Opinionateds

Messengers, there are many of them. But are they any good? Well there are some really good comparisons out there, but I want to add some of my own takes. If I missed your favorite messenger, I am sorry. Also I will not cover all clients for decentral protocols. For example for Matrix I might only cover Element or SchildiChat. A short overview Briar is a fully P2P messenger, making it very resilient against censorship, but also lets it drain your battery, as the app needs to be active to send and receive messages. Delta Chat is a messenger building on the existing E-Mail infrastructure. This has the advantage of it being quite decentral if you want, self hostable and easy to use. It does leak a lot of metadata though, making it not very private and also the encryption will be turned off, when the receiver doesn’t support it. Discord is a widely used chat application, which is not in any way private or secure, but is quite easy to use for most people. Jami is another P2P messenger, which has decent security, proven by independant audits and is quite private as well. Sadly it is not really usable day to day, due to the lack of a big userbase. SchildiChat is a Matrix client, which is based on one of the most popular clients, Element. It brings all the features of element, on the web, desktop and Android. Schildi mostly changes UI aspects of Element, but also provides bug fixes. Sadly Element breaks perfect forward secrecy for convenience 1, making it not the ideal choice for fully secure communication. Session is a messenger, which routes all its traffic through tor, making it resilient against cencorship, but also quite slow. Also it does not have perfect forward secrecy integrated 1, meaning if one message can be decrypted all can be. Signal is probably the most known secure messenger. And it is really secure, but relies on centralised servers. They mainly run on AWS (Amazons Cloud Service), which isn’t the best for both security and privacy, and has shown to also not be the most reliable2. For most people this is probably the best choice, as it is free, easy to use, very secure and has decent privacy protections. SimpleX is another P2P messenger, which also intruduces decentral relays, which add a little metadata, making the theoretical privacy worse than for Briar or similar, but to a very insignificant degree in comparison to centralised services. It is also suffers from high power consumption, due to the P2P connections. Telegram is for some reason a really popular messenger, which doesn’t really protect your privacy, cooperates, with governments and doesn’t encrypt messages by default. Also the cryptography can’t verified. Also Telegram seems to be developed in Russia, which isn’t exactly known for its respect of free speech, privacy and things like human rights. Threema is a swiss based messaging service. Just like Signal it is also open source, but the central service is hosted by Threema. It costs a 6,49 € to get it. Note that Threema just got aquired by a German capital company 3. Further it is important to note, that while many messengers like Session build on and change Signals messaging protocols, Threema rolls their own protocol, which supports perfect forward secrecy. Their protocol was criticised before, but in general should give similar security as Signals. Yes, there are messengers from Meta, Google and Apple (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google Messages, iMessage), they all suffer bad and/or not checkable security and don’t protect your privacy. Don’t use them. ...

What do I mean with ‘AI’? ‘AI’ is a term used in so many ways today. And in my opinion, we do not have anything that would qualify as ‘AI’ in the sense of the word. There is nothing intelligent about a statistical model; okay, there is something intelligent about how they are build and trained, but the model itself isn’t what I would define as intelligent. This site will talk about LLMs like the GPT series of models released by OpenAI. For those uninitiated, LLM stands for “Large Language Model” and describes a kind of model which takes in Text and generates new more Text from that. You may know for example ChatGPT, although technically that is just the UI made by OpenAI to interact with their GPT series of modesl. ...

Discord is an instant messaging application, mostly directed at gamers™. It can house one-on-one messages, groups and so called servers, where people can create channels for audio and text. These channels must not be accessible to all people on that server and can be for different things. For context: I have used Discord now for a too many years. I began using it, when I still used Windoof. I used the Desktop App on there. When I switched to Linux I started using the Web App only. I also tried out the Discord mobile app, but stopped after a major UI change. ...

Zen Browser is a Firefox based browser whos developers say it is focused on design, privacy and user experience. Here’s my take on it. For context: I have only tested Version 1.17.3b packaged as a flatpak. I tested it on two different desktop environments (Cinnamon and KDE Plasma). I have not tested for compatibility with screen readers. Overview Pro Con Clean UI Doesn’t use system colours Removes most of Mozillas ad-tracking Doesn’t use system window decorations Has a great page for customising shortcuts Has no buttons for window controls visible by default Firefox based It has a really long onboarding process for which there is no obvious way to be skipped Weird defaults: Enables “Do Not Track”, which ironically is used for fingerprinting. Uses standard privacy profile Cookies are stored and not deleted History is stored and kept between browser restarts DNS isn’t secured Asks to store passwords, locations and credit card information. This should be kept separate from the browser for security reasons. Doesn’t enforce HTTPS Default search engine is Google By default the full URL isn’t visible The suggested pinned tabs and shipped bookmarks are not privacy friendly and not relevant to many users. By default will ask to be default browser on startup Has no letterboxing support. Has Firefox Accounts not disabled. Has a weird recommendation on new tab for “http://tagesschau.de” even though my system is set to English language. Doesn’t use the OSs language correctly. In my case EN_US instead of EN_GB. Has no advanced tracking protection through add-ons like uBlock or Privacy badger by default. Makes itself default for HTML files without asking Doesn’t remove Desktop entries on uninstallation. Minor: Source isn’t hosted on a Free [1] platform. Setting up Zen and my experience during the process Firstly, let me talk about the positive things. I really like the clean look of the browser and like that there are easy custamisation options already in the startup wizard. ...