by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 32)
Chat programs that don't have a proper web-only operation and force you to have a mobile phone, e.g. WhatsApp.
Heck, even Signal, which is supposed to be super secure and good for your privacy, forces you to disclose your freaking cell phone to all contacts! lifehacker.com/how-to-use-signal-without-revealing-your-private-phone-1818996580
What is my phone breaks? What if I don't want to have a fucking phone? What if I move countries and have to change the fucking number? Also evil but less because done by all: chat programs that can't send you an email if you don't see the message in X minutes.
European Union, time to force those evil companies to use support open standards like XMPP?
The solution to "how to prevent spam" is simple: your ID is a public key that you own the private key for. If you start getting spammed, generate a new public key, and send it to all contacts, and dump the previous ID.
OK, you have to share your phone with the company to prevent spam, but why do you also have to share your phone with contacts? So you are then forced to give your phone number away on the Internet.
It seems impossible to avoid the signaling server. With signaling server:
Ciro Santilli's email can be found by cloning one of his repositories on GitHub. It is also given at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli".
The first one Ciro Santilli managed to get working in 2022, and which has a free plan.
You can either verify your sending domain by adding 3 DNS records.
Saw the email on Gmail, but Microsoft Outlook did put it into junk though. Yahoo mail also worked fine.
100 emails a day is not insane, but it is forever and appropriate for a test, I'm happy with that.
You need a secondary password that when used leads to an empty inbox with a setting set where message are deleted after 2 days.
This way, if the attacker sends a test email, it will still show up, but being empty is also plausible.
Of course, this means that any new emails received will be visible by the attacker, so you have to find a way to inform senders that the account has been compromised.
So you have to find a way to inform senders that the account has been compromised, e.g. a secret pre-agreed canary that must be checked each time as part of the contact protocol.
One of the very few encrypted emails... beauty. And they also have an encrypted password manager!!! Using this is a must as of 2023 basically. The only missing thing now is to find a fully open source alternative!!!
Sure, search capabilities have to be somewhat limited: proton.me/blog/engineering-message-content-search
techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-address-of-french-activist-after-order-by-swiss-authorities/ you've fucking got to use Tor Browser with it if you want your IP to remain hidden, learn that...
Are daily notifications without a recovery email possible? www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/yjau8f/allow_daily_email_notifications_without_having_a/ OK, they do work actually.
The lack of Gmail dot trick is tragic however, and you have to pay for multiple aliases. But you can however create separate inboxes with the same cell phone verification however.
It is fucking annoying!
Not just on browser close. Whenever Ciro Santilli pastes proton.me/ on the browser bar and click enter. Chromium 123.
More precisely: pasting mail.proton.me on the browser bar redirects to account.proton.me/switch each time. From there, selecting different accounts leads to different mail.proton.me/u/<UID>/inbox, e.g. mail.proton.me/u/41/inbox is my main one. If I paste mail.proton.me/u/41/inbox on the browser, then it works directly.
God, I love this company so much.
This allows you to create multiple non-anonymous accounts on any website that doesn't account for it, as this is not part of the email protocols in general.
OMG those devs are brutes, it's beautiful.
Haven't found the one yet:
Optional but really ideal:
  • can delete messages from the device of the person you sent it to, no matter how old
  • decentralized, your username is a public key
The state of messaging is ridiculous as of 2020.
TODO evaluate. No pip install???
Ciro Santilli's discord ID: cirosantilli#8921. See also: how to contact Ciro Santilli.
You gotta be born after the year 2000 to understand it.
This is becoming more and more popular as a group chat with channels and threads possibility as of 2020.
Very similar to Slack.
Not possible to anonymously join just one server without creating a new account? What's the point of servers then! www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6gmjl7/changing_nick_before_joining_a_new_server/ Oh, also nicks don't hide your username from the server in any way, you can get the original username by just clicking on the person's username.
No proper threaded discussion without creating new channels? As of 2022 there is kind of a way, but it was a bit obtuse.
As of 2022 they also have a school hub: support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406046651927-Discord-Student-Hubs-FAQ which auto creates groups by university email access. Good idea, and shows popularity amongst that user group.
Discord is useless if you want to participate in more than one large group because of this. It is impossible to get email notification for selected threads you care about.
Ciro Santilli worked on it for a brief time in 2016, when it was still called Ring, before he got fired. :-)
The people were quite nice and the project idea is fine, Ciro hopes they succeed.
Video 1. Ring - Peer to peer network for real time communication - FOSDEM 2016 by Ciro Santilli. Source.
As of 2020: end-to-end encryption optional and turned off as default, and marked as experimental...
Other cool stuff:
TODO what's the fucking official discussion/feature request forum?
You can't sync secret chats across devices, Signal handles that perfectly by sending E2EE messages across devices:This is a deal breaker because Ciro needs to type with his keyboard.
Desktop does not have secret chats: www.reddit.com/r/Telegram/comments/9beku1/telegram_desktop_secret_chat/ This is likey because it does not store chats locally, it just loads from server every time as of 2019: www.reddit.com/r/Telegram/comments/baqs63/where_are_chats_stored_on_telegram_desktop/ just like the web version. So it cannot have a private key.
Allows you to register a public username and not have to share phone number with contacts: telegram.org/blog/usernames-and-secret-chats-v2.
Self deleting messages added to secret chats in Q1 2021: telegram.org/blog/autodelete-inv2
Can delete messages from the device of the person you sent it to, no matter how old.
They've had a few breaches: www.whatsapp.com/security/advisories/
Video 1. WhatsApp founder Jan Koum talks about their Journey by Roots (2017) Source. Good talk, explains how everything happened in the perfect location at the perfect time: unemployed people who knew how to code, bought an iPhone, the next big platform, at its very beginning, they had just release the required push notifications API, and he travelled a lot and knew how much SMS sucked, especially international.
Obviously with the single intention of killing a competitor.
It is impossible to make money off WhatsApp as it is because of end-to-end encryption.
Facebook just clearly bought it to prevent it from actually growing further and killing facebook.
It is mindblowing that the sale wasn't cancelled due to anti trust.
The outcome of this is that WhatApp will remain with the same feature set forever, while other competitors have been growing, notably Discord and Slack.
It seems that there is a case looming 10 years after the fact: www.cityam.com/facebook-fails-to-block-antitrust-lawsuit-over-whatsapp-and-instagram-ownership/ Wake up???
Your profile picture, name and status are public by default as of 2022!!! OMG!!!
This means that all secret services in the world have alrady scraped this information for everyone that uses WhatsApp!!!
They just have to go incrementally through the list of all phone numbers... 001 0000 0000, 001 0000 0001, 001 0000 0002, etc. and then you can deduce who has which phone number.
OMG... it is analogous to the Facebook profile face dump.

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