Readit NewsThere was a time when phone service, electricity, etc. was just an ordinary private company that you contracted with, who could do whatever private companies can do. Eventually, we placed these kinds of companies in a special category, distinct from ordinary private companies, where they were subject to special rules (in those cases where they were not taken over by the government outright).
Eventually, we will turn social media companies which are as large as Twitter under the "utility" category, and access to them will be subject to a process with all the bureaucratic checks and balances. It won't be perfect, but it will be less bad, on balance.
Also, like almost all utilities, its profit margin will be tightly regulated, and often it will run at a (taxpayer-subsidised) loss.
Encouraging 3rd party patching tools to adopt it or the organizations I work with will leave them as a client.
Chocolatey already supports Brave in its packages for Windows.
Feels a lot like the days when Chrome came out and I championed it over Internet explorer and Firefox. Yeah, we all make mistakes, sorry Firefox.
Anyway, Brave seems like a great option to keep extensions alive that can actually block ads/trackers. Chrome is about to can that ability.
More info here for the uninformed: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...
And you can of course always chose to run local, encrypted backups.
On the other hand, if your adversary wants to get your stuff, they will find a way. The whole cryptography thing is just imposing cost on a potential attacker, not a universal warranty against any possible attack. Someone can still locate you and beat you with XKCD's $5 wrench for your password.
Ideally we'd have end-to-end encryption on everything without adding complexity for end-users. But a lot of that stuff seems to be hard to build and at least just as hard to retroactively bolt on to a system. iMessage (iChat) goes back a long time and supports many platforms (yes, within the apple ecosystem, that is) which means they can't easily nuke every legacy API at once.
This is true, and to add to it: for state level actors, “wanting to get your stuff” expands to passive collection of data as well as well trodden paths to more targeted surveillance. End to end at least throws up a few more barriers.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how much to trust Zuck's claims of WhatsApp encryption, or if external people have attempted to verify the claims, but it seems like such a big deal to lie about, that it's probably true?
Of course, that's only going to provide you passive protection from things like automated scanning of messages. If you become a target, it seems as though there are always exploits floating around which can be used to hack your phone, and then all bets off.