tech+law news opinion
The Durov indictment is exactly why I don’t think Signal is any more suitable for queer people facing increasing hostility from The Anti-Sex League than any other centralized platform. My preference for Matrix isn’t based on its cryptographic properties, it’s because it is more than one target.
Is Telegram more likely to backdoor their software now, or to cease operation? Which is worse? Why wouldn’t Signal be next?
Matrix is only as non-backdoored as the least secure client your messages end up on. But a heterogeneous landscape of clients and servers requires at least a little more investment to squish. Governments have effectively infinite money to target any individual, but they run out of attention span to target *every* individual.
My advocacy for decentralization isn’t about some false belief that a self-selected bucket of random yahoos running unaudited hapahazardly-updated software on arbitrary VPSes somehow has better security or privacy than one software stack run by specialists as a full time job. It’s more that the moles never win at Whack-A-Mole, but since you’re forced to participate as a target, you’d rather be one of too many to chase than beholden to the only mole in the field, because a government can *always* find a mallet big enough for a single target when it’s the only thing they need to hit.
tech+law news opinion
@kistaro A good example of this is Truecrypt vs OpenSSL.
The former very credibly got NSLed as a single target, even with good opsec by the creator. The latter, governments have been trying to legislate out of existence or destroy largely ineffectually, because it has too many candidate instances of its operation.
This is also why, as much as I'm reluctant to be a purist, I've generally been preferring open source. It's harder to destroy by those so inclined.
