at least you could keep their reviews so users could at least know if the app can be trusted.

You mean, don’t trust a flatpak uploaded by a random person, but if there are enough fake reviews, it can be trusted?

Also the location of known Wifi networks.

Embracing the GC

I never actually liked the GC in D as it didn’t seem to fit in with the general direction of the language, and Walter Bright in D at 20: Hits and Misses says:

Miss: Emphasis on GC

There is also lowendspirit, but in both cases you have to be very careful what you buy - not everything that is advertised there will work as advertised or will work long-term

where they will double your monthly data limit for free when you comment your order number.

where they use you to spam the forum thread (for giving away something rarely anyone has any use for)

So they actually rewrote The Hurd in Rust.

There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.

What are those better choices then (for those who currently use the non-LTS Ubuntu releases and don’t want to move to rolling releases or LTS-only releases)?

I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)

Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.

“secure alternative”? Others are not secure?

Only public keys get exchanged via Meta’s servers, those keys don’t help you with trying to decrypt any messages (you need the corresponding private key to decrypt - and that private key stays on the device).

Sure, they could just do a man in the middle, but that can be detected by verifying the keys (once, via another channel).

Maybe so, but in this case the point was that the protocol used by WhatsApp hasn’t changed in that time and it’s still what they describe in their security whitepaper. If you want to use that software as is or maybe reimplement it based on that is up to you.

Governments, if they want, can decrypt any chat

Any source for that claim?

In a subpoena case in India, that turned out to be not true.

Source please.

WhatsApp admins hold keys to being able to do that under law pressure.

How do they get the keys?

They only guarantee it for 1-1 messages and statuses, and against “generic” actors for group chats…

Who is “they”?

Group chats are also end-to-end encrypted in WhatsApp (so any monitoring would need to be done in cooperation with one of the participants’ devices before encryption or after decryption)

declassified internal FBI document I just linked

don’t see any such link

It still works (with a few minor updates).

yowsup is an Open Source implementation of the WhatsApp protocol. So there is proper end-to-end encryption on the protocol level - that would only leave the possibility of having a backdoor in the “official” WhatsApp client, but none has been found so far. BTW, people do actually (try to) decompile the WhatsApp client (or the WhatsApp Web client which implements the same protocol and functionality) and look what it is doing.

For anyone really curious, it’s not too difficult to hook into the WhatsApp Web client with your web browsers Javascript debugger and see what messages are sent.

It’s no secret that WhatsApp adopted Signal’s encryption protocol just before Meta acquired them, but since it’s all closed source we don’t know if they’ve changed anything since the announcement in 2016 that all forms of communications on WhatsApp are now encrypted and rolled out.

There is an Open Source implementation of the WhatsApp protocol: yowsup

Jed when you want a simple, Emacs-like editor.

At least for memory usage the hypervisor wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between memory merely used as cache vs. memory actually used by the software running on the machine (and OSes will usually just use any otherwise unused memory as cache, so you will likely see some inflated memory usage)