Wish I knew how.

Voting doesn’t seem to be the thing that’s going to unfuck this, considering how popular right wing extremists are right now and how morons are voting for them in droves, at least here in the EU.

Very true, unfortunately. Probably isn’t going to get any better before things get much worse first, either

This seems to be a repeating pattern everywhere around Europe.

Conservatives fuck up the economy and society in general, leftists get elected and try to fix things but face resistance from conservatives, conservatives blame leftists for everything they fucked up themselves, even more extreme conservatives get voted in because people are morons and conveniently forget who it was who was responsible for the problems that conservatives claim are all the left’s fault. Rinse and repeat.

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.

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?

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

YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, YOU’RE NOT EVEN MY REAL DAD

On the other hand most Linux desktop users are Normie’s, think Steam deck and so on.

Jesus fuck what a statement. Your parents probably regret having you.

Yeah, although without the cool space station and cyberpunk-ish tech. I doubt we’ll get that far.

we aren’t going to science up a magic bullet to save us from the epically irresponsible actions of our epically irresponsible species.

In-fuckin-deed. All the talk about “carbon capture” schemes makes my skin crawl.

Well it’s either that or delusional parasitosis that makes my skin crawl, but anyhow.

“Non-profit” doesn’t mean nobody gets paid

we thought the values of this corporation were very clear in terms of access to information.

Well there’s your problem.

The values of any corporation are “make the stockholders and executives richer”. Whatever utter horseshit they spew in their “mission statements” and “values” documents are just that, utter horseshit.

won’t stop until they […] are physically stopped by something like climate change

Ah I see you’re an optimist.

Probably the majority

The big problem is rather that a lot of innovation has been absorbed by the big companies via buyouts

Which ultimately does seem to lead to innovation slowing down. The big players buy out any potential smaller competitors, and very often just outright kill the products / services they inherited in the acquisition.