I’m hesitant to say it because I’ve gotten some ridiculously hostile reactions for it, but I’ve really liked Kagi.

Yes, it’s a subscription service but that means they have an incentive to not show you shit results. According to some, paying for a search service is wrong because online services should be free, and I’m just astroturfing if I even mention it

Or, I dunno, maybe just don’t use Google?

Yeah, same, I found it a bit surprising they have fewer than Germany

people still constantly bring him up, and even say his political views aren’t “that bad” on lichess during random broadcasts

Gee I wonder what kind of people would say that 🤔

Yeah I doubt those particular comments have anything to do with “AI”. It just seems fashionable to blame AI for absolutely everything nowadays

… what

PleasrDAO, NFT collective and current owner of Shaolin

So everybody involved in this lawsuit is an asshole?

Ah, I managed to completely miss the last part of the comment because I’m an eejit who can’t read good

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s.

By a character who was explicitly evil and whose judgement we were not meant to trust, though

With “guarantees” I meant things like whether you want to have perfect forward secrecy, or whether you want to provide some degree of deniability, and so on, not so much what kinds of guarantees you’re relying on although they’re definitely also good to keep in mind.

“As secure as possible” is a very all-encompassing goal which doesn’t really say much – what I was trying to get at with my point about the guarantees you want to make is that you’ll want to have a clear idea of what you actually mean with “as secure as possible” so you’ll know what sort of eg. architectural decisions to make before you do a lot of work and paint yourself into a corner.

It’s a very ambitious project, but I can guarantee it’ll probably be very interesting to work on and you’ll learn a lot regardless of the outcome, and I’m definitely rooting for you.

Sure!

• article from Yle, the national broadcast company: https://yle.fi/a/74-20087808
• Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-introduce-200-euro-fine-participation-illegal-strikes-2024-02-22/
• more in depth article by SAK, a “labor confederation” (sort of like a union of unions): https://www.sak.fi/en/whats-new/serious-grounds/restrictions-right-strike

I have a background in distributed systems and some background in security (I’m by no means a cryptography expert but I do know more about the subject than average developers), and I’d say that at this stage you shouldn’t worry too much about meeting all parts of some guideline or another; they’re often geared more towards bigger teams and slightly more established projects. What I think could benefit you would be first of all to have a clear idea of what exactly you want to accomplish (from a security standpoint, not necessarily so much from a functionality standpoint) if you don’t already have have one, ie. what sort of guarantees do you want to be able to make. Doesn’t have to even be a public document at first, just some notes and sketches for yourself. Then you’d want to find other projects with similar guarantees and aims and see how they did things, find research papers on the subjects and so on. Security guidelines can be useful, but generally it’s more useful to understand why something is in a guideline in the first place. For a project such as yourst I would personally really emphasize design documents and research over code at an early stage, because you need to have a clear goal in mind before you start cranking out code which might turn out to be worthless (at least to some degree) after you run into problems with your approach. Not saying that the documentation has to be public, just that you / the team know exactly what the goal is.

“Encrypted P2P chat” can mean vastly different kinds of projects, with very different aims. For example, do you want perfect forward secrecy? If so, you’d want to find out the challenges associated with it, especially in relation to interactivity since you’re building a P2P architecture, etc. etc. Same with anonymity / user “traceability” like I mentioned earlier; you need to have a clear picture of what kinds of guarantees do you want the users to have to be even able to say what kinds of best practices you’d have to follow.

Sorry, that turned into a bit of a ramble and might be completely obvious to you already, since I have no idea about your background and the level of research you’ve already done.

Honestly, just properly funding anything that is designed to do benevolent things for the community as a whole is a tough sell with way too many US community politicians

This seems to be a problem with at least conservative politicians everywhere. In Finland where I live we do still have the vestiges of a welfare state (and it really is vestigial at this point), but right wing politicians keep dismantling it and cutting taxes on the rich, and later on leftist politicians find it impossible to roll back any changes due to resistance from the right.

Right that makes sense.

But yeah, after glancing through the links you provided, I’d agree that you’ll definitely need to pay someone for an audit / review, there are so many pitfalls and gotchas when it comes to encryption alone, and depending on the guarantees you want to be able to make you’ll find even more pitfalls and gotchas – especially if you want to make even relatively light guarantees about anonymity. The classic problem is that even with encrypted payloads the metadata / protocol itself leaks information, which might or might not be a problem depending on what your guarantees are.

I’d suggest writing at least some level of documentation for the protocol. I’d assume a lot of the more security-minded folks – who your app seems to be targeting – won’t be too enthusiastic about using a chat service that promises security but doesn’t tell you how it plans on achieving it.

Is there a description of the protocol somewhere?

Yeah this is absolutely the most fucking infuriating part about conservatives. They’ll crow about how “leftists” (ie. what seems like anyone left of the Strasserites) want to have a one-party fascist state that controls every aspect of people’s lives, and when they get in power they start doing exactly what they accuse leftists of wanting.

They also have a real habit of blaming all of their own fuckups on the left; our current extremist government got in to power by claiming that our previous leftist government caused some sort of massive debt problem (government debt did increase, but they had COVID to deal with), when the reality is that it has been the previous 20 or so years of right wing governments who have consistently cut taxes for the rich and sold government property to cover for the budget deficits. Conveniently reich-wingers ignored the part where their ideology is the one that wants to cut taxes, leading to higher debt and cut social programs and public services, and somehow they’re stupid enough that they don’t even see it themselves and they believe it when their lying politicians claim it is all the evil leftists’ fault that our public healthcare is now completely broken and the welfare system is among the worst in Europe.

I did nazi that pun coming 🙄

The way I’ve understood the “defund the police” movement’s point is that they’re saying police funding is excessive because a lot of the things cops do should be handled before the cops have to get involved, eg. with higher funding for mental health and social services, housing for homeless people etc. So the point is that you wouldn’t need as many cops in the first place if things were handled more humanely “downstream” so to speak, instead of just letting problems fester until things go sideways

I assume that the reich-wingers will use these protests as justification for crackdowns.

Here in Finland we had months of strikes against our current extremely conservative government’s cuts to public services, welfare etc. – naturally their reaction was to refuse to negotiate and make political strikes illegal, and to use the strikes to vilify unions and as scapegoats for poor economic performance