RayJW

I think Ghost might be the best option. They just launched their beta Fediverse integration a few days ago.

Better UX until you have to download or update a game… there is an open bug report where it just doesn't progress but keeps starting new processes until you‘re OOM. Still no fix in months, I've had to boot into Windows for every single update. Really not that good of an UX.

https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird

This was a little „write-up“ back when everything became more public.

I think the most common alternatives I see recommended are Mullvad and IVPN. Both have a great track record, but also both lack port forwarding if that is an essential feature for you.

I think at this point it should be pretty clear that Signal never had the goal of anonymity which is an orthogonal concept to privacy. While I would support sign-up without phone numbers, it doesn't address the same threat-model and there are many alternatives if anonymity is your goal.

But I want near-perfect privacy with usability, which Signal provides for me and all my contacts. Who cares if my government knows I use Signal, as long as they don't know who I talk to and what we talk about.

Edit: just saw your other response. What you want to achieve, is almost impossible. Even if Signal doesn't log who you talk to, like you assume, there are still methods to unmask this info. There are PoCs for things like timing attacks for notifications etc. which combined can narrow down the list of contacts significantly. But it seems like your threat-model doesn't align with Signal goals which means it's probably best for you to search an alternative instead of hating on Signal for not catering to your needs.

Are you using GE-Proton? I had this issue when not using the stock Proton. Try switching to Proton 9 and try again.

As you said, if PFS can be disabled by enabling a feature on the receiving end it's by security practices not enabled, in the industry that's called a downgrade attack and considered very bad practice.

The blog post you linked, is the publicly revised version after they were called out by well known cryptographers for their handling. This was their original response to the researchers, again after the researchers disclosed the vulnerabilities to them and actively helped designing the new protocol, not just giving inspiration. This was their initial tweet: „There’s a new paper on Threema’s old communication protocol. Apparently, today’s academia forces researchers and even students to hopelessly oversell their findings“ which is long deleted, but I did read it while it was still up back then. I can't find a screenshot or anything at the moment, so if you want to call me a liar, go ahead but if you search for that quote you will find many citations.

Also, they claimed „old protocol“ but Ibex was still months from being deployed widespread, so that's another big downplay.

You mention Signals Desktop app issue, Threema claimed the attacks were unrealistic because they require significant computing power or social engineering, both things that are definitely a risk if you're trying to protect yourself from bigger intelligence efforts. The issue with Signal Desktop however, required full file system access to your device at which point, there is nothing stopping the attacker from simply using a key logger, capturing your screen, etc.

This is why no big security researchers called out Signal but many shunned Threema. At the end I don't have a horse in the race for either of them, but I think those are facts people need when making a decision with their private information.

If you're seriously concerned about privacy and security I wouldn't look at Threema. They severely mishandled vulnerabilities by insulting the security researchers, then introduced a new protocol they built with the advice given to them for free from the SAME researchers before that, and yet it still doesn't support critical features like full forward secrecy. If all you want primarily is the best security out there Signal is and will be the best for a long time to come by the looks of it.

I'm not sure that Proton can fix your problem. However, I feel like this project would love your help with capturing the USB traffic to get it supported and hopefully upstreamed in the kernel some day :)

Well, with NTFS, there isn't. That's why I said, BTRFS is definitely the better choice for games. Never had issues with two shared drives in over two years now with WinBTRFS.

I've been using WinBTRFS for quite some time without issues. It seems a lot of people recommend NTFS. But be aware, if you plan on using it for things like games, NTFS will absolutely break at some point. It is not compatible with Proton and will break things like updates for Steam. It always has for me up until very recently. Valve also says the same about using NTFS for games. I'm not sure this can be fixed with the NTFS driver unless they do workarounds like renaming things automatically because some things Proton does are not compatible with the filesystem spec.