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Signal Piracy group
(signal.group)
I saw some threads here about Telegram and piracy stuff being banned. So, as an experimental alternative, I created a public Signal group for piracy.
Maybe it'll be useful?
Before joining
Signal supports usernames and hiding telephone numbers. Here's a blog entry on how to do so. You might want to:
- set a username
- change your profile name (these are two separate things!)
- hide your phone number
Signal doesn't collect IPs and therefore can't even hand them out. It's been requested in 2021. Here's a list of requests from authorities they were allowed to publish. I've looked through 3 of the most recent and nowhere do they reveal IPs.
Sure they don't log the IPs, but it is technically impossible to not know the IP when you're running a centralized service.
IIRC, because of sealed sender, they can't know who you're communicating with, only that you're using Signal at all.
I wrote a comment here about why sealed sender does not achieve what it purports to.
I didn't know that. Thanks
What are the "popular" alternatives? Telegram stores everything, WhatsApp doesn't allow usernames, Matrix requires IPs too...
SimpleX
Despite their claims of total privacy, I imagine, like any software company, they have full access to their own back end including encryption keys and server logs. Meaning they can and probably will moderate their own platform if there is enough pressure from nation states/IP owners.
You are welcome to audit the source code and host the backend yourself.
You understand that, for everyone except for a complete network pro, that is worse for security and privacy, right?
Don't get me wrong, it's great that you can.
But the reason piracy websites struggle so much with long term stability isn't because they're hosting the wrong software.
If you don't put trust on someone something, you left yourself to trust and do all the works. However, you don't trust yourself either, sadly I can't offer any solutions.
TBH I would just use email over TOR and encrypt communication with PGP. Rotate identities every now and then and you should be fine. Yes it doesn't have forward secrecy but it removes the effort to find the "right messaging" service and is instead ubiquitous (and you can sign up for anonymous email addresses online too, which makes it even better).
Session?