Boots need shining, and Dessalines is positively salivating at the thought

  • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    This sounds like a unjustified callout and a bit of an ad hominem. He doesn’t argue against tools for dissent, but specifically against Signal and recommends matrix. link to post

    Any communication tool that requires you to personally identify yourself through a phone number and is hosted centrally in the US is not good for dissidents.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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      3 months ago

      He doesn’t argue against tools for dissent,

      He says it’s a ‘smart move’ for the totalitarian countries he simps for to ban signal. It’s not just a question of preference.

      • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Well maybe his bias is showing there, but Venezuela is in a cold war with the US and it is objectively a smart move from a strategy perspective.

        You simply cannot have open and free democracy if a superpower is meddling in your election. If I didn’t know who the dessalines was (I don’t) I wouldn’t especially think he was wrong. Any country that finds itself in opposition with the US is smart to limit or shut down US controlled IT infrastructure.

        Of course I wouldn’t be surprised if Venezuela and Russia would ban Matrix and other P2P protocols too.

        • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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          3 months ago

          You simply cannot have open and free democracy if a superpower is meddling in your election.

          I’m pretty sure the concern of Venezuela and Russia is not in having open and free democracy, but preventing it.

          Any country that finds itself in opposition with the US is smart to limit or shut down US controlled IT infrastructure.

          How convenient, then, that the US controlled IT infrastructure they target is the same IT infrastructure that dissidents use to communicate and that totalitarian governments can’t track. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

          • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            Well I’m not going to argue against any of that, I’m certainly not a fan of Putin. I still hate Signal though and hate that it gets recommended and marketed as a secure messenger when it’s clearly an unsafe tool for dissidents.

            We still don’t have mature and widely used fully decentralized P2P messenger apps. I suspect that Signal is part of an effort to prevent that, I imagine all it takes is to ever so slightly sabotage projects, like hire a guy who works on an open source project, or buy it, or invest a bit of money into marketing the controllable alternative.

            So putting this critique about Signal in an article about repression is worthwhile and important. At least in an “enemy of my enemy” sort of way 😉

        • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 months ago

          Venezuela is an authoritarian regime not because the US is “meddling in its elections” but because the current leader is a despot who faked the election results.

        • Socsa
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          3 months ago

          There it is. There is absolutely no evidence that the US is medaling in Venezuelan elections.

    • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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      3 months ago

      No. He’s a well known Tankie and has a Castro profile picture. So crying about privacy while rooting for autocrats is absolutely laughable.

    • Socsa
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      3 months ago

      Are you suggesting that the US would compel signal to turn data about Venezuelan dissidents over to Maduro?

      I mean, there’s maybe a conversation to be had about the wisdom of using Signal in particular, but I really struggle to imagine a justification for banning it anywhere near that conversation. Furthermore, we all know Dessalines is a redfash bootlicker. His intent here is very clearly more cheerleading for said boot

    • kn0wmad1c@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      I agree the callout is unjustified, but there is still something to be said when those countries ban Signal but aren’t banning WhatsApp.

    • PoTayToes
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      3 months ago

      Tell me though, which company will not hand over what data they have when asked by their country’s judiciary?

      The question here is how much data they keep. Strict legal minimum or more.

      • qaz@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        You obviously didn’t watch the video, the point made is not that there is information being handed over (every company has to comply with legal orders), but that Singal handed over nothing except 2 timestamps shared as integers.

        • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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          3 months ago

          Congrats if you can stand more than a minute of this 4chan-esque garbage but I’m not gonna sit through 10 minutes of it while they stretch out getting to the actual point. If you want to bring forth an argument, don’t start with “watch this random ass YouTube video” where I have to sit through some garbage and have to then fact check every potential point made.

            • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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              3 months ago

              I only opened the embedded player, I didn’t even bother wasting an actual click on that video. And why reply? Because they’ve made a stupid point about not having watched the video. That’s why. If he wanted to make a point he could’ve cited an article with the relevant tidbits instead.

        • PoTayToes
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          3 months ago

          You are correct though, I did indeed not watch it. Hence I misunderstood the comment I was answering to as being negative towards Signal. Thanks for the added context.

    • ivn@jlai.lu
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      3 months ago

      While this is true it’s still good to add nuance.

      There is a difference between judiciary and intelligence context in these kind of things, if you use a tool in a judiciary context you burn it (as with the FBI malware on Playpen). So it’s probably better to keep it low, even avoid to use some of the information gathered, so you keep the intelligence source.

      I’m not saying that’s what’s going on, just that this is not an absolute proof.

  • andrew_bidlaw
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    3 months ago

    That’s a way to know it’s banned. Zero local coverage, but yes, it doesn’t work without tricks as I’ve tested. That’s said, it’s a nice proof it’s is\was relatively safe to use and popular in said countries and the likes.

    Dess may seem smug for promoting mtx over Signal, but it’s one less channel for communication, and they’d try to come for mtx next.

  • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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    3 months ago

    Wasn’t it protect-your-privacy-Snowden who pushed for signal a few years ago?

  • Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    I don’t understand. Weren’t most lemmy users cheering when tiktok thing happened? How is this any different?

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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      3 months ago
      1. No, most Lemmy users were not cheering for the Tiktok ban.

      2. Signal is not owned in large part (namely, a golden share) by the Chinese government, and the proposed Tiktok ban only goes into effect if they don’t divest within a year.

      3. It wasn’t done just after a political crisis in an attempt to silence dissent. Hell, it’s not even in effect yet.

      4. The US is far from the only country to have taken such steps, as the espionage risks of a ubiquitous app that an enemy government has unlimited and legal access to is not great. Numerous other countries have been restricting Tiktok until a change in their data sharing policies is effected, because of how wide open it is right now.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPM
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      3 months ago

      In Russia, the country’s communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, says that Signal violated Russian legislation, reports Interfax. People in Russia also can’t register a new Signal account without using a VPN, Reuters reports. Russia has “restricted Signal messaging app backends on most internet providers” as of Friday afternoon, NetBlocks says.