Gentle reminder; don't brag about your cool crimes (like doing graffiti) on here. It's not a secure place. That's how people get caught. In general, it's important to learn to be happy being a secret bad ass.
If you need help doing cool crimes, only tell one or two people you'd trust with your life. Make sure they won't tell anyone, even if they get arrested. The Weather Underground and the people who exposed CoIntelPro got away with it because they all kept quiet.
Don't store dangerous or secret info as pictures on your phone. Not unless you really know how to lock that down. Android and iPhones upload all the pictures to the cloud by default, and that's not private. It can get hacked, or the police can just ask for the pics. You wouldn't even know till it's too late.
Don't do research for your cool crimes in normal web browsers. Use Tor (there's a Tor Android app) or a VPN you know won't cooperate with authorities. And don't use your normal accounts.
Someone's gonna be like "but a VPN is something you use with your normal web browser." Yes, I know. But your browser might try to automatically log in to one of your accounts, and even over a VPN that would identity you. Even in Private Mode you might slip up. So it's best to use a separate browser.
None of this guarantees safety, it just improves your odds of getting away with things.
Actual security experts feel free to chime in here. I'm just a scared bunny who is too scared to do any cool crimes.
Signal is a decent messaging app for secretly talking with friends about where/when/how to do cool crimes. Like posting the address of an abandoned house you want to graffiti.
It has flaws. Nothing is perfect. But it's end to end encrypted and you can set messages to self destruct. Better than planning crimes on here.
@bunny_jane Matrix is also good. It also has flaws (for one everyone says it's somehow More Complicated™ than Signal, though we really don't see how), but we trust it more than Signal, not least because Signal makes you give them your phone number to sign up.
@LunaDragofelis @bunny_jane ehhhh XMPP+OMEMO /works/ but it's not nearly as nice.
Of course, part of that is because we tend to be multi-device and multi-client. Matrix has provisions for that. XMPP? /Nope./
@LunaDragofelis @bunny_jane Matrix is just /way/ nicer at key management.
@IceWolf @bunny_jane OMEMO does support multiple clients. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO
@LunaDragofelis @bunny_jane okay sure, but does it support getting your history from an old client to a new client?
does it support anything like Matrix's cross-signing so I don't have to manually tell people "hey this new device is really us, you can trust it"?
@IceWolf@masto.brightfur.net @LunaDragofelis@embracing.space @bunny_jane@plush.city no cross signing, but history works
@thatonecalculator @bunny_jane @LunaDragofelis Oh /nice/, OMEMO history was our #1 gripe when we used it a year or two ago.
@thatonecalculator @bunny_jane @LunaDragofelis Like, it's /the/ reason we recommended critters avoid XMPP!
@IceWolf@masto.brightfur.net @bunny_jane@plush.city @LunaDragofelis@embracing.space So now you can reccomend it! :D
@thatonecalculator @bunny_jane @LunaDragofelis I hope so! Have to try it ourselves sometime and make sure y'weren't talking about a different thing somehow.
Sometime when we have spoons, which is not today.
@IceWolf @thatonecalculator @bunny_jane @LunaDragofelis that's cool! i was thinking about setting up an XMPP server (maybe Prosody IM?) and it's good to know that you can get OMEMO history from a device to another.
@LunaDragofelis @bunny_jane (if you're worried about cross-signing security: you can't sign new devices without the old device. The old device signs your key, not the server.)
@IceWolf @bunny_jane hmmm, true
but it's certainly good to mention both XMPP and Matrix as options.
it's a lot harder to disguise who talks to who when you have multiple servers talking to each other.
@dhfir @LunaDragofelis @bunny_jane hmmm true.
Multi-user-instance federation as opposed to "everyone runs their own server" helps somewhat with that, but still.
@IceWolf@masto.brightfur.net @bunny_jane@plush.city
Matrix does not have self destruct messages, IMO that's one huge disadvantage compared to Signal.🤔
@IceWolf @bunny_jane Also, XMPP (also known as Jabber) is a decentralized protocol just like Matrix (and unlike the centralized Signal), and offers end-to-end encryption via OMEMO (which most XMPP clients support nowadays)