• 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
rss


  • RayJWtoPrivacy Guides@lemmy.one*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    13
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    I think at this point it should be pretty clear that Signal never had the goal of anonymity which is an orthogonal concept to privacy. While I would support sign-up without phone numbers, it doesn’t address the same threat-model and there are many alternatives if anonymity is your goal.

    But I want near-perfect privacy with usability, which Signal provides for me and all my contacts. Who cares if my government knows I use Signal, as long as they don’t know who I talk to and what we talk about.

    Edit: just saw your other response. What you want to achieve, is almost impossible. Even if Signal doesn’t log who you talk to, like you assume, there are still methods to unmask this info. There are PoCs for things like timing attacks for notifications etc. which combined can narrow down the list of contacts significantly. But it seems like your threat-model doesn’t align with Signal goals which means it’s probably best for you to search an alternative instead of hating on Signal for not catering to your needs.





  • Just know that sites like this are useless if you don’t understand the results. There are anti-fingerprinting techniques that add random noise to your fingerprint. This might result in these kind of tests claiming you have a completely unique fingerprint, even though the anti-fingerprinting mechanisms randomise the fingerprint for every site, browser session, etc. (depending on the config). This would mean that you are relatively „safe“ from fingerprinting because you never have the same print twice but tests think you are very vulnerable because it’s still a random “unique“ fingerprint.












  • Wrong, it still keeps it private but not anonymous. It’s not the same concept and for most thread models knowing that you use Signal is not really an issue, especially since with this feature no one can check if you have one if you don’t give them your username unless they have access to Signal servers in which case they still have nothing except the knowledge that you have an account.


  • Well yes sure, but remember AV1 decoding only became standard like 1-2 GPU generations ago. Encoding only this generation. iPhones only got support with the 15 Pro so it will be another generation before it trickles down to the base models. And what about the hundreds of millions of Android phones in Asia and the likes with dirt cheap SoCs. Pretty sure they don’t have dedicated AV1 decoding hardware for a long time.

    So that’s a TON of hardware being made slow and inefficient if everything were to be AVIF tomorrow. Not saying AVIF decoding will be a big hurdle in the future but how long until all this hardware browsing the web has been replaced? That’s why I think somethings that’s efficient and fast on CPUs without any specialised hardware is more suited for a replacement.


  • Well yes, however without acceleration JPEG XL is many times faster. Also if you only have a CPU for example.

    It’s also highly parallelizable compared to AVIF which also matters a lot considering the amount of cores is growing with the likes of ARM and hybrid architecture CPU.

    AVIF also fairs badly with high fidelity and lossless encoding, has 1/3 the bit depth and pretty small dimension limits for something like photography.

    I don’t think AVIF is per se a bad format. I just think if I want to replace a photo oriented format I’d like to do that with one that’s focused on „good“ photos and not just an afterthought with up- and downsides.