ID: AP Seattle @apseattle posted: “BREAKING: Greyhound says it will stop letting Border Patrol agents conduct routine immigration checks on its buses.”
corpse @thefurrow replied: “Witnesses said a bus driver told an ICE agent to “gargle [his] balls” when the latter requested to enter the bus”
On this note, I’m looking for a way to communicate with foreign (and local) friends that is relatively safe. So many people primarily use apps that I no longer trust, but I’m not sure what solution would be both safe and practical. Anyone have any suggestions?
In terms of increasing paranoia, but also obscurity:
Signal (easy, pretty secure messenger replacement)
Matrix (self-hosted, which means you control the data, but it requires good security practices on your end to be safe)
SimpleX (messenger without user IDs, makes it nigh impossible to trace who’s communicating with whom)
Briar (peer to peer messenger over Tor, Bluetooth, local WiFi, or physical drives)
For Matrix “good security practices,” I assume both parties of the conversation need to follow them? I’ve already got a VPN, but I don’t think all of the people I want to communicate with have one.
Matrix is a federated system, kinda like Lemmy. If you just use an existing instance that you trust, it’s basically just another e2ee messenger. But many people host their own, and for that you need to a) have access to a server or VPS and b) have that server secured, i.e. configure firewalls, certificates, etc. It’s not super hard, but takes some technical knowledge. Your non-technical friends can just use your instance, tho.
The benefit is that you control your data, not some external provider. From a pure security standpoint, however, there’s not a lot of benefit over, say, Signal.
Of course, that’s the infrastructure aspect of security. Other things, like having strong and varied passwords, no biometric logins (or only with 2fa), not sharing personal information about yourself or friends online, those obviously everyone needs to follow.
Anything wrong with Signal?
They require a phone number, are centralized and based out of the US. So depending on your threat model it could be fine but it’s had some issues.
signal