Hey Steve, thank you for taking your time reading and replying to my email.

I can only imagine the frustration they may have felt, circa 2015, that made them to put their privacy in the corporate's privacy grinder.

I hope that the participants for tomorrow's Crypto Party were notified that by installing Zoom, it would be like installing malware in their own devices. 

I wish that those NoiseBridge folks that care less for Privacy would rethink their position, because, IMHO, NoiseBridge is giving a bad example. 

And I agree with you. We, even folks like myself that are not coders, should do more supporting the open source community. Because, Privacy is dying, and we all have the moral responsibility to do our part to keep it alive. 

And last but not least, thank you (and james) for spinning up that RocketChat, and the other platforms that I am aware you have running. I appreciate your work.

Thanks, 

Daniel 




On Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 6:13 PM Steve Phillips <steve@tryingtobeawesome.com> wrote:
Hey Daniel,

1. Why is NoiseBridge using Slack (Corporate), isn't privacy a concern?

I believe the historical reason is that, circa 2015, the people running Noisebridge's infrastructure were overburdened and people wanted something that would reliably be up.

I and James have set up RocketChat at https://chat.noisebridge.info/ but it hasn't caught on. #networkeffects

RocketChat, Riot, and others didn't exist back when Noisebridge started using Slack.

Private conversations are on Slack, and so yes, it'd be great to use something end-to-end encrypted and open source instead.

 
2. Why is tomorrow's (2020/04/05) NoiseBridge CryptoParty being held via Zoom, when the party itself is about privacy?
>
> 3. Why not use their open source alternatives?

It is a public event. The way I think about this is: privacy violations occur when information you want to be private to certain individuals is visible to people outside of that group.

Zoom v. others was discussed internally and I encouraged Kinnard to use Zoom for this public event because Jitsi Meet doesn't work very well at all if you either have more than a few people joining, or even 1 person has a slow internet connection, which is especially common in the global south.

More good is being done for the world by making the event accessible to all :-).

If we want people to use FLOSS software then we need to (1) make it work well and (2) financially support the people and organizations making that software so they have the resources they need to make it work well!

--Steve Phillips
Cypherpunk and privacy activist since 2012