Signal - Linked Devices
Monday, March 17. 2025
For messaging, there are plenty of choices. I must admit, my thinking is similar to criminals: the less any government knows about me and my messaging, the better. Today, full anonymity is gone. Really, really bad actors were staying below law enforcement radar, and now those really good ones for messaging are gone.
So, I'm doing what Mr. Snowden does and am using Signal daily.
For governments to keep track on me, Signal works via phone number. My issue with using a phone number as identifying factor is, in any country, there are "like five" different phone numbers (in reality an area code has roughly 10 million different numbers).
As you must feel confused, let me clarify. The reason, I say "5" is because when numbering scheme was designed, 10 million amounted roughtly to infinite. Today, anybody can dial 1000 numbers per second and exhaust the entire number space in less than three hours. Obviously, there are multiple area codes and prefixes, so we have multiple sets of 10 million numbers. So, it would take a day to dial all possible numbers. With single computer. What if somebody could obtain two computers? Or three?
Let's face it phone number as a technical invention has been obsoleted for years. It should NOT be used to identify me in any messaging app. It's convenient to do so. Governments have been tracking phones for many decades and they can demand messaging protocol operators to enforce phone identification. Still, by any measure Signal is the safest option.
Moving on. Phone numbers: bad. Signal: good.
This is what happened the other day:
The text said:
Open Signal on your phone
Your account will be deleted soon unless you open Signal on your phone.
This message will go away if you're done it successfully.
For the past two years, I've never used Signal on a mobile device. To me typing messages with a non-keyboard is madness! So, I'm just using messaging from my computer(s).
It seems there is a limit to it.
Government wants to track you, so you must verify the existence of your phone number for every 2 years. Fair.
