Sounds like a bad joke joke but the EU governing council wants to once again legislate #chatcontrol for it's 350 million citizens. According to @echo_pbreyer (EU parlamentarian) the legislation wants to force messengers to prevent users from sending images or videos unless they agree them to be scanned, AI-analyzed and potentially reported to police. They apparently want to bring it up for a council vote in two days and get it through parliament in June. German link https://www.patrick-breyer.de/lass-dich-ueberwachen-eu-rat-will-sich-auf-chatkontrolle-mit-zustimmung-der-nutzer-einigen/
@delegatevoid@echo_pbreyer It is easy to bring lots of technical arguments why #chatcontrol is a bad idea. But even if it were technically possible, it would be a catastrophic idea. No government should have an automated surveillance capability built into all private communications -- and images and videos are very much a core part of private communications. Pushing for such automated surveillance of private communications arguably surpasses Iran, Russia and other countries's control efforts.
While we do have criticisms of its centralized architecture and other choices we highly regard Signal for ushering in a decade of popularizing end-to-end encryption. We particularly appreciate @Mer__edith doing excellent communication work there. It's disingenuous that tech-billionaires Musk/Dorsey fuel attacks on her and another female colleague, hinting at Telegram as a more secure messenger. Comparing security of Signal with Telegram simply results in "Type Error: incompatible arguments".
WhatsApp introduces "ask meta ai" in the local chat search bar, and Slack auto-feeds messages to train their LLM robots https://eigenmagic.net/@NewtonMark/112455578857917485 ... Delta Chat is among the shrinking number of messaging applications that does not look at your data except to end-to-end encrypt it and send it over interoperable message transport servers chosen by yourselves and your contacts. #decentralization#security#privacy ftw!
Often overlooked from our "but e-mail!" skeptics: Any sufficiently advanced P2P messenger will eventually re-invent a custom, partial form of e-mail ... because users want to communicate when their apps are offline or not foregrounded and active at the same time. See https://briarproject.org/download-briar-mailbox/ for a recent example.
Delta Chat goes the reverse route by providing a secure and interoperable e-mail based messaging experience and then adds P2P tech like https://webxdc.org on top.
@lyyn@fell@rakoo surely, push notifications are a complex thing only arising because mobile OSes prefer to prevent apps from just sitting there, listening for network activity. https://dontkillmyapp.com/ exists for good reasons.
@delta@lyyn@rakoo I think the real reason is because (Android) smartphones want to suspend the actual CPU whenever possible and receive notifications via the less power hungry baseband modem. AFAIK it's capable of maintaining simple TCP connections on a very low level, which is what Google's FCM service is.
Delta Chat may be criticized for not being the most secure messenger in some sense or not the most feature rich. When it comes to interoperability, however, our efforts and collaborations are the biggest game in town, no? The two biggest sets of internet standards revolve and operate at massive scale around E-Mail and the Web. Our approach fully engages and takes up these extremely impactful sets of standards, and reliably rewires them into a modern UI #deltachat#webxdc#chatmail#xkcd927
Did you know that Delta Chat is the only mature, cross-platform secure messaging app that does not use or need a key server?
Signal, Matrix, Proton, Whatsapp all effectively operate key servers that reveal the cryptographic identity (a very strong identifier) behind an address.
Delta Chat uses decentralized specs and protocols that reveal your cryptographic identity only to those you choose to interact with. Nothing can be publically queried.
Delta Chat is an in-between project: often ignored as a messenger by e-mail companies/experts and then ignored by messenger companies/experts because of its use and interoperability with e-mail. As Heinz von Foerster once said: "If you are doing something genuinely new then don't ask the experts. If you do something that has already been done, then, by all means, ask the experts." FWIW many experts have verified Delta Chat's security mechanics https://delta.chat/en/help#security-audits :)
The problem with asking the experts about something genuinely new is, according to Heinz von Foerster, that they will only explain to you why it can't work or why it is a bad idea. We had no shortage of such experts in the past years :) However, common objections like
"e-mail is too slow", "secure e-mail is not possible", "you can not do a Whatsapp-style interface on top of e-mail" are having an increasingly hard time to be upheld because of the reality of Delta Chat apps working :)
The "webxdc evolve" project is now official and was just announced from one of our early followers and advisers, @ansuz , but it's not just a boilerplate announcement! Ansuz dives deep starting from his yearslong cryptpad maintainership history, his early involvement in #webxdc up to the present and future .... Very good reading if you want to understand some.foundational considerations around evolving an end-to-end encrypted, decentralized web app platform ... https://cryptography.dog/blog/announcing-webxdc-evolve/
@lutindiscret@ansuz@matrix sure, matrix and also signal and others could support webxdc and benefit from it. As far as we can tell, however, they are unlikely to jump on it soon. Fwiw matrix has "widgets" with application-specific server side hosting (tied to business interests) ... Whereas webxdc apps can be added by users to chats without requiring any application specific server side hosting. Webxdc has no "integration" server like matrix needs as apps are written in a P2P paradigm.
@delta actually @matrix itself doesn't have widgets. Widgets only exists in @element. The specification work is abandoned (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/issues/3803#issuecomment-1472194956) and send people to a chatroom. I asked there and got no answers. So I think, there may be room for #webxdc in matrix as it's an already existing standard with existing impl. Other clients could start on this standard without waiting for "widgets". IMO, widgets and webxdc are different and both are legit.
Seems the french surveillance practises (Hadopi) identifying people behind IP addresses have been legalized by a top EU court. Fwiw #chatmail servers remove any IP address traces after two days and collect no personal data whatsoever. Maybe it's time for a french themed chatmail server similar to the de,pl,us ones? https://delta.chat/en/chatmail
A wild community experiment that can not but fail? Probably but whatever, welcome to massive multi-device usage of #deltachat on #chatmail :) it's an account not shared between your own devices but between all devices who can import the backup file that is currently circulating .... Bringing you an anonymous e2ee encrypted forum without individual user identities, with autodeletion from server after a week .... also adressable wirh e2ee messaging .... #DepartmentOfCrazy
For those who like to focus on #security an honest question: which other messenger has, like #deltachat in the last 13 months, received and addressed two independent security audits and one security analysis, all three from renowned auditors and researchers? CC @kuketzbloghttps://delta.chat/en/help#security-audits
Apart from the default #chatmail server advertised on our onboarding page there are at least three other stable open-signup servers whose operators cooperate to ensure stability, see this new page covering background such as funding, trust etc https://delta.chat/en/chatmail
Messaging transports better be dumb and do the bare minimum to get the job done for end-to-end encrypting apps. Compared to #matrix homeservers #chatmail servers are two orders of magnitude more dumb, consume two orders of magnitude less resources and are blazing fast and don't require extra (central?!) identity and integration servers. With delta all intelligence, including general purpose https://webxdc.org/apps and protection against compromised networks and servers, lives on the end device.
"but e-mail !1!!!" Is probably still a number one objection from experts and power users who refuse to fathom that e-mail protocols are a viable option for instant messaging even if it demonstrably works, is fast and secure :) We'd be happy if someone engaged in a proper comparison with xmpp and matrix specs and impls, really the only three messenging protocols deployed and implemented at scale. (Can't compare that with Signal or WhatsApp which don't have wire specs!). https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core-rust/blob/main/standards.md
How many people do you know that have lost their messaging history on Whatsapp or Signal, photos etc during mobile phone transitions or breakage or through other shenenigans?