chameleon

I’ll freely admit I don’t use that thing and was under the assumption it was feature complete. Regardless, the Android and iOS clients are also open, and I’ve found absolutely no indications that there’s any blobs in the repo or the like.

It’s not and I’m not sure how that article arrived at that conclusion. Their E2EE crypto is problematic homebrew crypto, but that’s very, very different from being closed. The whole desktop client including the implementation of that crypto is fully open source and lives right on GitHub. Plenty of people have independently reviewed it and came back with a very iffy impression of the whole thing.

Really the only difference is that Telegram doesn’t publish their backend, but the one Signal publishes is missing a couple of bits related to their “spam filter”, which happens to take in the source & destination of messages and do anything it wants with them. That doesn’t matter for either platform’s E2EE properties in any case, since distrusting the server is the whole point of E2EE.

Basically yes. Rancher Desktop sets up K3s in a VM and gives you a kubectl, docker and a few other binaries preconfigured to talk to that VM. K3s is just a lightweight all-in-one Kubernetes distro that’s relatively easy to set up (of course, you still have to learn Kubernetes so it’s not really easy, just skips the cluster setup).

Eh. I’ve been on the receiving end of one of those inboxes and the spam is absolutely, utterly unbearable. Coming up with a better system than a publicly listed email address is on Google at this point, because there is no reasonable way to provide support when you need a spam filter tuned up to such a level that all legitimate mail also ends up in spam.

That’s because they had a lot of people “buying the dip”. CS is in a very similar position to SolarWinds during their 2020 security slipup. The extent of managerial issues there should’ve been unforgivable but unfortunately they got away with it and are doing just fine nowadays.

Realistically, immutability wouldn’t have made a difference. Definition updates like this are generally not considered part of the provisioned OS (since they change somewhere around hourly) and would go into /var or the like, which is mutable persistent state on nearly every otherwise immutable OS. Snapshots like Timeshift are more likely to help.