to know your number works. There are tons of other ways including just trying to log in into telegram or Whatsapp with a list of many numbers.
Or good old XMPP!
I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts about Signal and DeltaChat for messaging
I said Signal, meant to say Sessions
Signal is fine for a drop-in WhatsApp replacement. I use it for chatting to my friends casually. For something you need more security for you could do encrypted emails as that doesn’t require exchanging phone numbers, or ideally just arrange to meet up in-person and discuss things so you don’t leave any kind of digital or paper trail.
Signal is pretty broken. A chat app shouldn’t require a SIM card & an iOS/Android device just to create & maintain an account (too bad Linux or KaiOS users or folks that otherwise don’t want a smart phone). Multi-devdice setups seem to have issues. The desktop app being Electron is a waste of resources. They still don’t want to support UnifiedPush while highly encouraging you download the app from the Google Play Store & send notification data thru Google-controlled FSM. There’s also the missing history of the server code which is probably has something to do with US intelligence injecting code.
Is it better than a lot of things, sure, but it should be put on a pedestal nor seen as exemplary for private chat in UI or philosophy.
Been using Deltachat for about a year, so far so good. I dunno how secure it really is (never took the time to check) but it’s been reliable. Multi-device was kinda quirky at first but has gotten better.
Also Simplex but I find element client very comfortable to use.
Reading the discussion here. I’d never heard of xmpp. Probably just never registered as a messaging alternative. Just checked out https://xmpp.org/. Wow! Tons of apps. Even some android apps on fdroid. Guess I’ve got some exploring to do.
XMPP is an old protocol. GTalk (google talk) and Whatsapp used it, then extended it, then didn’t give back to the community. So here we are…
The problem with alternative protocols and apps and whatnot is that people are reluctant to change and won’t try anything new if only 2-3 other people use that protocol/service. I can’t even convince my best friends to use Signal, let alone XMPP.
One can never expect power of any kind to not be abused!
Thanks for the heads up
What proprietary software does Signal have?
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