I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message “hi <name entered>” could be displayed was baulked at.

Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    17 hours ago

    Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.

    I don’t know what you mean by “bait” here, but…

    Escaping to a phone-number-requiring, centralized-on-Amazon, closed-source-server-having, marketed-to-activists, built-with-funding-from-Radio-Free-Asia (for the specific purpose of being used by people opposing governments which the US considers adversaries) service which makes downright dishonest claims of having a cryptographically-ensured inability to collect metadata? No thanks.

    (fuck whatsapp and discord too, of course.)

      • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        15 hours ago

        When it’s libre software, we’re not banned from fixing it.

        Signal is a company and a network service and a protocol and some libre software.

        Anyone can modify the client software (though you can’t actually distribute modified versions via Apple’s iOS App Store, due to Apple’s binary distribution system being incompatible with GPLv3… which is why unlike the Android version there are no forks of Signal for iOS) but if a 3rd party actually “fixed” the problems I’ve been talking about here then it really wouldn’t make any sense to call that Signal anymore because it would be a different (and incompatible) protocol.

        Signal (the company) must approve of and participate in any change to Signal (the protocol and service).