Regarding pointing out examples of posts made by bots, that is just a waste of time! No one will know for certain, people will argue, those bots will argue, other bot accounts with the same agenda will argue, people will be manipulated, they will argue, and status quo returns…

By talking about ‘anything of substance’ is being framed by the bot posts, repeatedly, to manipulate. But, take a step back and you’ll realise it really isn’t ‘anything of substance’ but something to distract.

As for the early internet, I think you’re thinking about early pre-banhammer-FBI-raid 4-chan.

1. no they weren’t. no moving of goalposts
2. what’s my number then?
3. amazingly not stupid. dunning kruger and all that.

signal accounts… signal accounts everywhere!

perfect for the everyday user

…because of course, they don’t need privacy, do they now. “Nothing to hide” and all that jazz.

But like TOR, can entry / exit nodes be used to tie the two ends together through e.g. timing attacks?

The messages are private and that’s what’s most important.

No, that isn’t true. WhatsApp has the same lies. Law enforcement connect communication between users at key times and use it as credible evidence. Why would drug exporter 1 be communicating with drug buyer 1 at the exact time the delivery arrives in the country? Law enforcement doesn’t need to know what was written.

Phone numbers are one way. Paid accounts are another.

Rubbish. How would this stop bots? Bots are created to make money. What makes you think creators don’t have a phone number, or be prepared to pay to spam.

huh? so the phone number is encrypted in a way that can’t be read, but an sms is sent to the phone? … a separate company sends the text on behalf of signal? so that separate company logs the phone number, the timestamp and who knows what else.

1. yawn, vpns are a thing and strawman argument. point?
2. my number is private. point?
3. bs. spam is easy to detect across a large number of accounts using simpleheuristics. point?

But the police request the meta data of all messages from your phone number that the company has and they’re required by law to give them it.

This is what the UK police do with WhatsApp data. Even though they can’t read the messages, they do use the connections of messages to suspicious characters as evidence including date and times, which also puts these other people in the spotlight, opening further investigations.

The UK police can also use ‘stinger’ devices that are “fake” mobile data towers to intercept mobile communications.

opening the discussion again is just tiring.

so tiring that i opened it and read it, then typed a long response.

… but why require numbers in the first place.

and then every phone number on your phone by arresting you and searching your phone.

you will still need a phone number to sign up for Signal

During registration they want a phone number to send a verification code. I know I am me. They don’t need to verify that.

I’m sure that just sets the database column hide_phonenumber to TRUE.

The PDF was/is a closed-source propriety file format.

If you really wanted to leave the Apple eco-system, it would most likely be possible to run macos in an emulator (kvm/qemu) on a pc and most likely the software too.

forget me not, i think on f-droid may be an option. it’s fairly easy to make data files for, and you could easily ask your favourite llm to wrap some data into the format.