This is unfortunate. Elon despite his flaws opposes mass surveillance and censorship, and that's the general sentiment on X at the moment. He just retweeted the Telegram founder 20 hours ago. [0]
I'm afraid we're being divided and conquered. The people pushing for mass control are attempting to reframe the fight for digital freedoms as a "leftist" talking point, so that they can later ride the populist wave and use its momentum to kill online free speech and general purpose computing altogether. Perhaps the EFF has been compromised, because it should not be falling for this trick. It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible.
Elon, the guy that will ban anyone on X at the drop of a hat, opposes censorship?
Comical.
> It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible.
How about their website, which is accessible to everyone because it doesn't require you to log in?
> Elon despite his flaws opposes mass surveillance and censorship…
Sure, just like he was pro-free speech, until he suddenly wasn't.
His broken promise not to ban @elonjet is still up. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
Would you call it free speech if the whole world was able to track your position anywhere in the world 24/7?
Yes. If you're just making arbitrary choices on each instance you're not a free speech zealot you're just making judgement calls like everyone else.
I would fly commercial
The world still has the ability to track it, this guy was just calling attention to publicly available, unencrypted data.
Further, Elon said he considered it free speech he was deliberately protecting.
Of all the verifiable complaints I've heard about Twitter censorship, the best left-wing one was "they banned the Elon Musk jet tracker" and the right-wing was "they banned people for saying there are two genders." Anyone have a better one for either of these?
His anti censorship stance isn't necessarily born out by the data:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...
> He just retweeted the Telegram founder 20 hours ago.
Wouldn't that only strengthen one's resolve to not get invested in anything Elon controls?
Telegram started out as being the privacy option, not owned by Facebook, encrypted chats were possible long before WhatsApp did that (not sure if whatsapp still sent messages in plain text on TCP/443 when telegram launched with TLS). It was a thing, and I believed it, and the UX was and is amazing, but they still haven't rolled encryption out further (not even to desktop clients, much less expanding/switching the protocol for, say, group chats) and then I recently looked at this Telegram dude's Telegram channel and... well, that's when I cancelled my subscription.
My only problem is: what platform could replace it? Signal doesn't scale with thousands of members; Matrix could not decrypt message; Wire seems to have abandoned their consumer products; XMPP has no market share so you're really starting from zero; some others like Jami have mediocre-to-bad UX; Threema is paid (would be fine by me if a reasonable fee lets 10 other people use it free in the first year, say); Discord would just be swapping one walled garden out for another. What's one to do? I'm just looking to be part of communities, not start a new hobby by hosting a public Zulip/Rocketchat server and trying to bring about an exodus and convince everyone that my server is better
On the Matrix side, "unexpected" decryption errors got fixed in ~Sept 2024.
(There are still a few scenarios where e.g. if you delete your identity keys by logging out of all your clients, you may get "expected" decryption errors. We're still working on those.)
You absolutely need to pop the bubble you're in, because what you believe is the opposite of reality.
There's a reason cryptographers laud Signal (the protocol) over MTProto (Telegram's protocol), and Signal (the app) over Telegram (the app). Telegram is not E2EE by default, does not have E2EE for group chats, and does not have a good crpytographic protocol, and Musk has long been rallying against Signal.
Under Elon Musk, DOGE exfiltrated and breached American's data from the major government agencies they broke into, exfiltrated information to private databases (with DOGE employees leaving with flashdrives), Russian IPs accessing NLRB systems with provided credentials, and we're even seeing DOGE's once-alleged US citizen master-database project come to proposal as a DHS project under the SAVE act.
In just a year, Musk and DOGE helped to expand the US government's mass surveillance capacity beyond what we've ever seen. This is not surprising, since Elon Musk is aligned with the United States fascist movement, and mass surveillance is a hallmark of fascism.
We have a much stronger surveillance state, owing to DOGE and Musk.
Which part of what I said is the opposite of reality?
I'm aware that Telegram is not E2EE by default, and you have to turn it on manually. But it's not true that Elon has long been rallying against Signal. In fact, he endorsed Signal a while back along with Edward Snowden. He also later criticized Signal, as well as other encrypted messaging apps. I remember seeing a podcast clip of him saying something along the lines of "none of them can really protect against the government spying on him", which is true. If you're a high profile individual like Musk, nation states will expend lots of resources to spy on you, and no messaging app will protect you from that. The point of encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram is to raise the per capita cost of doing surveillance so that surveiling the entire population becomes prohibitively expensive, but it doesn't prevent targeted operations on an individual by determined state actors. Having multiple options for those apps is a good thing, even if the apps are individually imperfect, because the government will have to deal with multiple apps instead of one, and that takes more resources.
As for the rest of your comment, those claims aren't true, at least not in the way you stated. DOGE has been accused of mishandling sensitive records, and that part might be true, but I've not seen any evidence pointing towards the mishandling being a part of a evil plot to strengthen the surveillance state and promote fascism. Mass surveillance was already a problem back in 2013 when Snowden leaked it. In fact, it was already a problem before Obama's first term, and Snowden held off on leaking it because he thought Obama would introduce reforms, which didn't happen. The surveillance state is not a recent fascist movement spearheaded by Musk or DOGE. And I think a lot of the vitriol towards Musk is manufactured. He occasionally lies and is prone to manipulation like everyone else, but he's not the supervillain you think he is.
> encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram
Telegram less of an "encrypted messaging app" than Instagram was (which, until May 8th, has optional E2EE apps using the Signal protocol). It's simply incorrect to think of Telegram as an "encrypted messaging app" when the default use case is not E2EE.
> the mishandling being a part of a evil plot to strengthen the surveillance state and promote fascism
DOGE strengthened the surveillance state. It does not matter whether or not it's tied to a singular intentional plot.
> Mass surveillance was already a problem back in 2013
Yes, and mass surveillance was a problem even before 2013. We saw it greatly expand especially under the Bush administration under the guise of the "war on terror". As you noted, we haven't seen Obama or Biden reform to account for expansions of power that happened under the preceding administrations. (Hopefully we can get another Watergate style realignment!) So, you have to think about the world in systems thinking, and you have to think about how the state of things are changing over time.
Musk endorsed Signal in 2021, but since then he's denigrated it as "vulnerable", promoted Telegram (which, again, is not even in the same ballpark), blocked Signal for a period and banned users for posting them, and has promoted XChat (which stores keys and metadata serverside and which does not even have forward secrecy).
Musk is a proponent of surveillance and censorship, not the other way around.
This is to laughably misguided that it leans toward malicious.
I mean, you're talking about Elon, the Doge guy, the one who organized mass hoovering of citizens data from whatever sources he could get his grubby mitts on? That Elon?
Opposed to mass surveillance??
And then you sprinkle some commonly known truths on top to make your comment palatable ("we're being divided and conquered!"), and finally you add a dash of malicious speculation to seed some doubt against the organization ("Perhaps the EFF has been compromised!! It's a trick!!").
No thanks.
It is malicious, and you shouldn’t be downvoted for calling out someone who is so obviously arguing in bad faith.
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> Elon despite his flaws opposes mass surveillance and censorship, and that's the general sentiment on X at the moment. He just retweeted the Telegram founder 20 hours ago.
There are probably things more relevant about X than what it is that Elon Musk currently proclaims about his political opinions?
Elon is anti-censorship when it’s censorship of racism, homophobia, sexism and the other things the woke liberal left hate.
Elon is pro-censorship for the things he doesn’t like, like the word “cis”.
You can be happy that Elon is allowing alt-right speech, that’s fair, he has brought that back to Twitter, slurs are finally allowed again, truly the speech we all long for, but anti-censorship as a principle? Please. Pull the other one.
On Twitter, "cis" is about as censored as racism. Neither one gets you banned, but you're warned when posting.
Is this the same guy that bought Twitter and then had his tweets promoted above all others and the AI bot a simp for him?
Whats is worse, censorship or that only those with money are heard? Who do you think is doing the dividing and conquering? Not everything is political, sometimes it's just a rort.