Signal CEO Whittaker said that in the worst case scenario, they would work with partners and the community to see if they could find ways to circumvent these rules. Signal also did this when the app was blocked in Russia or Iran. "But ultimately, we would leave the market before we had to comply with dangerous laws like these."

This is why we need the ability to sideload apps.

I hope more follow, would be funny if "all chat apps have to include a back door" leads to "there are no official chat apps"

I hate this framing. They don't "THREATEN" to leave europe.

Europe is about to change laws that makes their product illegal.

If the law is implemented, I would selfhost my own chat server. I don't see this as Signal fault.

But everybody can`t selfhost. That is a problem I am struggling with.

I am now sure what I would do about email, I assume it is affected as well?

About freedom, not freedom and various other things - might want to extend the common logic of gun laws to the remaining part of the human societies' dynamics.

Signal is scary in the sense that it's a system based on cryptography. Cryptography is a reinforcement, not a basis, if we are not discussing a file encryption tool. And it's centralized as a service and as a project. It's not a standard, it's an application.

It can be compared to a gun - being able to own one is more free, but in the real world that freedom affects different people differently, and makes some freer than the other.

Again, Signal is a system based on cryptography most people don't understand. Why would there not be a backdoor? Those things that its developers call a threat to rapid reaction to new vulnerabilities and practical threats - these things are to the same extent a threat against monoculture of implementations and algorithms, which allows backdoors in both.

It is a good tool for people whom its owners will never be interested to hurt - by using that backdoor in the open most people are not qualified to find, or by pushing a personalized update with a simpler backdoor, or by blocking their user account at the right moment in time.

It's a bad tool even for them, if we account for false sense of security of people, who run Signal on their iOS and Android phones, or PCs under popular OSes, and also I distinctly remember how Signal was one of the applications that motivated me to get an Android device. Among weird people who didn't have one then (around 2014) I might be even weirder, but if not, this seems to be a tool of soft pressure to turn to compromised suppliers.

Signal discourages alternative implementations, Signal doesn't have a modular standard, and Signal doesn't want federation. In my personal humble opinion this means that Signal has their own agenda which can only work in monoculture. Fuck that.

Haha! Do it if the EU does not give up on their Orwellian control!

Wait, I'm in the EU and I use Signal!

Separate airgapped device running an encryption app. Type text on it, it spits out a ciphertext, then, use internet connected device to scan the ciphertext, OCR*, then send to target receipient, they also use this same airgap encryption device and they OCR, then decrypt using their key.

*Instead of OCR, you could also use a QR code to have error correction

Tell me how they can ban this? Anyone using a raspberry pi with a battery and touch display attached into one compact thing, is a criminal?

What if we just start using One Time Pad? Can they ban that?

Steganography?

Like seriously, how do you even stop "criminals" using steganography?

So, to Big Gov, here's my question: Are you gonna ban talking to other people becuause criminals also talk to other people?

So now where will Signal go ?