KawaiiPunk @kawaiipunk@sunbeam.city

What a rough decade its been this year

Painted nails chipped and dirty
Form a fist with skinned knuckles
Caught between redevelopments
Our city rendered unrecognisable
A watching eye on every corner
A cop in every phone
Unrecognisable regeneration
No space to feel alone

If one day we could tear it down
Every office block a home
Destroy every shopping centre
Every police station closed
Repurpose, redistribute
A seedling in sunlight grows
Rewild, regrow together
No need to feel alone

HELL YES, I'M LGBT

Lets
Go
Bring down
The capitalist system

If you enjoyed this essay and are able to, please donate to police and prison abolitionist causes. Thanks.

There's also the fact that all subsequent libre messaging platforms inevitably have their UX measured against Signal. Is it as easy to use as Signal?

The gap is closing but I still don't think the UX of Matrix and XMPP are quite there yet.

For example, if you told your grandmother (who we assume to be less technical with all due respect to the hacker grannies), can you ask them to get setup with Matrix or to get setup with XMPP. What do you think is going to happen? I propose and I'm happy to be proved wrong by an actual UX study that it won't be as smooth as on boarding process as Signal.

I think the libre hacker community are right to critique Signal but we should also remember to critique ourselves and the alternatives we propose with the same rigour.

And what I'd say to the libre/hacker communities is to bear in mind that Signal isn't designed for you.

I believe as a project, it was originally conceived as an intervention into the messaging space to promote what is now known as the Signal protocol.

It's actually been very successful at this as big messaging players such as WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Google shit and Signal derivative such as Wire has adopted the protocol to various extents.

However, we know the implementation of E2E crypto into proprietary platforms is very problematic if there's no way to tell it's been implemented correctly.

It's also been useful for the libre software community. Olm on Matrix and OMEMO for XMPP are based on the Signal protocol and are probably the best hope for decentralised E2E encrypted communications. Though they have some advanatages over Signal, both of these platforms still don't perform as well in terms of metadata privacy as Signal.

The project has made a bunch of (in my opinion) wrong turns in the past and I fear this will be another.

I'm sure they're doing a bunch of UX testing on everything they do but look, that isn't a golden ticket and it can lead you in the wrong direction also.

Incidentally, I can see that their nag UX strategy for creating a key for the remote SGX stuff doesn't work. Less technical folks just ignore the nagging "Verify your pin" box. It's just part of a UX pattern of "annoying pop ups that you ignore" that people are already familiar with.

I guess my point is that much as the Signal project is the poster child for open source UX, they can't magically solve the really difficult problems that everyone else is already grappling with.

They have a big of a start up public facing persona of "yeh, we'll definitely solve this hard problem". It comes across as arrogant to the wider libre community. A bit more self critique wouldn't go amiss.

There is no doubt that the future of banking is going to be very mobile focussed.

You can see this with all the fintech being experimented with surrounding the Open Banking API.

However, no one has cracked the crypto currency that's actually usable for buying actual stuff problem. I don't know why the Signal think they will be the ones to solve it. The problems are obvious.

Also I worry the problems they outlined in
https://signal.org/blog/update-on-beta-testing-payments/ are unfixable.

2, 3 and 4 are out of the project's control and they can't code their way out of those issues.

It's very telling that the Signal team worked on this crypto stuff rather than being able to sign up without a phone number and idk some sort of Loomio style decision making features for groups.

I'm very spaced out rn watching a cat play jenga huh

I feel called the fuck out

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2021/04/10/shock-new-warning-for-millions-of-whatsapp-users-on-apple-iphone-and-google-android-phones/

Holy shit, this new WhatsApp vulnerability is wild.

Using two factor spam and a single social engineering email you can literally disable anyone who you know the phone number of's WhatsApp account.

And they won't patch it

Found a English translation of the constitution of Rojava from 2016:

https://internationalistcommune.com/social-contract/