If they do the form correctly, then it’s just an extra step for you to confirm. One flow I’ve seen that would accomplish this is:

1. You enter your address into a form that can be auto-filled
2. You submit the address
3. If the address validates, the site saves the form and shows you the address in a more readable format. You can click Edit to make changes.
4. If the address doesn’t validate, the site displays a modal asking you to confirm the address. If another address they were able to look up looks similar, it suggests you use that instead. It’s one click to continue editing, to use the suggested address, or to use what you originally entered.

That said, if you’re regularly seeing the wrong address pop up it may be worth submitting a request to get your address added to the database they use. That process will differ depending on your location and the address verification service(s) used by the sites that are causing issues. If you’re in the US, a first step is to confirm that the USPS database has your address listed correctly, as their database is used by some downstream address verification services like “Melissa.” I believe that requires a visit to your local post office, but you may be able to fix it by calling your region’s USPS Address Management System office.

Where did I contest your point?

The president won [the] popular vote

Only if you ignore the huge amounts of voter suppression. If you don’t, then he lost the popular vote and the electoral vote - netting 45.8% of the popular vote to Kamala’s 52.7%, and he earned at most (and probably less than) 252 electoral votes to Kamala’s 286.

Even with an HOA, you can still end up needing to pay tens of thousands for surprise repairs in the forms of special assessments, especially if the HOA is poorly managed.

Do you mean like a FOSS version of https://soundiiz.com/transfer-playlist-and-favorites?

Or at a song/album level, a FOSS version of https://odesli.co/?

Why specifically do you want to be a trans man online?

• Is it because you’re fetishizing the idea of being a trans man?
• Because you’re actually trans (aka an egg) and you just haven’t come to terms with it irl?
• Both?

I attended a 1-on-1 meeting that a billionaire scheduled with me but that they themselves did not attend.

It’s okay, the author of the article didn’t actually read (or understand) the Copyright Office’s recommendations. They are:

Based on an analysis of copyright law and policy, informed by the many thoughtful comments in response to our NOI, the Office makes the following conclusions and recommendations:

• Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change.
• The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.
• Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
• Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
• Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
• Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.
• Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
• The case has not been made for additional copyright or sui generis protection for AI- generated content.

Pretty much everything the article’s author stated is contradicted by the above.

Clearly they’re cosplaying as a Canonical engineer whose internal explanation and pleas for them to not take this approach fell upon deaf ears /j

you’re the only one with your SSL keys. As part of authentication, you are identified. All the information about your device is transmitted. Then you stop identifying yourself in future messages, but your SSL keys tie your messages together. They are discarded once the message is decrypted by the server, so your messages should in theory be anonymised in the case of a leak to a third party. That seems to be what sealed sender is designed for, but it isn’t what I’m concerned about.

Why do you think that Signal uses SSL client keys or that it transmits unique information about your device? Do you have a source for that or is it just an assumption?

If you’re a C developer who doesn’t know Rust, no.

And it’s I who should take a course in encryption and cybersecurity.

Yes. I was trying to be nice, but you’re clearly completely ignorant and misinformed when it comes to information security. Given that you self described as a “cryptography nerd,” it’s honestly embarrassing.

But since you’ve doubled down on being rude, just because I pointed out that you don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s unlikely you’ll ever learn enough about the topic to have a productive conversation, anyway.

Have fun protecting your ignorance.

Nice try FBI.

Wouldn’t “NSA” or “CIA” be more appropriate here?

Well, if my pin is four numbers, that’ll make it so hard to crack. /s

If you’re using a 4 number PIN then that’s on you. The blog post I shared covers that explicitly: “However, there’s a limit to how slow things can get without affecting legitimate client performance, and some user-chosen passwords may be so weak that no feasible amount of “key-stretching” will prevent brute force attacks” and later, “However, it would allow an attacker with access to the service to run an “offline” brute force attack. Users with a BIP39 passphrase (as above) would be safe against such a brute force, but even with an expensive KDF like Argon2, users who prefer a more memorable passphrase might not be, depending on the amount of money the attacker wants to spend on the attack.”

If you can’t show hard evidence that everything is offline locally, no keys stored in the cloud, then it’s just not secure.

If you can’t share a reputable source backing up that claim, along with a definition of what “secure” means, then your claim that “it’s just not secure” isn’t worth the bits taken to store the text in your comment.

You haven’t even specified your threat model.

BTW, “keys” when talking about encryption is the keys used to encrypt and decrypt,

Are you being earnest here? First, even if we were just talking about encryption, the question of what’s being encrypted is relevant. Secondly, we weren’t just talking about encryption. Here’s your complete comment, for reference:

I have read that it is self hostable (but I haven’t digged into it) but as it’s not a federating service so not better than other alternative out there.

Also read that the keys are stored locally but also somehow stored in the cloud (??), which makes it all completely worthless if it is true.

That said, the three letter agencies can probably get in any android/apple phones if they want to, like I’m not forgetting the oh so convenient “bug” heartbleed…

Just so you know, “keys” are used for a number of purposes in Signal (and for software applications in general) and not all of those purposes involve encryption. Many keys are used for verification/authentication.

Assuming you were being earnest: I recommend that you take some courses on encryption and cybersecurity, because you have some clear misconceptions. Specifically, I recommend that you start with Cryptography I (by Stanford, hosted on Coursera. See also Stanford’s page for the course, which contains a link to the free textbook). Its follow-up, Crypto II, isn’t available on Coursera, but I believe that this 8 hour long Youtube video contains several of the lectures from it. Alternatively, Berkeley’s Zero Knowledge Proofs course would be a good follow-up, and basically everything (excepting the quizzes) appears to be freely available online.

it wouldn’t be very interesting to encrypt them, because now you have another set of keys you have to deal with.

The link I shared with you has 6 keys (stretched_key, auth_key, c1, c2, master_key, and application_key) in a single code block. By encrypting the master key (used to derive application keys such as the one that encrypts social graph information) with a user-derived, stretched key, Signal can offer an optional feature: the ability to recover that encrypted information if their device is lost, stolen, wiped, etc., though of course message history is out of scope.

Full disk encryption also uses multiple keys in a similar way. Take LUKS, for example. Your drive is encrypted with a master key. You derive the master key by decrypting one of the access keys using its corresponding pass phrase. (Source: section 4.3 in the LUKS1 On-Disk Format Specification (I don’t believe this basic behavior was changed in LUKS2).)

Its impossible to verify what code their server is running.

Signal has posted multiple times about their use of SGX Secure Enclaves and how you can use Remote Attestation techniques to verify a subset of the code that’s running on their server, which directly contradicts your claim. (It doesn’t contradict the claim that you cannot verify all the code their server is running, though.) Have you looked into that? What issues did you find with it?

I posted a comment here going into more detail about it, but I haven’t personally confirmed myself that it’s feasible.

Both of the reasons you’ve provided are nonsensical:

• It isn’t performed automatically if you disable it, and they did (and explained why)
• They said they don’t believe capitalization aids with clarity. They didn’t express the same opinion about punctuation and paragraph breaks.

I can’t use signal.

Why? Do you not have a phone number? Is it blocked in your country? Are you legally prohibited from using software with end to end encryption?

The sender ('s unique device) can with 100% accuracy be appended to the message by the server after it’s received.

How?

If I share an IP with 100 million other Signal users and I send a sealed sender message, how does Signal distinguish between me and the other 100 million users? My sender certificate is encrypted and only able to be decrypted by the recipient.

If I’m the only user with my IP address, then sure, Signal could identify me. I can use a VPN or similar technology if I’m concerned about this, of course. Signal doesn’t consider obscuring IPs to be in scope for their mission - there was a recent Cloudflare vulnerability that impacted Signal where they mentioned this. From https://www.404media.co/cloudflare-issue-can-leak-chat-app-users-broad-location/

404 Media asked daniel to demonstrate the issue by learning the location of multiple Signal users with their consent. In one case, daniel sent a user an image. Soon after, daniel sent a link to a Google Maps page showing the city the user was likely in.

…

404 Media first asked Signal for comment in early December. The organization did not provide a statement in time for publication, but daniel shared their response to his bug report.

“What you’re describing (observing cache hits and misses) is a generic property of how Content Distribution Networks function. Signal’s use of CDNs is neither unique nor alarming, and also doesn’t impact Signal’s end-to-end encryption. CDNs are utilized by every popular application and website on the internet, and they are essential for high-performance and reliability while serving a global audience,” Signal’s security team wrote.

“There is already a large body of existing work that explores this topic in detail, but if someone needs to completely obscure their network location (especially at a level as coarse and imprecise as the example that appears in your video) a VPN is absolutely necessary. That functionality falls outside of Signal’s scope. Signal protects the privacy of your messages and calls, but it has never attempted to fully replicate the set of network-layer anonymity features that projects like Wireguard, Tor, and other open-source VPN software can provide,” it added.

I saw a post about this recently on Lemmy (and Reddit), so there’s probably more discussion there.

since the sender is identified at the start of every conversation.

What do you mean when you say “conversation” here? Do you mean when you first access a user’s profile key, which is required to send a sealed sender message to them if they haven’t enabled “Allow From Anyone” in their settings? If so, then yes, the sender’s identity when requesting the contact would necessarily be exposed. If the recipient has that option enabled, that’s not necessarily true, but I don’t know for sure.

Even if we trust Signal, with Sealed Sender, without any sort of random delay in message delivery, a nation-state level adversary could observe inbound and outbound network activity and derive high confidence information about who’s contacting whom.

All of that said, my understanding is that contact discovery is a bigger vulnerability than Sealed Sender if we don’t trust Signal’s servers. Here’s the blog post from 2017 where Moxie describe their approach. (See also this blog post where they talk about improvements to “Oblivious RAM,” though it doesn’t have more information on SGX.) He basically said “This solution isn’t great if you don’t trust that the servers are running verified code.”

This method of contact discovery isn’t ideal because of these shortcomings, but at the very least the Signal service’s design does not depend on knowledge of a user’s social graph in order to function. This has meant that if you trust the Signal service to be running the published server source code, then the Signal service has no durable knowledge of a user’s social graph if it is hacked or subpoenaed.

He then continued on to describe their use of SGX and remote attestation over a network, which was touched on in the Sealed Sender post. Specifically:

Modern Intel chips support a feature called Software Guard Extensions (SGX). SGX allows applications to provision a “secure enclave” that is isolated from the host operating system and kernel, similar to technologies like ARM’s TrustZone. SGX enclaves also support a feature called remote attestation. Remote attestation provides a cryptographic guarantee of the code that is running in a remote enclave over a network.

Later in that blog post, Moxie says “The enclave code builds reproducibly, so anyone can verify that the published source code corresponds to the MRENCLAVE value of the remote enclave.” But how do we actually perform this remote attestation? And is it as secure and reliable as Signal attests?

In the docs for the “auditee” application, the Examples page provides some additional information and describes how to use their tool to verify the MRENCLAVE value. Note that they also say that the tool is a work in progress and shouldn’t be trusted. The Intel SGX documentation likely has information as well, but most of the links that I found were dead, so I didn’t investigate further.

A blog post titled Enhancing trust for SGX enclaves raised some concerns with SGX’s current implementation, specifically mentioning Signal’s usage, and suggested (and implemented) some improvements.

I haven’t personally verified the MRENCLAVE values for any of Signal’s services and I’m not aware of anyone who has (successfully, at least), but I also haven’t seen any security experts stating that the technology is unsound or doesn’t actually do what’s claimed.

Finally, I recommend you check out https://community.signalusers.org/t/overview-of-third-party-security-audits/13243 - some of the issues noted there involve the social graph and at least one involves Sealed Sender specifically (though the link is dead; I didn’t check to see if the Internet Archive has a backup).

Message history won’t be fully fixed. It can’t be without storing message backups in some cloud somewhere (whether it’s to iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, or Signal’s servers) and Signal omits its message history from system backups on iOS and Android.

iOS users are completely incapable of backing up their message history in the event of their phone being lost, stolen, or broken. This omission isn’t justified in any way, as far as I’m aware; I don’t know of any technical reason why following the exact same process as on Android wouldn’t work.

Android users are able to back up locally via Signal, but that isn’t on by default, can’t be automated, needs to be backed up separately, requires you to record a 30 digit code to decrypt it, and has limitations on when it can be used for a restore (can’t restore on iOS, for example). See https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages for more details.

Message history on linked devices - meaning iPads and desktop computers - is being improved, but it still won’t mean that a user who loses or trades in their phone as they get a new phone will be able to simply restore their phone from a system backup and restore their Signal message history. And even that isn’t anywhere near as easy as on Telegram, where a user can just log in with their password and restore their message history, no backup needed.

It’s great that they’re improving the experience for linked devices, but right now that doesn’t actually help if you lose, break, or trade in your phone. Maybe they’ll later allow users to restore to a phone from a linked device or support backups on iPhones, but right now the situation with message history isn’t just an unfriendly UX, but one that is explicitly and intentionally unreliable for a huge portion of Signal’s user-base.

Also read that the keys are stored locally but also somehow stored in the cloud (??),

Which keys? Are they always stored or are they only stored under certain conditions? Are they encrypted as well? End to end encrypted?

which makes it all completely worthless if it is true.

It doesn’t, because what you described above could be fine or could have huge security ramifications. As it is, my guess is that you’re talking about how Signal supports secure value recovery. In that case:

1. The key is used to encrypt your contacts, profile name, group avatars, social graph, etc., but not your messages.
2. Your key is only uploaded to the cloud if you have a recovery PIN or passphrase
3. Your key is encrypted using your PIN or passphrase using techniques (key-stretching, storing in server secure enclaves) that make it more difficult to brute force

The main criticism of this is that you can’t opt out of it without opting out of the Registration Lock, that it necessarily uses the same PIN or passphrase, and that, particularly because it isn’t clear that your PIN/passphrase is used for encryption, users are less likely to use more secure pass phrases here.

But even without the extra steps that we can’t 100% confirm, like the use of the Secure Enclave on servers and so on, this is e2ee, able to be opted out by the user, not able to be used to recover past messages, and not able to be used to decrypt future messages.

The concern is valid, and it has caused a lot of distrust in many companies due to the Snowden leaks, but that distrust is founded in the leaks.

Snowden explicitly endorsed Signal, too - and as far as I know he’s never walked that endorsement back.