• 2 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 20 days ago
Cake day: June 26th, 2026
  • _Nemo_@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Best way to share pictures with the fam?
    5·
    2 days ago

    Immich is dead-easy to set up on its own. I’m a great fan and have been running it for >2 years now.

    That said, I don’t think it’ll work for you because:

    • I gather you have little experience in self-hosting services. Sure, one can learn all that, but if you’re becoming a parent soon, your priorities will be elsewhere (as they should).
    • self-hosting stuff isn’t a one-shot - it does come with maintenance costs. You need to keep your boxes up to date, swap out dead hardware, manage backups… You may not have time for that.
    • Running immich itself is relatively easy. But running it securely is a different can of worms. Immich is a young project, written by enthusiasts, but not vetted for security like professionally-deployed software is. Thus, it’s not advisable to expose it to the open internet. Since you want to share access to others, you’d have to setup Wireguard VPN tunnels for your relatives, which complicates matters.

    Obviously, I’m making a lot of assumptions about you. Whether these are true is up for you to decide.

  • _Nemo_@lemmy.mlOPtoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•How do you guys keep Signal up to date?
    2·
    6 days ago

    Thanks for providing some evidence at last. You’re not wrong on many of those points, but not entirely right either.

    Phone numbers are an issue, true, though you can get around that using a burner SIM or even a virtual phone number. Also, contact discovery has been working without exposing your phone number for over a year now.

    a phone from Google or Apple

    The phone can be made by anyone. The OS needs to be Android or iOS at some point, which is unfortunate; pure (desktop) Linux usage isn’t possible. That said, deGoogled Android has been around for more than a decade, allowing you to use Android in a privacy-friendly way. So if you want, you absolutely can avoid being tied to Google and use Signal.

    As you can see, there’s a lot more nuance here than “Signal isn’t private”; privacy, after all, isn’t binary, but rather a gradient. For what it’s worth, Signal is more private than many messengers out there by a long shot, and it allows you to use it in more privacy-friendly ways if you so desire. While there are messengers out there that go even further in terms of security, privacy and decentralisation, a lot of them come with usability and convenience drawbacks. The way I see it, Signal sits in a Goldilocks Zone of “private enough” (for most threat models) and “convenient enough” for mainstream adoption. You can have the most secure and air-tight messenger; if there’s nobody there to talk to, it’s no more than a technically sophisticated brick. For now, Signal may be our best shot for mainstream adoption of reasonably private and secure messaging. If your threat model is higher than that of average Joe, by all means, go for Briar, SimpleX chat or any of the more hardcore options.

  • _Nemo_@lemmy.mlOPtoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•How do you guys keep Signal up to date?
    3·
    8 days ago

    Ignore the downvotes. That’s a fair question to ask, but one that does have answers. Signal is FOSS, has E2EE and was audited several times, so we know that

    • it did not contain any backdoors at the time of the audit
    • it will not for the foreseeable future (they’d be visible in the client code)
    • I need not trust the server code since messages are E2EE

    Thus, while mistakes do happen and can open up severe vulnerabilities, cf. Heartbleed, there’s reason to assume that Signal is relatively secure. Signal’s centralisation of server infrastructure is a valid concern, but not for security, but rather for

    • privacy (they might capture metadata, although it appears they don’t; nation-state actors trying to subpoena user data have so far only gotten “date of registration” and “last online”, which appears to be all they’re storing; that’s as close to “zero knowledge” as you get)
    • availability (as the recent AWS outage has shown, which took out Signal as well)
  • _Nemo_@lemmy.mlOPtoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•How do you guys keep Signal up to date?
    10·
    10 days ago

    I’ll reply to you since you first brought it up, but it’s a question to anyone here recommending Molly: what makes you cofident that Molly is secure (i.e. they’re not fucking up Signal’s cryptography by accident) and maintained by trustworthy people. Signal does get audits from time to time, Molly doesn’t.

    Mind you, I’m not trying to shit all over Molly; Unified Push looks great. I’m trying to approach this with due caution though.

  • _Nemo_@lemmy.mltoDeGoogle Yourself@lemmy.ml•CalyxOS is back!
    3·
    10 days ago

    I’ve been a great fan of the project and used it as my daily driver for >5 years. It was stable as heck and the devs were super responsive, even adding in neat features at users’ request.

    That said, I’ve lost trust in the project and moved on to GrapheneOS. The departures of Chirayu Desai and Nick Merrill smell weird from miles away. The latter left without any words of farewell explaining why he’d abandon his own project from one day to the other. I won’t engage in speculation as to what happened behind the scenes, but there are enough red flags here to keep my distance.