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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 20th, 2025

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  • Even the FOSS apps don’t all get along.

    Conversations is great for XMPP, and it can act as a UnifiedPush pusher, but AFAICT it doesn’t support other protocols and it doesn’t act as a UnifiedPush subscriber.

    So running 2 chat protocols, one being the well-support app Conversations on the well-supported protocol XMPP, means 2 push setups and 2 apps. Bleh.

    I would like to see an architecture where the expensive app side of things is separated from the protocol. But that’s all speculative, I haven’t put work hours into it. Basically, if I have an idea for P2P chat, why do I need to re-invent emojis and channels and shit like that? I only want to iterate on transport. And if I have a better idea for channels, why would I have to re-invent the transport like XMPP and Matrix?

    (The reason is that cutting those two apart is hard - But I will continue to wonder.)








  • It’s true that a large adversary with a little money (like the US or Israeli government) could host a huge amount of compromised exit nodes and relays (I don’t think compromising exit nodes alone is enough) and de-anonymize users.

    It is also true that you can run a relay right now by running the Snowflake proxy in a normal browser tab: https://snowflake.torproject.org/

    It is safe to run a relay on your home connection, because you aren’t hosting any exit traffic. I’ve never had trouble when I’ve done it.

    Tor also hosts “hidden services” or “onion services”, which don’t exit the Tor network. The client and the server agree on a rendezvous node and meet each other there, and the traffic is encrypted from end-to-end. I am pretty secure this is more resistant to the “global passive adversary” type of attack, but nothing is perfect. A GPA can always look at timing and make some correlations based off of it.

    It is true that the network is more secure if more people use it, because that provides cover. It is true that if you pirate stuff through I2P you won’t get a letter from your ISP.

    Better practice now before you really need it.