Nicholas Nassim Taleb has coined the term “IYI” ( for “Intellectual Yet Idiot”) for experts that ignore common sense and long-established principles because they prefer to rely on new discoveries based on poorly-proven theories.
Anyone that prefers Signal over decentralized protocols is an IYI who I’d never trust with any actual, practical security solution.
Signal is an improvement over twitter or facebook mesenger. There is no way I would be able get my friend group to switch from those to XMPP but I did get then to at least switch to signal. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it’s a hell of a lot better than what came before. Eventually I might get them over to something better like XMPP but nontechnically inclined people can’t make that jump in one go.
Looking at this as someone familiar to FOSS is a completely different perspective than for the average person. If you tell the average person to use XMPP then they’re going to type XMPP into their preinstalled app store and get confused about “which app is the XMPP app”.
It has end-to-end encryption and is used by billions of people. It’s certainly a step up compared to FB Messenger.
The point is: if you are supporting Signal because of its usability and you don’t care about giving up control to a siloed platform, then WhatsApp is already enough.
Exactly, I felt the same way when I read the original “security researcher” post, this person then doubled down and insulted basically anyone with a differing opinion
Nicholas Nassim Taleb has coined the term “IYI” ( for “Intellectual Yet Idiot”) for experts that ignore common sense and long-established principles because they prefer to rely on new discoveries based on poorly-proven theories.
Anyone that prefers Signal over decentralized protocols is an IYI who I’d never trust with any actual, practical security solution.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/538/
Signal is an improvement over twitter or facebook mesenger. There is no way I would be able get my friend group to switch from those to XMPP but I did get then to at least switch to signal. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it’s a hell of a lot better than what came before. Eventually I might get them over to something better like XMPP but nontechnically inclined people can’t make that jump in one go.
Looking at this as someone familiar to FOSS is a completely different perspective than for the average person. If you tell the average person to use XMPP then they’re going to type XMPP into their preinstalled app store and get confused about “which app is the XMPP app”.
If this is your bar to clear, then WhatsApp should be fine.
Isn’t whatsapp owned by Zucc?
It has end-to-end encryption and is used by billions of people. It’s certainly a step up compared to FB Messenger.
The point is: if you are supporting Signal because of its usability and you don’t care about giving up control to a siloed platform, then WhatsApp is already enough.
Exactly, I felt the same way when I read the original “security researcher” post, this person then doubled down and insulted basically anyone with a differing opinion