Government and big tech have shown their hand, now's the time to start moving over to private end to end encrypted communications.
It's Time To Encrypt Your Comms!
3 Apps to Help Secure Your Communications
Signal - Signal has experienced tremendous growth lately, largely thanks to a tweet from Elon Musk. By tremendous I mean a x61 fold increase in downloads of the App!
Mobile app analytics firm Sensor Tower said Wednesday that Signal saw 17.8 million app downloads on Apple and Google during the week of Jan. 5 to Jan. 12. That's a 61-fold increase from just 285,000 the previous week. -nbcnews.com
In short Signal is a messaging app available for iOS, Android, and Desktop that features end to end encryption and the option to automatically delete data at a given time interval.
Signal is open source, which mean the code can be reviewed by anyone at anytime. The app is a product of the Signal Technology Foundation which is an American non-profit organization founded in 2018 by Moxie Marlinspike and Brian Acton.
Signal has much room for improvements beyond being a basic messaging app, and I would expect that they ramp up development resources to improve in areas such as group chat. Currently group chats are sort of not available on desktop.. But I expect this to change.
Element - Element.io is more feature rich and polished communications App. Again end to end encrypted, more than a messaging App, I would call this more of a platform with multiple offering. Yes its decentralized, also important.
The Element app is free for everyone, and can be self-hosted or hosted on Matrix.org at no cost. The Element app is open source and you can find all the code on GitHub. -Element.io
Element's features make it similar to platforms like Discord or Slack in that it's build with collaborative work in mind, and they've built with communities in mind as well.
Could this be a natural replacement for Discord communities, that don't want their data mined?
Keep your communities safe. Built on the experience with the Matrix community, Element Matrix Services (EMS) provides a huge range of features to protect your users - including server ACLs, shared moderation lists, message deletion, extensible anti-spam and anti-flooding mechanisms. -Element.io
The fact that Element.io is decentralized is important, as it makes it much more difficult to attack and shut down as it's not hosted by a single server, but rather by many. This is the future.
Mastadon - Mastadon App is another decentralized open source communication platform.
Mastadon is different in that it's more focused on overall digital content publishing, in addition to audio and video communications.
It utilizes what's known as the Fediverse which is essentially a group of interconnected servers used for web publishing.
(social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.
A platform like Mastadon checks a few boxes for me. It's open source, it's decentralized, end to end encrypted, and it's distributed on iOS, Android, Web, and PC/Linux.
How big a role will Linux play in the future of encrypted communication? The OS of choice, it's open source! I'm seeing the trend here..
What is end to end encryption?
And why is it so important? In laymen's terms it means that only the people communicating are able to read and understand the data. Outside parties are not able to decipher the data.
It also means that the machines involved in transferring your communications data are not able to decrypt the data, not without the keys!
We've all heard the phrase "Not your keys, not your crypto", but how about Not your keys, not your comms data. The trend is here, we lock our crypto behind keys, now we lock our comms data behind keys. This needs to be gold standard for all of our data.
The Future of Communication
How important is open source becoming? To secure our data we'll be relying more and more on open source OS's, Comms apps, DiFi, and the distributed nodes that support that infrastructure.
Looking even further down the road, we'll be looking to secure all of our digital data.
We produce a lot of data, some of us more than others but we are data factories and we're being mined harder and harder with every passing minute.
Personally I've been using Signal for a few months now and it works well for what it is, I mostly use it on mobile, and the group chat works well there.
I'll definitely be looking at options to further encrypt going forward, and thinking more about how other elements of my data can be protected. I think fundamentally there is a shift taking place, with more and more people looking at their data differently.
I like to say "own your data", it's yours! unless it's not, and understand that too. If you're using the mainstream communications platforms then you're agreeing to the TOS and to be data mined, and also to be censored.
Thankfully there are people pushing the envelop working on censorship resistant tech. Annnd, I would like to see cheap hardware being manufactured at scale not using Chinese components, microprocessors that can run Linux distro's. In the future it's common place to run nodes, everyone does it, many without even knowing it, it's just the way things work.
Ciao for now,