And that is what I would recommend against, even on a server that does not ban that age. If someone’s (young) age is relevant to a discussion they wish to participate in, I would suggest a throwaway account.

How were they revealed?

Why do you care?

If it’s just about following the rules as a matter of principle, I suggest not doing that. Nobody is checking, and saying your exact age on public social media is oversharing anyway.

If it’s about content moderation being strict enough to satisfy some comfort level, I wouldn’t rely on that, but I also think 13 is old enough to start learning there are shitty people online and how to deal with them, preferably with some adult support.

When Microsoft first proposed something like that a couple decades ago, it was widely seen as the nightmarish corporate power grab it was. Even mainstream, non-techy publications were critical.

I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.

It is.

How the fuck did this become acceptable?

I never said anything to that effect. The ancestor comment discussed running Signal for Android inside an Android emulator for account creation, after which it could be linked to Signal desktop.

Someone could presumably fork Signal desktop to allow the scenario you’re describing, but I’m not aware of any such efforts.

I imagine search of server backups would be pretty hard to do securely. Better management of locally stored media would be nice, but you can sort by size, export, and delete media from inside the settings.

If anyone is actually going to get that right in a mainstream product, it will probably be Signal.

A phone number that can receive SMS is required, but it doesn’t have to be associated with the device that’s running Signal last I checked.

It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.

I never set auto expiry and often search messages. Sometimes it’s because I want to find a specific fact or datum from two years ago; other times it’s just for a reminder of a memory. On occasion, if the history wasn’t there, people might remember something important differently.

There seem to be two main arguments put forth here:

1. F-Droid does not thoroughly audit the apps it distributes, so they might include bad behavior that is not initially obvious.
2. It is theoretically possible to provide a package to F-Droid that does not match the source code it claims to be based on.

To which I respond:

1. No app store thoroughly audits the apps they distribute. You must ultimately decide if you trust the developer enough to run their app, or audit the code and build it yourself.
2. This creates a theoretical opportunity for a developer or maintainer to upload a package that doesn’t match its purported source code, but it’s possible to check for this manually, and to automate that process. It’s likely anyone exploiting this would be caught and their reputation tarnished. It comes back to the first point: do you trust the developer or maintainer enough to run their app?

If you have average security needs, you probably don’t need to worry about this. If you have reason to believe someone well-resourced and dangerous wants to compromise your phone, you should probably be extremely selective about what apps you install and where you get them.

I agree it’s not possible with an uncooperative/adversarial recipient, but it’s very possible that the recipient is cooperative, but too passive to reliably follow an instruction like “delete after reading”.

It may be reasonable to use technical means to protect certain messages against the possibility that the recipient’s computer or mail provider will be stolen or compromised in the future. Email isn’t a great tool for this.

Certainty of punishment is much more likely to help here than severity. Severe punishments are even likely to lead to an increase in police enforcing it selectively, not citing or arresting people they decide don’t deserve it.

So you want to abolish time zones

That’s a little less surprising to me. Organizations are likely to pick competing communication software if Teams is not available to everyone. Web browsers are generally interoperable after Microsoft lost the war to popularize one that wasn’t.

I’m pretty neutral about the mere existence of software I’m not interested in using.

Microsoft Edge was a recent surprise. It’s surprising both that Microsoft would create it and that any Linux users would run it. Since its Chromium based, there should be no need for developers to test Edge separately.

It’s interesting the number of comments about parenting advice as opposed to technology suggestion.

Was this unexpected? It has been my experience online that people are more likely to tell you what they think you need to hear than what you asked for.

There’s a hardware device with a companion app that can do charge limiting for any Android or iOS device if you’re so inclined. I haven’t used it; I use ACCA.

They’re all essentially adults now, so we don’t enforce it anymore, but they sometimes still do it anyway.

I know adults old enough they didn’t grow up with smartphones who exclude devices from their bedrooms by choice to have a healthier relationship with technology.