explains a lot about the willingness of certain oligarchs to restrict what we can install on our own fucking gizmos.
That’s always been a red line for me. If we lose that, we are at the mercy of the gizmos true owner. Maybe the true owner is benevolant. Or maybe they aren’t. Either way! A golden cage is still a cage!
My friends don’t feel that way. TBH I only do b/c my pa is an old mainframe guy and after personal computing arose he had C64’s and stuff. Those oldschool home computers answered to the human at the kb. I picked up his values. Digital gizmos should answer to me, not to BigTechCo. B/c BigTechCo can be pressured. It can change ownership and policies overnight. Then everyone loses their computing freedom at once.
I see it as Royal Mail or Canada Post way before tech was draining the populace of money and resources. Anyone along the line could open your letter or lose it, but it rarely happened. People were more serious then, and honour and pride of workmanship existed. The default nowadays is “how can we spy on them and take more of their hard-earned cash”.
That’s romanticizing history. When communication via post became economically feasible for a large number of citizens its surveillance began–in the 19th century. I’ll make a more contentious point: religion played the role of what modern-states now call domestic intelligence. The state’s desire to control (that’s what surveillance is about) has always been there. It’s an intrinsic aspect of a state. Technology only allows what would have been economically unfeasible to now enter the realm of feasibility.
What one should take away from this article is that: Signal is a central point that can be compromised silently; Signal has the power to revoke your access to its software at any time (leaving the Canadian ‘market’). Both point to Signal’s users being rubes. They are not in control of the software and are subjugated by a private dictatorship branded ‘Signal’. Users should not be concerned about the government’s will here (it’s the same; it has not changed). Users should be concerned that the private dictatorship–that they paradoxically hold dear–is a private dictatorship.
Signal users yearn to be subjugated and told sweet lies.
Opening and searching people’s mail was very illegal up until the last decade or so. Now there seems to be a big push to let the RCMP do whatever they want.
Does anyone know who is actually doing all the pushing?
Please don’t be silly Canada! I don’t want to lose Signal, it took a lot of effort to get my family and friends to migrate from Zuckerberg owned messenger services.
An app that isn’t complying with any local law is the only app that you can’t actually lose. So if they do the right thing, humanity gains. Unless you want them to comply with the law?
Realistically though, the Signal will stop being available in app stores. Once that happens my non technical friends and family will slowly lose access to Signal. And once it’s unavailable to one person in a group chat, everyone in that group chat will need migrate to a Zuckerberg platform.
Ugh saaame
