That is a pretty weird post that doesn't make much sense, but I remember meeting Moxie and asking him about Android security and being surprised at how defensive he was about it. Is Signal the app he was working on? That helps somewhat. I get them confused with each other.
The Signal app doesn't appear to be on F-droid, which is a bit discomforting.
The claim is that Signal's phone verification step doesn't cause privacy problems because Signal (purportedly) doesn't retain the phone numbers after verification. That claim is falsified because the phone carrier stores the call record even if Signal doesn't. They store it because of the same law that makes them turn it over to Big Brother on demand. The phone verification step is, therefore, a privacy problem. Obviously there are similar issues with IP routing, but at least I can use a VPN with an endpoint in another country.
Is there a url for the history? Or for a good answer about the phone numbers? If the topic keeps recurring and the answers don't satisfy people, that suggests that there is no good answer, and that there are possibly misaligned interests between Signal and its users.
Are you saying I have to literally rebuild and distribute my own client APK if I want to use my own server? There's no "settings" in the existing client where you say what server you want to use, like every email client has? That sounds obnoxious.
I don't understand what you mean about discoverability: is my presence on the network advertised to strangers and spammers? That doesn't sound good. What does the onboarding process look like?
You still haven't said what Signal's advantages are supposed to be over alternatives, though I can guess some (e.g. better/more crypto than irc has). Jami seems conceptually ok, but buggy in implementation. Nextcloud Talk works but is kind of clunky. Matrix is popular though I've never used it: is it the main alternative to Signal these days? I thought it was what all the hipsters had migrated to while luddites like me were still on irc. Jitsi Meet looks nice though again I haven't explored it much. I've been puzzled for a long time that there is so much work in this area yet everything has deficiencies. Are there difficult problems to solve?
If Signal's code is open then of course I'd want to self-host the server. Can I do that? Does that get in the way of the onboarding process you mention? Where does the phone number come in, in that case? If I to use Signal's server, that doesn't sound so open, and normally there's no way for me to verify that it's running the same code that they claim.
I don't see where I'm spreading FUD. Ignoring a question and calling it FUD doesn't invalidate the question.
Do you mean the client side is open source? What about the server? If you're required to use Signal's server, how do you know it's not disclosing metadata? If you can self-host it, why the phone number?
I get that Signal is a messaging system (not sure if "messenger service" has a specific meaning). What I don't understand is why I'd want to use it instead of any of the million others that are out there. I've never used Signal and don't have the slightest clue about how it operates, but apparently it tries to mess with the contact list on your phone? That sounds bad. I use Nextcloud Chat sometimes and its web design is ugly, but it works ok and you can self-host it fairly easily. It doesn't do anything with your phone contacts. Jami is distributed but (maybe unrelated) I often have trouble getting it to work at all.
Newegg doesn't seem to sell the Crucial MX500 any more*, only the BX500. But if the 870 evo is comparable, I might get that, since I have a couple of MX500s now and am happy with them. I hadn't realized that Team Group was legit at all! I'll keep that in mind. Thanks!
*Note: The MX500 appears on Newegg's web site, but the actual sellers are "Newegg Marketplace" randos rather than Newegg itself, and I prefer to buy directly from Newegg when possible.
Is there a quick explanation of what signal actually does? I don't understand the need for a phone number either. Jami doesn't ask for a phone number. It has other deficiencies that make me not want to use it, but those are technical rather than policy, more or less. Similarly, irc (I'm luddite enough to still be using it) doesn't ask for a phone number either. So this is all suspicious. There are a bunch of other things like this too (Element, Matrix, etc.) that I haven't looked into and tbh I don't understand why they exist.
Thanks, I think you have it right and that it's not worth messing with adapters. The adapter was never about performance from my perspective though. It was about being able to keep using the drive if I eventually moved to a laptop with an M.2 slot.
QVO is QLC flash which has worse durability. I'm trying to stay away from it though maybe it works better now than it originally did. Hmm, I had thought that the drive I looked at a while back had HMB but was not NVMe. Maybe you are right and I didn't look closely enough. I believe those SATA shells don't work with NVMe drives.
The purpose of the cache is to improve latency and save SSD wear. It doesn't help much with throughput as far as I know. Although if it's on the host side, maybe it does.
HMB is host memory buffer or something like that. It means instead of having a ram buffer in the drive, the OS software uses some of the host computer's memory for disk buffering. That makes the drive cheaper but I haven't heard claims of it being any faster. Consumer drives seem to all use it now, and Linux supports it, but maybe not when you wrap up the HMB drive in a SATA shell.
I guess $90 for 1TB is pretty good. I have been suspicious of the EVO drives but at least they aren't QVO.
Thanks, I wasn't really thinking about transfer speeds, it's just the PCIe drives are cheaper (depending) and more re-usable if I get a newer laptop later. I think you are right though that it's not worth messing with adapters.
I dunno if there's such a thing as a reliable brand. The brands have reliable and unreliable models. Particularly I have the idea that I should be avoiding QLC drives, but that TLC these days is ok.
The wikipedia article looks informative and I will read through it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
Is spam a serious problem on other messaging systems?