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by arethuza 296 days ago
Apologies for the rampant paranoia but that all sounds great - but how do I know that advice like this can be trusted, after all you could be an agent of a state security service directing people towards services they want people to use.

NB Just to be clear, I'm not doubting you, but if I was in a situation where my life or liberty was at threat I would be very worried about whose advice to take.
3 comments
bdd8f1df777b 296 days ago
If you have the technical knowledge, you can just read the protocols, find out if they make sense, and then implement them yourself. Most of them are quite straight forward so it's not possible to hide a backdoor like Dual_EC_DRBG in the protocol.

If you are not so technical then you have to decide who to trust. For example, you may trust that open source software has been vetted enough and build one from source. Or trust that the built artefacts downloaded from github is good enough. Or trust that the software downloaded from a website not marked as fraud by Google Chrome is good enough. Etc.

In any case, the more technical knowledge you have, the more confidence you can have by doing due diligence yourself.

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hluska 296 days ago
Wow, someone sent out of their way to write about protocols. Instead of saying “thank you” or being silent or even doing independent research, you decided to talk about your paranoia. That’s interesting…

Every single thing the person wrote about is a protocol. Each has been written about extensively and they’re open source. You can read source code if you’d like.

Those are the best guarantees you can get with any software. If you’re not technical and not willing to do the research and put in the work, there’s nothing you can do.

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pythonguython 296 days ago
He’s giving advice about generic protocols - you could learn about them and make your own decision. The tools he mentioned are open source - you could read the source code or trust in the community. I don’t know what other guarantee you could hope to get. If he told you he’s an anti digital censorship expert he could just be lying to you. Anyone COULD be an agent, but at a certain point you have to choose to trust people, at some potential risk to yourself.
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