Anonymous crypto-asset wallets would also be banned under the new law – just as anonymous bank accounts already are – in an effort to make transactions using Bitcoin and other cryptos fully traceable.

The analogy between “crypto-asset wallets” and “bank accounts” is a bit infuriating.

If you have a non-anonymous bank account, you can still withdraw your funds to CASH and store that in a safe. Is the safe “already” banned?

Are they proposing to ban, say, use of Electrum style wallets? Or only banning things like monero?

Though you could also have E2E on XMPP, it’d just require more effort to find the appropriate plugins/settings on your part, than with Matrix.

That may be the case with some older clients, but the client I use has it enabled by default…

I use Monocles Chat, a fork of blabber.im, which is a fork of Conversations.

OMEMO encryption works by default, and (for me) was a little bit more seamless than setting it up for Element.

Element has a slightly awkward “verification” process, and also the backing up of encryption keys, and verifying other devices, just tends to confuse new users (imo).

i guess you could self host and let other people use it, like what gmail did

There is no situation online where giving out more personal info about yourself makes your online activities more secure. None.

I guess a more difficult question is whether there is any situation online where giving out personal info makes society more secure.

definitely an intelligent marketing decision tho. i can imagine a lot of fans will want to support the company even nore now

dont forget about invidious! the alternative open source frontend to youtube.

Yes I do not see why we should trust any system which forbids self-hosting, especially when alternatives exist.

Federation increases censorship resistance. I do not think it necessarily decreases privacy, although having metadata strewn across multiple servers may be a risk. Still, I think the comparison with email is a bit of a strawn man argument, since it is not only the federated nature of email which makes it easy to surveil but also the fact it is unencrypted by default.

Moreover, email these days is concentrating in the hands of a small number of providers (gmail, etc).

XMPP seems a lot more distributed at this point in time.

the decentralized nature of XMPP is a huge plus for me.

I guess Matrix also has that, in theory, but from what I have seen the matrix.org homeserver still effectively functions as a central point to track metadata.

I guess the issue with XMPP is that people can send unencrypted messages to you, perhaps with deanonymizing information?

Ah your explanation clears it up. That whole conditional probability thing is in the wikipedia article, but I see now that my explanation of the haircut thing was not correct.

I guess maybe this is a better formulation:

p1 = P(not being guilty | evidence found)

vs

p2 = P(evidence found)

Prosecutor’s fallacy would assert that, if p2 is small say 0.01%, then the defendent is guilty. But really the relevant probability is p1, which could be quite a bit larger than 0.01%.

Anyways let me know if you agree lol.

well it seems like they track the unencrypted metadata and share it with law enforcement. i wouldn’t necessarily consider this breaking end to end encryption…

there is a separate issue with the “reporting” feature where the other end can voluntarily send your (decrypted) messages to facebook for content moderation. i dont think the article claimed that decrypted messages were being automatically sent…

pretty interesting, thx.

here is an edited selection from wikipedia for posterity:

Mathematically, the fallacy results from misunderstanding the concept of a conditional probability, which is defined as the probability that an event A occurs given that event B is known – or assumed – to have occurred, and it is written as P(A|B).

The error is based on assuming that P(A|B) = P(B|A).

For example, let A represent the event of getting a haircut, and B the event of reading a haircut meme.

But this equality is not true: in fact, although P(A|B) is usually very small, P(B|A) may still be much higher.

I like “privacy browser”

What’s that?

i highly recommend a phone with lineageOS and also with microg versus the usual google services.

https://microg.org/

the tutorial hasn’t been updated in a while, but there are versions compatible with recent versions of lineageOS it seems (i’m using lineage 18.1-20210814-microG-oneplus3)