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In a similar situation as you (entire society revolves around whatsapp). I came to this conclusion:
Others won’t share my view on personal privacy at all will happily give out any metadata or data. No matter what secure channel we use, the destination (people) will always leak.
Because of (1), consider all communication with others as public, no matter the inferred intimacy, no matter the platform or its security.
Consider (2) as true even if they somehow used Signal or any secure platform, because of (1). (E.g. “Hey, did you hear about $familyMember? Yes, the weird kiddo who forced me to use some strange blue shit for chat. He got positive on blood exam for $badCondition. Go check on him”)
As for whatsapp itself, i use Android and isolate it in a separate profile, also frozen until opened. I also used a burner phone number for account registration, not my actual number.
People are more receptive of whatsapp accounts with “alternate” numbers when you explain you “got hacked in the past” or any plausible reason.
I wouldn’t consider WA secure. They do tracking, they have your phone numbers and those of all of your friends and know exactly who you talk to, when, and how often. Even if they don’t know the content of the message because it’s encrypted, that’s a lot of information for the algorithm to feed on. Apart from that, I’m not sure if they have access to the encryption keys. They might be able to decrypt everything if they want.
I’m sure someone wrote a lengthy blog article about WA. But unless someone does a proper security audit including where the encryption keys are stored and the implications of that and how extra features like breaking encryption in case someone flags an inappropriate post turns out… The ‘it’s safe’ is just a claim by your brother or Meta. You’re free to believe in anything you want. But it’s not necessarily true.
With the new European regulations Whatapp will soon be forced to offer some compatibility towards 3rd party apps, so there are chances that perhaps bridging in this way will become easier in the near future, or at least have some level of official support. But we won't know for certain how will it work until it happens. All we know is that Whatsapp is currently working on a way for 3rd parties to connect with them.
Personally, I'd hold for a bit to see where does that go and then decide what method to use.
I don’t want to sound overly negative here. But that idea is more a hypothetical proposal “we should do something about it” at this point. There is a working group mimi. But not even a draft or technical proposal, yet. And interoperability is hard, and they also want to come up with a solution that makes it secure, the messages confidential and maybe grant anonymous access. These problems aren’t solved at all as of today. On top you have to deal with spam, malicious servers, users, lawful interception and all kinds of things in a distributed platform. Then they need to come up with a text for the regulation. Write it, discuss and do several revisions, debate it. And there will be lobbyism against it and court cases because it cuts into the business model of large companies. Then it has to be adopted into national legislation and it will get a grace period.
So if you want to wait 'til 2029 (or so) to reply to your mom, go ahead and wait for the EU. I don’t have a crystal ball to be sure, but I highly doubt that this will happen in the next few years.
And on top, there is no guarantee that it turns out good or usable in the first place. There is a lot of lobbyism happening in the EU. Especially by big tech. They’ll find a way to make it a thing that just connects Apple, Meta and Google and exclude independant or secure services.
So, while I'm very skeptical that the result will be satisfactory, I'm very curious to see what will Whatsapp come up with when the deadline hits, because, allegedly, they are already working on it.
I’m curious what Meta is going to unveil. Usually big tech companies get ahead of legislation, in order to set a standard they like, or to prevent possible more strict regulation from happening. We see the same thing with AI and practically everything the big tech companies lobby for. I’m a bit wary.
Whatsapp is under the hood still a lightly modified XMPP system, and given Zucks recent comments about federated protocols (albright in a Threads i.e. ActivityPub context), they might just get their XMPP federation working again.
To be frank I went away from Gentoo for much the same reason. And the constant compilation. I only used it once after that for a small project where I needed to minimise what actually lands in the OS.
Just the little things, really. App compatibility, xbps not having too many packages, issues with Musl, GRUB not loading on the LiveUSB, desktop/WM selection, and also I don’t like the way Runit works. I could make it work if I needed to, but overall it just seems like too much effort.
As an Arch User who keeps hearing about OpenSUSE being a more stable rolling release…mind going into it a bit more? I’m happy on my system, mind, but idk, could be I’m missing out on something big for not making the jump. If nothing else, I’ll know my options
My daughter wanted to do something trivial with windows, but did not know how. Online help referred to a button that did not exist in the application. I know at least three ways to accomplish the same action on Linux, and I know they just work.
Git is a program your computer runs to have a single folder have source control. It does all the hashing and commit chaining that you’re used to, branches, that sort of thing.
But if you want it to be on more than one computer, you need to do this complicated “Bare” repository setup on a server computer to do the “git push” stuff you’re used to.
Most people, being too lazy to learn bare repositories and the general sysadmin necessary to host a git server themselves, instead just use Microsoft’s Github which is a web interface for the server use of git the program.
Microsoft then proceeded with their classic mantra of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” and started slapping on more and more features that are incompatible with any other git hosting service: actions, CI, their web VSCode instances, etc. That’s all in GitHub too. But it’s all just web interface for git the open source program, at the end of the day.
Just a few comments on this. Most people aren’t “lazy”, they just understand that the effort to run a bare repository is greater than basically any other solution. Also your incompatible features list implies that other git repo sites (gitlab, codecommit, bitbucket, etc) don’t have their own form of proprietary stuff that you have to learn. In fact the newest version of gitlab actually changes their web ide into vscode web, because of the obvious, it is much better than their old ide.
I like shitting on M$FT as much as the next bloke but if you believe Github started being evil when Microsoft entered the picture then your memory is pretty awful.
From it’s inception github pushed proprietary tagging and issue numbers that have no meaning outside their platform and a difficult export process to trap projects - especially commercial ones - on their platform.
I remember moving a project from github to gitlab years ago (before MS) and the process to move all the non-git data from github was just as easy as moving the git repo itself. Thanks to gitlab’s efforts perhaps, but I didn’t expect github to have made it difficult for them based on the experience I ended up having.
I was being diplomatic because I was uncertain how people felt about the issue and PR tracking, considering how Bitbucket and GitLab replicate it. Felt simpler to focus on the since-M$ft egregious steps.
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