Right. Exactly my point? Phone numbers are not, like, the only way to identify a user. You have to know who they are. You posted an xkcd but failed to derive the conclusion that if a user is ‘compromised’ and they know who they’re talking to, then so are the people they’re talking to, regardless of whether phone numbers are involved. There’s no practical way to mitigate against that, it becomes a paranoid’s nightmare.

Ok but a messaging app that doesn’t let you know who a message is from is completely pointless? I feel like you’re not really addressing this issue here

No the most important thing a chat app needs to do is send messages between the intended recipients making them unavailable to anyone else. Signal does this. You’re worried about ppl receiving messages and knowing who they’re from. Generally knowing where a message is from is considered a feature – if you want anonymous broadcast, pick a different technology that’s geared towards that

If your threat model is deanonymisation of chat users via phone numbers after one chat is fully compromised, then yeah I guess you need to register the accounts with relatively ‘untracable’ phone numbers (ie unregistered or incorrectly registered burner sims), but that’s not my threat model. I’m more concerned about server-side broad-spectrum government surveillance than I am about targeted device seizures. And of course there are mitigations even with data access on device seizure, provided you’re unwilling to provide device passwords. But, like, if you’re cooperating to the point of providing passwords you’re probably sharing what you know about other users identities anyway, so it’s a very niche case this applies to.

Does it really? Iirc, you can determine: when the account was made, and when the last message was sent. This doesn’t sound ‘highly vulnerable’ to me… Doesn’t permit inspection of metadata e.g. contacts, so as vulnerabilities go it’s pretty weak sauce

What are you referring to? I’ve read many security breakdowns of signal and nobody who knows what they’re talking about has ever mentioned a back door

This is the way

Once your computer’s working to your satisfaction, pretty much all you’ll need to do is alias sudo packman -Syu and try to remember to run that every so often. The arch Linux wiki is second to none, and if you stick with the distro you should find it all feels very familiar in no time.

Male pattern baldness has something to do with testosterone I think? Like, ppl w/ more testosterone tend to lose more hair or summat

Yeah a grass lawn with no flowering lawn plants is dull and borderline sterile anyway. At least it’s not being replaced with AstroTurf

What bit did you worry I hadn’t read? Was it an answer you posted in another thread, perhaps, that you’re talking about? I don’t believe there was anything in my reply that suggested I hadn’t comprehended anything relevant up to that point…

It’s not really that straightforward though, is it? Firstly is it a mean or a median average? What counts as an empire? When do we date the rise and fall of specific empires? These are not questions with straightforwards answers. Would Hitler’s Germany count as an empire? How many Roman empires were there?

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Well that makes sense

Anyway never mind that. Back down the fat mines

. philosophy is important, but implementation is importanter

Yes. This is the key

I don’t mind a bullshit meme, most memes are bullshit. Sometimes the bullshittery itself is the funny bit, or to put it another way, there are times like this where the absurdity of it is what’s funny to me. Like, Linux’s kill levels operate, as they must, as advice to the running process, because the os has no insight or capability as to how to gracefully close a process - nor should it. It’s an impossible task to know what safe cleanup looks like. But I like the image of the Linux penguin shooting Firefox tbqh

One task lifecycle management tool to bring them all, one tool to find them. One tool to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

Is ASAP Linux a variant of Asahi that I’m not hip enough to get?

I know, right? It turns up on the sorrel in my garden every year