fwn

The official signal.org blog post I linked does actually explain how it works. They write that the client sends parts of hashed phone numbers to Signal:

> The client transmits those truncated hashes to the service. The service does a lookup from a set of hashed registered users. The service returns the intersection of registered users. The obvious problem with this method is that the hash of a user identifier can almost always be inverted. Regardless of whether the identifier is a phone number, a user name, or an email address, the “keyspace” of all possible identifiers is too small.

Also: Signal messages are currently never P2P. They always pass through Signal servers, which see (but apparently not retain) your IP and timing metadata. The Signal WebRTC calls are partially peer-to-peer, that is what the relaying in the Signal settings panel is about.

(Not to object the degoogeling, but:) To create a Signal account, you have to validate a phone number. So Signal is currently largly about privacy, not anonymity.

FWIW I wouldn't know why to message someone if I didn't know who they were. The same goes for them not knowing who I am. What would we even talk about?

Federation between instances is nice, but it's not necessary for the Fediverse to deliver freedom from Big Tech censorship.

Even in the extreme, theoretical case of full defederation you could just browse your communities by having a sperate account on every relevant server using a multi-account client.

It also reduces the impact if you lose an account: Since they are all single-purpose, you can easily create a new one replacing the one you lost.

Many professional service firms do not allow BYOD. Depending on your job, you may end up with per-mandate phones.

I once had to take four phones with me for a short while and ended up looking like an absolute clown, stacking them on the restaurant table.

Not having to do that is a privilege.

HN is not one person, but a diverse set of users. HN the aggregate therefore will be consistently wrong and consistently right all the time.

...and yes: Accountability should not be stripped just because the actor did wiggle their deeds through an LLM.

If Anthropic attacks a company again, I think this should be prosecuted.

It is a standard corporate register. If you are an employee responsible for communication at an organization, you must either write like this or take ownership of your work and accept some creative risk.

... However, you often don't receive anything in return for taking that risk, so you end up producing standard corporate PR content.

> ... a project devoted to free speech as such shouldn't be associated with a political, ideological group that favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another

Just think this through: Since its beginning, the Tor Project has heavily relied on US government funds.

The U.S. government trivially favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another. That is not a bad thing. Just ask them about Al-Qaeda.

It would be an unlikely luxury if all of one's donors were ideologically aligned with one's project. Now, some people want every important employee of every donor organization (or just Mullvad?) to be ideologically aligned as well.

This becomes more complex the further down the relationship tree you go.

The whole current PR campaign (it at least feels like a campaign) against Mullvad rests on absurd double standards as a method.

Problematic opinions at the top of Apple, Google, Microsoft? That's all fine. Problematic opinions at the top of some dissident tool? Sin! If they are not heaven they are hell! We must never stop pushing.

I do not know that person, but her views in the linked video seem great and vastly underrepresented in the current media landscape.

She lists many valid AI risks, discounts the doomsday PR and instead talks about the accountability gap that current AI frontier companies profit from.

I'm sure her Twitter timeline is awful, as you noted. But do you have thoughts on the arguments she presents in the linked video?

edit: I think she is absolutely right about the percentage risk numbers. Apparently, those numbers are not particularly meaningful beyond their functional use of communicating a sense of urgency. I think p(doom) is very similar to the Cold War doomsday clock. An instrument of irresponsible, fearbased PR.

For most people, it is far easier to pay with cash than with Monero.

And yes, whoever invented cash was a genius. It's an amazing technology that, in some ways, is far ahead of almost all digital payment systems.

OTOH, I did the cash envelope thing only once, out of curiosity. It was fun but now, for convenience, I just buy regular vouchers online.

Yes, you are right. My reply was written for a different comment on the same level. Sorry for the confusion!

No one claimed any case would be "thrown out for spying." The legal definition of spying is also not particularly relevant to the argument in the initial comment.

The initial comment instead questioned how someone could be accused of making a threat if they did not realize anyone would read their private content. You probably also can not insult someone with a statement you never expected anyone but you will ever read.

Was it claimed that the police did any spying?

Presumably, Anthropic did the spying and the reporting.

You argued that it is not spying, since the spying may have been made sufficiently explicit in the ToS/EULA.

This raises the question: Does announcing a spying operation mean that it is no longer spying? I've never heard that perspective before.