okay
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Privacy
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Man, I haven't seen a goat.se in years
Not trying to be pedantic, but the original was goatse.cx
Yeah everyone likes to call it "Goat-see" or "Goat-say", but it was originally supposed to be "goat-secx" i.e. "goat sex".
I think part of the confusion may be that when the site was taken down, the mirrors that sprung up were things like goat.se, etc.
I've heard it pronounced "goatsee" and said that myself back when the original site was live. You are 100% right on the intent of the name though.
That's probably the only reason I clicked it. Honestly, kinda regret that I did because the author just seems like a dude yelling at the sky because he's wildly critical of the smallest things but doesn't offer up any solutions.
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The fact that there are no interoperable third-party implementations, or even third-party builds/distributions of the Signal app
that's not true, Molly is perfectly fine
Who is this clown "jwz" and why does his opinion matter?
He's someone that was a developer for Netscape and Firefox. I used to follow him but stopped doing so and now I find him quite annoying, haha
I agree with him in many things but he's always replying people like he's better than everyone which makes me think he must be a very shitty boss considering he's the owner of a club.
"Right about a lot of things but fucking insufferable" is an apt summary of JWZ
"Insufferable ass" doesn't begin to summarize my experiences with him. But he's been right about a lot of things.
This was exactly my experience.
Also got the same impression back when I used XScreenSaver from jwz. I looked in to customizing the logo shown on the login dialog and some of the screensavers, only to find a rather preachy write-up on the advantages of XScreenSaver and a very stubborn affirmation that the logo is hard-coded and should not be changed because it is the identity of the program or something.
Oh yeah, the Debian vs. JWZ XScreenSaver spat, that was royally stupid and led me to stop using it altogether
Kids these days...
Hard to take them seriously, if they can't even use a search engine to realize most of this is complete bullshit. What is this? A Twitter post?
What is this? A Twitter post?
Just about. JWZ is known for his cynical hot takes on tech in general.
I don't think any of his complaints are invalid, though his conclusions are uncharitable at best. Making a communication tool that's both reasonably secure and sufficiently palatable to people who don't know how to use computers to achieve broad adoption is a hard problem with no perfect solutions. If he has a better idea, well... he's a skilled and somewhat famous programmer; he's better equipped than most to implement it.
There are some fairly good solutions tho. Matrix is still kinda half-baked (specifically thinking about 2.0 and Element X) and Conversations has limited capabilities, but they are fairly easy to use
Edit: Although I would really wish Matrix had a 'normie-mode', with secure and reasonably easy to handle defaults
I use Matrix, and I've moved some conversation with people I met in public rooms there to Signal because it kept failing to transfer keys rendering it unable to decrypt messages. I haven't seen that in a while so maybe it's fixed, but I haven't been using it for one-to-one conversations lately.
Unfortunately, I've found most people have a lot of resistance to adding another messaging app. I don't really understand why that is, but it's true. Asking someone to install a messaging app when I'm their only contact who uses it and they have another way to contact me has a success rate near zero.
Yeah, I also had encryption problems, especially when I was running Conduit rather than Synapse. However, I never had such problems in XMPP with OMEMO.
Element X is pretty easy to use. I honestly don't know why anyone listens to tech illiterate people about security and you have to be tech illiterate to think setting up element is hard.
Yeah, Element is super easy to use.
You just need to chose a Matrix instance, create an account with username and password that have nothing to do with what follows, log in (not that), generate keys, ideally back up those keys (which you could ignore, but you are prompted to), then it bothers you with cross-signing (which you can also ignore, except you kinda can't, depending on you contacts, so log in again and confirm the devices), then chose another, unrelated instance to be discoverable via mail/phone (which again is optional, except if you want to be or don't want to explain how adding via domain + name works), than add mail or phone number and activate it and boom, you are golden. Except you are not, because if you want Element X, well, you still have no push notifications, which just require you to... Oh, create another account, neat!
Meanwhile on Signal you do what? Punch in your number, confirm, optionally set a PIN, optionally enable backups, done. Yeah, that's not as private, and missing online massage backups, I know, but it's also a 1-3 step setup without any alarming prompts, telling you to do non-straightforward stuff that could very well compromise your privacy. Or having to dig through options and make choices and handle keys you don't understand.
Do you need a reminder that 123456789 is a popular password and 2FA commonly considered a nuisance? Matrix is complicated enough to confuse even (non-ITSec) IT people.
As a professional software developer, I consider Matrix/Element to be quite user-unfriendly (and anecdotally also quite buggy)
Edit: Some clarifications. Describing this easy process was kinda confusing for silly ol' me
~~most~~ some of the stuff on that list isn't even true (at least not anymore) lol
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Is there a better alternative? I don't see anything conclusive in the link on that front
It’s like a politician, “Look how bad the others are” and then not proposing anything better (because at this moment, there isn’t).
I sure don’t know. SimpleX is suggested, among others: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#good-alternatives
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