Wireguard protocol works with my home internet provider, doesn’t work on LTE. Shadowsocks just works everywhere.

They do have black boxes but there are protocols they can’t handle yet. It’s just usual sword vs shield arms race.

I live in Russia and with all this “VPN is restricted” fuss I’ve yet to meet someone without VPN on their phone. Most people use free VPN services, some are paying for it, me and my friends use VPN we set up on VPS.

They need a new enemy every now and then. If the current enemy happens to be exterminated, they’ll need one sooner, but they’ll need a new one anyways.

Thankfully I don’t have people I need on WhatsApp, but it took some convincing.

Nowadays I only have dentist and barbershop on WhatsApp, all my folks are on Telegram, including all work communications.

WhatsApp was always lacking features; WhatsApp web can’t replace a full featured desktop client which is a must have for me; and its mobile client is inconvenient in every possible way.

You might enjoy reading Robert Sheckley’s “A Ticket to Tranai”. They have some good ideas about holding politicians in check there on Tranai.

I was using Gentoo for some years, and I have to say I do not regret switching to Arch.

That said, power to those chosen or damned to wield Gentoo in the eternal war of kernels. They are the fabric of reality, interstellar light and darkness, they are the reason we, common folks, can live peacefully with precompiled packages, not knowing the pains of building everything from sources.

This episode made me watch all of Black Mirror, and let me tell you it didn’t stand up to this one. Watch White Christmas episode and you’re good. Maybe add San Junipero, this one is really good too and it’s more optimistic.

Good privacy brings inconvenience, don’t even think this compromise could ever be avoided. Convenient WhatsApp has nothing to do with privacy, whatever their PR department might want you to think.

This compromise is unavoidable, and every user should be forced to make the choice. Every kind of defaults is bad. Can you imagine that a messenger app that forces you to choose your place on the scale of security-convenience during onboarding process gets wide adoption? Me neither…

Telegram defaults are very sane for common users, and they have very easy and convinient way to start a secure chat. Best available messenger app so far.

WhatsApp by default backs up to Google drive, which is laughably insecure.

I don’t know how good is WhatsApp’s e2e implementation, I’ve heard good things about protocol though. But I do know Telegram protocol documentation contains all information needed to implement e2e capable Telegram client, and their e2e is really good, I’ve seen it done by my friend and as I’m a programmer and am interested in cryptography, I followed his work very closely.

I still do not trust e2e group chats, it’s a shaky point in security protocols. There was some kerfuffle about WhatsApp being able to silently add invisible listeners to group chats, wasn’t there?

Telegram very explicitly chooses the right amount of security and makes user aware of inconveniences this level of security brings along. WhatsApp lies in user’s face, making you think it’s secure and convenient.

edit: btw I’m Telegram premium subscriber and love it. I subscribed for the ability to convert voice messages into text. I am aware of privacy concerns, voice messages get sent to some 3rd party for this to work. Pretty often this speech-to-text works not very good, I expect it’s much better for English language though. I still love my Telegram premium, for being able to support developer and to lower the chance of being the product. Cost is negligible, benefits are tangible.

Every service has a product they sell, if a service is free — you are the product.

Need I remind you WhatsApp is owned by Meta? Free service from creators of Facebook and our mutual respect to their privacy practices, all in the same sentence, yeah.

Well, how do you define free will?

I thought about it for quite some time and defined it for myself as following: free will is possibility to make two different choices in identical (down to quantum level and below) set of two universes. That applies only to something that has a “will”, which is yet to be defined.

If being in identical circumstances you predictably make identical decisions, that doesn’t look like free will to me. Your choice was made by circumstances for you.

So yeah, chaos it is. Nothing bad in it.

The only place free will source from is quantum randomness.

Also, better believe in free will. If you are wrong, it wasn’t really your choice, and if you are right you can do more.

Telegram for family, friends, work and actually for everything I can think of.

Discord for gaming with friends, not as a messenger but as voice comms mainly.

Whatsapp for very legacy stuff, haven’t had a notification in a couple of years. Maybe it’s time to uninstall, finally.

I would agree with you if threads didn’t choose to avoid market with decent consumer protection laws, EU.

They aren’t launching at EU for a reason, and that’s good enough for me to take a stance against them.