Notices by taedryn 🏳️‍⚧️ (taedryn@dice.camp), page 4

Today's interesting egg realization: from an early age, I was deeply avoidant of locker rooms. I didn't understand the reason, I figured I was just shy, or afraid other boys would mock me, but I knew deep in my heart that this was a place to not be. I don't recall ever being unclothed in a locker room.

As usual with these realizations, it all makes a lot more sense now. (And this isn't to say that locker rooms are a nice place for anyone else, I suspect they're just generally not good.)

@roadriverrail @AlyAlyOutnFree Well, what I did was to go into Ulta while skating on the edge of the dysphoric abyss, all one of the very nice people there for help, and have her try out a few things on my face. This is their raison d'être, so don't be shy about it. One of them (a tinted moisturizer) was a good match.

I applied it like i do sunscreen (liberally), but in this picture, I've got maybe a gram or two on my whole face. I'm going to have to work on that.

@roadriverrail @AlyAlyOutnFree my aim is to have everyone worshipping at my feet within the next year. Gotta practice for that kind of thing, early and often. ?

(Seriously, though, that's incredibly sweet, thank you.)

@AlyAlyOutnFree i don't think I've posted this here yet. A friend came over last night and we played with makeup a little bit. This is far more subtle than anything I've ever done on myself, but it's nice. I tend to layer on makeup like it's grout.

New glasses just dropped. Sexy cat-eye phase: engage! (Cw for eye contact)

@roadriverrail Another Goodwill find. It's missing a couple danglies, but you'd never know to look at it. It only works with very high-necked, or very open tops, but I enjoy the intricacy of it.

It's finally salad time again, and of course I have to photograph my salads for long-irrelevant reasons, now just for fun. Plus, I'm enjoying this sweater/necklace combo.

Signal is becoming a liability.

I started using it because it would do both encrypted and SMS messages, and by using it, I was contributing "low value" traffic (cat pix, "how u" msgs) to a system where I wanted to help protect those doing "high value" communication (political resistance, privacy activists, etc.).

The fact that it did both SMS and encrypted meant that I was following security best practices by default, without effort. As my friends joined, we talked over secure channels. 1/?

However, they're dropping SMS support, which means that I will need to open Signal to talk to Signal friends, and some other app to talk to SMS friends. And I've found over the several years I've used it that some of my Signal friends put the app away and ignore it, so my messages to them just never get seen, and we're both unhappy with the outcome.

Between these two factors, it will soon no longer make sense to use Signal as my daily-driver messaging app. 2/?

And what that means is that Signal will (presumably, because I'm probably not alone in my thinking) become a place where only "high value" communications happen. It will become the place where bad actors know that they can aim at any message and know that it will be worth spending the effort to decrypt. That is *terrible* for a system like Signal.

I understand why they would want to drop SMS. It feels like it's against the mission, it's engineering drain, etc. 3/?

But by doing so, they are losing sight of their greater mission, which was originally to provide seamless, easy-to-use encrypted messaging for everyone. To provide a service which was so easy to use that even brand new smartphone users could pick it up as easily as any other SMS client.

Now, it's still easy to use, but you can only use it to talk to a fraction of your contacts. Now you have to use two different apps to do what appears to be the exact same thing. 4/?

So, for the layperson, who doesn't care whether their messages are encrypted or not, there's very little incentive to download this extra app and use it in addition to the default insecure SMS app.

I don't expect this to reach the Signal team's ears, and I don't have a clever solution in mind. They've made their decision and clearly communicated it, and I wish them luck. But over time, I'm probably going to stop using it. It's too much work.

I lament the loss of this boon to secure comm. 5/5