Signal is blocked in several countries but you can set up a proxy server to help people access Signal no matter where they live. Here’s how:

https://signal.org/blog/proxy-please

Thank you for helping keep Signal available for everyone who needs it.

To share your proxies use #SignalProxy

The Washington Post's @JosephMenn has more details about Stanford University's cowardly and cynical closing of the invaluable Internet Observatory.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/14/stanford-internet-observatory-disinformation-research-lawsuits-politics/

The most important part of this debacle is the message it sends:

Right wing extremists -- possessing limitless bad faith, ample money, and subpoena power -- can silence essential research into the poison they and their deceitful cadres are injecting into our civic bloodstream.

Phone number privacy and usernames are now rolling out to everyone using Signal version 7.0! Update your app to take advantage of these new features 🎇

https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

1/

The (edit:) CURRENT beta version of #Signal is version 7.0.0.
There's a good reason for the round number. This will be the first version where usernames and phone number privacy are available outside of the staging environment.
From this version on, you'll be able to talk to people on Signal without revealing your phone number, and also, you may use Signal without revealing to people who have your number saved that you do.
This is huge.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/compare/v6.47.4...v7.0.0

#Privacy #FOSS #OpenSource #PNP

Microsoft just announced that they were breached by the SVR, the same Russian intelligence agency that broke into Solarwinds.

This is a big deal, and Microsoft owes all of us a much more detailed description of what happened.

https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2024/01/microsoft-actions-following-attack-by-nation-state-actor-midnight-blizzard/

As the coup in Niger keeps unfolding, we can’t help but think back to the millions of € of surveillance tools and techniques that the EU has exported to Sahel countries over the past decade.

https://privacyinternational.org/video/4886/eu-sahel-and-externalisation-surveillance.