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FBI warns users to encrypt text messages for cybersecurity. Here's how to do it (www.usatoday.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The second half of the article is about Signal.

It sucks they mention WhatsApp first, but I think the bigger omission is that they don't mention non-US entities or anything you can self-host and federate like Matrix.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Oh, fair enough then!

ETA: Yes, the lack of mentions of Matrix, etc are a bit disappointing. But I think Matrix is waaay outside their target democratic.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Yeeahhh, they're talking to like Grandma who barely knows what a text message is

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Their target democratic is still in the matrix.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Matrix isn't super private though. It's halfway there, but compared to something like XMPP, it falls short due to the fact that any instance a user federates with gets a gigantic copy of all of their metadata, and the server operator can do whatever they want with it. So all you would have to do is spin up a new host, message a target user and get them to respond, and you're done.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

any instance a user federates with gets a gigantic copy of all of their metadata,

No, it does not. Instances get metadata only for the chat rooms in which they participate, not all of a user's metadata.

When chatting with someone on Matrix like you would with text messaging, only your instance and your contact's instance are involved. Because they have to be, in order to exchange messages. Just like every other chat protocol that uses servers, including XMPP.