A fair number of my contacts from countries where this is true also have Signal. If you don’t, I suggest installing it and seeing how many people are there.
If it’s hard to remember who uses what, start conversations from the contacts app instead of one of the messaging apps; in most cases it will tell you.
I don’t think any evidence has come to light that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption of message contents is broken, but it’s also impossible to prove that it is correct because the client is not open source.
According to the reports I’ve read, including in the toplevel article here, the sequence of events is:
It’s easy to conflate running with fleeing, but running toward a group of people with a rifle pointed at them is charging, not fleeing.
Volunteers were told not to carry a weapon because of outcomes like this.
Let’s try out the counterfactual: the assailant pulls out a rifle, aims it into the crowd, and nobody else in the immediate vicinity is armed. What happens next?
There’s a small chance he was just trying to scare people and disrupt the protest, but that sounds like the prelude to a mass shooting to me. It’s likely many more people would have died in that case. We can’t know of course and neither could the security volunteer; he had to make a hard decision in a split second in an emergency. He had to weigh the risk of shooting when he did against the risk of waiting, and he had the disadvantage of fighting a rifle with a pistol; it’s much easier to shoot accurately with a rifle, and the ammunition is more deadly.
I think even something like Drip is not sufficient in this kind of situation. If the police can compel someone to unlock their phone and decrypt data, then being local-only won’t stop them. Of course it’s a lot easier to ensure that no data exists if it’s local-only and something happens that might attract the interest of the police.
Nothing in this comment should be construed as legal advice.
He heard Trump describing migrants as criminals and asylum seekers as frauds and thought that couldn’t possibly be describing his workers, who are not criminals or frauds.
He didn’t stop to consider that the characterization was a lie.
I suppose the distinctions between the OS and “just an app” are blurred on any OS. One might argue anything that isn’t the kernel is just userland software on conventional Linux.
On Android, anything a third party could deliver without system or root privileges is “just an app”. That includes keyboards, launchers, messaging apps, image editors, and smarthome device managers, but not direct management of network connections, notifications, or direct interaction with other apps (i.e. outside of intents or over the network).
If you’ve used an Android device with root access, you’ve seen things that fail this test. Anything that needs root to work can’t be delivered to most Android users unless it’s part of the OS or a system app.
I’m not sure what the best answer to that is. I don’t think it’s forcing Google to improve its search results.
I want it to be the average person gaining a baseline level of computer and media literacy such that they seek out and find apps that cannot send sensitive data to third parties without the user’s clear intent, but I don’t think we’ll ever get there.
If a result like this was found in a swing state, I’d be sure it was malicious. In New York, that seems improbable. Someone clever enough to conduct the attack is unlikely to be stupid enough to employ it in a way that creates an obvious anomaly without changing the result.
The launcher is, but not everything new in Android 16 could be just an app. The new desktop mode, for example likely requires much deeper integration with the OS.
Would the cops come beating my door down claiming I had an abortion? 🤔
I don’t think that has happened starting from a period tracking app yet. There was a case involving an unencrypted messaging app used to discuss a criminalized abortion.
So why the fuck don’t women just use that?
They probably don’t know about it. If I search “period tracker” on Google Play, Drip is in about 40th place in the results. That’s several screens down, past a bunch of search suggestions, and the parts where it’s open source, on-device, and optionally encrypted aren’t clear until I tap on it and read the description.
And you probably can’t even get drip on iPhones.
There’s some irony in a comment dealing with people making decisions that are against their interests because they’re insufficiently informed speculating incorrectly about something like this when it’s easy to check. Drip is, in fact available for iPhone.
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These are all app features, not OS features.
Google is concerned with its own interests and only behaves as if it’s concerned with anyone else’s when there’s a perceived benefit to Google.
There’s a chance the preferences of some app developers were a contributing factor for Google, but I’m convinced it was about reigning in OEMs more than anything else. Your comment cites fragmentation, and there were things like Fire Phone from Amazon that didn’t ship with Google services. Fire Phone failed because it wasn’t good, but if Amazon had iterated on it or someone else had done a better job, it might have taken a big chunk out of Google’s Android profits.
excluding legitimate users
I hate this framing.
I’m generally disappointed there wasn’t more outcry about Google creating a remote attestation scheme. Microsoft proposed one for PCs a decade earlier and the New York Times called it out as a corporate power grab. I’m not sure if there was a general shift in thinking, if people thought about phones differently from PCs, or if Google had enough of that “don’t be evil” glow people didn’t question it.
I don’t love the term “sideloading”. It sounds like something more nerdy and less normal that just installing software from a source of the user’s choice.
No, I don’t think it’s likely Google will try to prevent it. That would violate the DMA in the EU, and several other jurisdictions have moved toward forcing Apple to allow software installation outside its app store. Between that and antitrust lawsuits in the USA, I think it’s very unlikely Google wants to attract more scrutiny from regulators.
But for that you have to blame Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney, a lot of banks, a lot of games for using what is basically DRM for apps.
I don’t think those entities had the leverage to force Google to add remote attestation to Android. Safetynet didn’t show up until 2014 when Android was already established enough that not being on Android wasn’t a realistic option for any of them.
Instead, I think it was mainly a move by Google to make it so any OEM shipping a fork of Android without Google’s blessing would have angry users because some of their apps wouldn’t run.
I never said anything to that effect. The ancestor comment discussed running Signal for Android inside an Android emulator for account creation, after which it could be linked to Signal desktop.
Someone could presumably fork Signal desktop to allow the scenario you’re describing, but I’m not aware of any such efforts.
I imagine search of server backups would be pretty hard to do securely. Better management of locally stored media would be nice, but you can sort by size, export, and delete media from inside the settings.
I did not experience this, and I’ve been using Signal daily for years. Prior to 2020 or so, I experienced more unreliability and hesitated to recommend it to the average person.
I’m familiar with the problem though; in most of the EU and probably other places WhatsApp usage is so high that it’s a major inconvenience to avoid it entirely.