No.

There’s a lot of answers itt but heres a simpler one:

If you want to prevent people in power from having access to communications there are two methods employed, broadly speaking:

The first is to make a very secure, zero knowledge, zero trust, zero log system so that when the authorities come calling you can show them your empty hands and smirk.

Signal doesn’t actually do this, but they’re closer to this model than the second one I’m about to describe. Bear in mind they’re a us company so when the us authorities come to their door or authorities from some nation the us has a treaty with come to their door signal is legally required to comply and provide all the information they have.

The second is to simply not talk to the authorities. Telegram was closer to this model than signal, using a bunch of different servers in nations with wildly different extradition and information sharing mechanisms in order to make forcing them to comply with some order Byzantine to the point of not being worth it.

Eventually the powers that be got their shit together and put hands on telegrams owner so now they’re complying with all lawful orders and a comparison of the tech is how you’d pick one.

The technology behind the two doesn’t matter really but default telegram is less “secure” than default imessage (I was talking with someone about it so it’s on the old noggin’).

It’s just as well, rcs in America only has guarantees of features if you’re on the same servers as the other people, so there’s a big split between the Samsung and google rcses with all kinds of weird mixed media stuff if you’re both on gchat or the Samsung fork and nothing but maybe higher resolution pictures if you’re not.

It’s part of why I’m so willing to recommend imessage because for better or worse in America it’s the defacto standard.

Yeah and even if you’re on an ios with rcs plenty of old android devices just scale the videos down to postage stamp size anyway by default so you get bad looking pictures no matter what.

Yeah per text charges are really uncommon in the anglosphere, although the pay as you go carriers and plans have data limits.

If you’re on contract or renewing contract with an American carrier they’ll usually take literally any phone you have in trade for their lowest cost ios or android device, your choice. I took them up on it several years ago because the gimmie device was the only physically small iphone at the time. Sometimes it adds a couple of bucks to your monthly bill if you pick one with a little more storage or whatever but that amounts to them selling you the phone for fifty bucks or so over two years.

Hell, usually if you’re signing up for a new account they’ll offer some android and ios phones for free to get you on contract.

Half of each person is getting them to use encrypted chat with you one on one and half is getting the group chats to use it. If you can knock out half the battle most of the time then you should do it.

In my experience ios and android users are equally open/resistant to using some new thing.

I recognize that for a particular type of threat model or ideology all proprietary software amounts to the same level of vulnerability. The op only asked about encrypted chat. The implication that I picked up on and responded to was that the op is in America or concerned about American cell network compromises and wanted to address that.

That’s a real simple threat to get past, just go to whatever is encrypted that the most people use.

Most people use imessage, so that’s what I suggested.

It seems like I’m not being clear. The goal is to get 100% on to encrypted chat.

Right now in America, about sixty percent of the phones are running ios. ios has imessage by default. The application which those people use to do imessage is called messages (very unconfusing!) and also does texts. When you’re using imessage in messages the text bubbles are blue, rcs and sms are green. Imessage is an encrypted chat.

If a person running android wants to use imessage they need to bridge it to their phone from a mac (messages and imessage are available on mac) using the bluebubbles application.

So three out of five of the people you know are already using encrypted chat. If you, the op, can get on their level then you only have to convince the other two to use some other chat thing that they can do. Maybe signal or something.

So the cost of running a mac computer as a bridge so you can use imessage through the bluebubbles android app is for you, the op, to get on the encrypted chat application those three out of five people are already on. You’d still need to use xmpp or something for everyone else but now you only need to worry about two out of five people.

I’m pretty poor and a hundred bucks isn’t a terrible price to pay for being sixty percent there. If I could have done that with pgp back in the day (when a hundred bucks was worth something!) I would have jumped at the chance.

Just avoiding having to explain to people that email was transmitted in plaintext and what that meant and not either have to talk them down from taking a pickaxe to their computer or convince them that it doesn’t matter that they have nothing to hide would have been worth it back then.

It’s also a completely hypothetical cost that assumes you don’t just stumble into an old mac and won’t trade your phone in for one running ios to save that cash.

As I said, use signal for everything else.

If immediately getting sixty percent of your chats encrypted isn’t worth a hundred bucks to you I don’t know what to say. We’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m trying to meet a goal to solve a problem and you’re trying to find the fair solution.

It’s good to try to find the fair solution.

If you’re in america almost sixty percent of phones are ios.

If you’re choosing an encrypted chat and sixty percent of people are already using it then that’s the one you choose. The hardest thing is compliance and you’re almost two thirds of the way there if you just pay a hundred bucks (or scrounge up an old mac) and run the bridge app. Then you use signal for everything else.

I think we’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m not worried about a universal solution because I know I’m not getting to 100% compliance with any solution so I suggested the one that immediately fixes the majority of the problem. Having had to convince people to exchange pgp keys twenty five years ago, I’d pay a hundred bucks to not have to deal with that for two thirds of the people I know.

Think about it this way: if you were starting from scratch would you rather have to convince all your contacts to move their chats with you to signal or matrix or whatever or would you rather have to convince four out of ten to do that?

Obviously you’d pick the easier thing because no matter how committed you may be to not using proprietary software or big corporate apps or fragmented ecosystems you actually have to accomplish the goal of chatting with people using encryption and all the process compliance and wheedling and convincing and tech support for family members is time you could be spending talking about gardening, sharing baby pictures, plotting to overthrow the government or whatever you would normally be doing.

The barrier to entry was intended to refer to others since it’s already installed on over half their phones to start with and most people are gonna be using a messaging program on their phone.

When there’s above a 50% chance the person you’re talking to is already using a particular encrypted messaging program that’s the lowest barrier to entry.

The barrier to entry always refers to other people because the hardest part of establishing private communications has always been convincing other people to actually do it.

If you really wanted to get on imessage for the least amount of cash out of pocket possible, the bluebubble bridge application random letters person mentioned is ~$100 for an old mac, and tbh that’s a high estimate in my experience. People are just giving those things away nowadays.

That’s awesome! I didn’t know there was an option for android users.

People will dislike this:

The most basic one with little barrier to entry is imessage. Theres a good chance your friends and family already have it and with a few setting changes (no sms fallback, set icloud recovery key, probably some stuff I forgot) you’re damn near at parity with signal.

All without dad having to download a new app onto his phone and make a new identity!

Of course you’ll need signal or something for people who don’t use it.

I use that combination and it’s excellent. If you can be on imessage with someone you’re good and everything works, if not you do signal.

There will be people you gotta use sms with. They just won’t be able or willing to do something new. Sometimes there’s an equipment problem, their super old provider version of android can’t get an app you both agree on. Sometimes they’re using a Nokia.

Interacting with sms often may help keep you on your toes about it. I know I’m more careful over text now.

That combination, imessage and signal, also has a benefit of reducing the chances that you’ll broadcast an awareness of and desire for privacy and security to the whole world all the time.

In the us, there’s a 50% chance you just look like a normal person and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Make sure it meets your needs of course

As of the time I’m writing this comment literally none of the suggestions made actually matter for the ambiguous goal of “general security and privacy” more than building in a neighborhood or community that meets the occupants desires.

Pick a place with people you want to be around who you trust to look out for you.

Hexbear was right about downvotes.

We eat fewer eggs.

That seems like nothing but eggs are an insanely cheap and fast way to get a decent meal quickly in the morning or to beef up, pun intended, a bowl of grits or oatmeal or something.

When we run out of eggs we don’t just not eat, we may make something that’s less filling or healthy or may spend more on breakfast because there just isn’t time to make breakfast and the only time permissive option is to pay 8-13 dollars for fast food on the way to work or eat peanuts and coke from a gas station.

So the egg price has knock on effects for us that are pretty big.

I’m gonna spend a little time and express something that isn’t being said in the comments:

people’s purchases don’t exist in a vacuum and the meaning of the price of an inexpensive source of protein like eggs nearly doubling in the span of a year or two isn’t just that it costs more.

Often, people shop. That sounds like a stupid thing to say, but the effect of the piggly wiggly implementing barcode scanners is impossible to deny. Shopping is where you go into a store with some goal, like a list, and some budget like the actual cash you have in your possession and try to make those two things match up.

If you’re like me you grew up going on these excursions maybe once a week or more with your parents and understood innately that if you can get something in the cart early, maybe pudding cups or that peanut butter with the chocolate mixed into it, there’s better chance of you enjoying that treat than if you wait till the end.

As adults you probably recognize that it’s because as a person progresses through the store they’re keeping a tally (my grandmother used a literal calculator) of how much of their budget they’ve run through. It’s a toss up weather they’ll be under enough to afford a very cost ineffective piece of candy from the shelf next to the checkout counter so getting that treat in the cart early means the person shopping has the chance to make little adjustments to make up for its price. I never understood the relationship between relatively expensive sugar added peanut butter and the type of green beans we ate that week but that’s one way it manifested. Cut versus French cut was a price difference and we’d eat the cheaper one to make up for some dalliance in the previous isles.

Eggs are in the dairy cooler section. Most stores have these all in one place at first because it was cheaper to run the wiring for them and then because of food safety practices and finally nowadays because everyone expects it. For reasons I’m not sure of, people tend to hit those isles last. It might be to get cold stuff in the cart last so those items don’t warm up in the store as long.

When you’re at the end of your trip to the store, on the last isle, trying to fit the list to your cash, the price of eggs is what determines your choices. If you put back that box of pop tarts you can get two dozen eggs and a loaf of bread. That’s breakfast for a family of four for a week in a pinch. If you swap the stoufers lasagna for a six pack of ramen noodles, a can of beans and some eggs you have a cheaper dinner for four plus some left over.

If you want to have nicer things to eat and can’t afford to buy them but do have plenty of time, eggs are an ingredient that’s hard to replace in baking. There are substitutes but they’re sometimes more expensive and involve being able to learn a new recipe or do some experimenting which just isn’t in the cards for plenty of people. If eggs cost more it means less brownies, cakes, noodles and a bunch of other stuff because suddenly the recipe costs more.

Eggs are the gateway to making your grocery trip work for a lot of people and so when you might not know the price of that can of beans off the top of your head, you absolutely know what eggs cost and make adjustments accordingly. Maybe you buy lower grade eggs like “a” instead of “aa” or you buy more eggs and less meat.

The price of eggs is the backstop to being poor and healthy while maintaining whatever position on the 5d chessboard of equipment, time, money, calories and experience that you occupy or want to be in.

A lot of the posts and comments I’ve seen that specifically reference eggs have a sneering tone or are either denying the price changes or downplaying their effect. I personally think that expressing such sentiments makes you at best inexperienced and ignorant and at worst a bad person, but opinion aside, those kinds of sentiments aren’t helping anyone to understand who you are unless you just want to be seen as an out of touch elite.

To go a little further, the price of eggs is an undeniable metric that shows wages haven’t risen with inflation+cpi+externalities. It means there’s a problem in a way that can’t be denied or misdirected from.

If eggs were 50-100% more expensive and wages had risen across the board by that same 50-100% then no one would be complaining except old timers in the rocking chairs in front of the gas station.

That’s not what’s happening and now the things that let poor people keep living and not quite poor people buy all their groceries are 50-100% more expensive. If that isn’t alarming to you it should be.

What specific data?

You can’t keep information you put on their platform or your habits of use on that platform “safe” from it.

What would make you unsafe? What data do you want to keep away from Facebook?

Some food for thought:

Absence of information is its own sort of information. You may find it worthwhile in your search for an acceptable compromise to place some kind of value on “looking normal”.

That will* work.

*actually figure out what you’re trying to maintain privacy from and set up your icloud account appropriately.

So go ahead and take a look at your journalctl output. The left hand side should be timestamps, so you can immediately figure out if it’s starting a million years in the past or sometime you know you had the problem.

If it is a million years in the past, use the —since flag and specify the time you want to start at as enumerated in the manual file (man journalctl).

Once you’re looking at the logs in journalctl from a day you know the problem happened, go ahead and use arrow keys and pgup/pgdn to find a reboot. You’ll know when you find a reboot because it’ll look different. The messages will be about figuring out what hardware is attached and changing runlevels and whatnot.

Once you found where the reboot is, go backwards to find something weird happening in the logs.

E: By default the parser (program used to handle text) of journalctls output is “less”. If you want to get out of it, press “q”, and if you want to know more “man less”.

I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with you, my comment was intended to add the context that might help English readers understand how the natural conclusion they would reach after learning that the app name directly translates to “little red book” isn’t necessarily true.

For me, as an American English speaker the natural conclusion would be that it’s an application designed by maoists in order to discuss Maoism when it’s actually designed for integrated ecommerce.