now that so many people are migrating to
signal after elon musk told them to
i've noticed that there's been a sharp
uptick in i guess you would call them
signal haters or signal detractors on
both plebit
and the laotian basket weaving forums
people are
raising red flags left and right saying
don't use signal it's just as bad as
whatsapp
it requires a phone number it's not
federated it's
compiled with google libraries the
signal servers have been backdoored by
the cia
and every single pepe that gets sent
over the network is sent directly to the
pentagon for analysis
okay that last one was a joke but let's
go through
these legitimate criticisms of signal
because
these are legitimate criticisms and hey
there's some ways to mitigate them
so it requires a phone number to set up
uh that is true
and that is a downside to signal in my
opinion that's a little bit spooky but
here's the thing it doesn't require a
phone number for you to actually
use it you can literally use signal from
your laptop
or an ipod or a phone that just doesn't
have a sim card in it so
the phone number is not required for use
of the service and
because this phone number is just used
to sign up you can just use a phone
number
that isn't associated to you in any way
for the sign up it is
very easy to get an anonymous phone
number
to sign up this is literally how indian
dudes
are able to keep their various tech
support scams and
irs scams going they just recycle phone
numbers
every single time your grandma's phone
company ends up blocking them
and to make things even better you don't
have to actually use
this phone number on an ongoing basis
because once you have a signal account
you can just
password protect it and of course i
would recommend using an alphanumeric
pin for that instead of just four digits
that's obviously very easy to hack
so yeah because you don't need constant
access to the phone number
you don't actually have to go and buy
dids for like
10 cents a pop like the indian scammers
do you can just use
one of the many free online sms services
you usually have an option of a bunch of
different phone numbers
often in different countries as well
where you can just get that account code
for signal like look
you can see this one right here this has
gotten
this has been used for a bunch of
different things like even google voice
which is
probably the top tier as far as like
these uh
internet phone numbers go google voice
because some of these
you might get some issues with it so
don't you know go blowing up my comment
section saying oh this
sms service that you showed me didn't
work like yeah just use a different one
or
use a google voice it's easy to get a
google voice without identifying
yourself in any way
uh so yeah like this kid just set up a
roblox account with a
anonymous phone number so he's got an
anonymous roblox account
do the same thing with signal so next is
people complaining about signal not
being in the f droid store
so you have to download it through
google play which requires you to have a
gmail
and a google account and google is
already pretty spooky in and of itself
and obviously this won't even be an
option for someone who's using an
ungoogled phone
now i don't know why people think
that the google play store is the only
place that you can download it because
you can literally download the apk
directly from
signal.org so this is the option if you
don't want to go through the google play
store
it even works on tor so you can just
download the signal apk
through tor and then that way your ip
address isn't even associated
with downloading it so i don't know if
people are just trolling about this or
if they're legitimately too lazy to just
do the most basic research but
there you go that's your option for
downloading signal without using google
in any way
uh then finally there's the google
libraries now this
is more of an efficacy issue and it's
also
the reason why signal doesn't appear in
the f droid store to begin with because
it depends on some google libraries
that are proprietary which makes it not
free software
but luckily there is a patched version
of signal
that you can download from this github
link that'll go ahead and
leave in the description um so yeah this
doesn't depend on any proprietary
software so you can essentially have
a fast signal that is compatible with
the other
versions of signal and then that way you
have a free software one and you're not
committing any sins against richard
stallman
now as far as the centralized server
thing goes
uh there really isn't anything that we
can do about that and that's probably
the most
legitimate criticism of signal that
there is out there
but i don't know how much of a concern
this really is with regards to spyware
so
signal has been subpoenaed before that's
what you can read about on here
but they don't really store any
data about their users in the first
place they stated right here
that the only information that they can
really produce in response to a subpoena
is the date and time that a user
registered with signal
and the last date of users connectivity
to the signal device
doesn't even mention giving them your
phone number but again
you can register with a phone number
that's not even connected to you so
that's really not much of an issue if
you just put on your thinking cap
now this obviously still isn't as good
as
the peer-to-peer options or federated
communications like element
but it's a lot better than whatsapp and
that is the whole point
to get normies using something better
than whatsapp
because you have to remember these
people are not
all of a sudden moving from whatsapp to
signal because they're concerned about
their privacy or that
they're concerned about facebook spying
on them or the government spying on them
like you have to remember
the typical person that you might walk
by in your day-to-day life
probably thinks that the cia and the
other alphabet agencies
are the good guys and if the average
person actually
cared about their privacy then facebook
would have collapsed
years ago twitter instagram snapchat
all these other social medias would have
collapsed years ago but instead
they keep on growing so for the people
like us
the whole reason for the push to signal
is so that we can talk to
non-techy non-you know linux
non-privacy conscious people in our
lives
without each and every conversation
getting sucked
if you want to know you're known as
spaghetti sauce recipe that's been in
her
family for generations without facebook
trying to monetize it
then have her call you on signal if you
want to trade q anon
trump memes with your boomer dad then
have him text you on signals so that the
feds don't arrest both of you for hate
speech
and all the extra spicy conversations
about
tannerite and drop in auto sears and the
latest chlorine gas recipes
those should be saved for the highly
secure messaging apps
mentioned earlier that's also where all
the cool kids are
anyway so have a great day and remember
with
every new normie that installs signal
and uninstalls whatsapp
the zuck gets a little sadder