As an argument, it barely passes initial scrutiny suggesting the real reason is not that.

Odd? No, it's normal politician behaviour. Julia Klöckner herself got hacked because she is not aware of phishing. To distract from her incompetence, she urges to switch to Wire to implicitly blame Signal. It's obvious what's going on, but people have so little knowledge about digital communication and security that she will get away with it. Poor woman got hacked by insecure Signal, people will remember.

It's owned by an American no-prrofit with a dedicated subsidiary, so still a commercial product and (more relevant) usa-based with all the potential implications. Wire is for profit but german-swiss.

Are Wire, Signal, Telegram backed by mega corps though?

Beeper is owned by Automattic (of Wordpress fame). They’re a corp but I wouldn’t call them mega and they use matrix which is an open federated protocol.

You can run your own matrix server but tbh it’s easier for someone else to do it.

Not to mention the obvious advantages of their bridges into the closed networks of WhatsApp/fb/x/instagram etc

signal 100% has the best UX for non-technical users out of messengers i'd actually consider reasonably secure

the best on ux is probably telegram, but i'm trying to move a few people off it anyway

I have 70+ year old relatives who use Signal. It works quite nice. Similar to whatsapp.

the ones most of your contacts use, what's the point finding perfect messenger if nobody you know use it and you must move people over there and anyway keep installed other app for most of the contacts?

here you have chart comparison

https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html

and alternative

https://www.securemessagingapps.com

personally I like Element (Matrix) and Threema

It is a grey zone. Some of the data protection authorities in EU have said that it's okay to do pay or consent while others have said it's not okay and it hasn't been tested by the EU court yet.

It’s called “pay or okay” and condemned by noyb: https://noyb.eu/en/noybs-pay-or-okay-report-how-companies-ma...

But actual enforcement of GDPR has always been shoddy. First the “legitimate use” loophole, now this.

It’s a bit ironic that heise does this, since they probably have one of the most sensitive readerships to this.

Europe wants to use European infrastructure. Reasons given are politeness.

Kumbaya?

Good idea, let's all live in peace and harmony. (But first we need to sanction and regime change all the bad countries.)

The problem though is, using undocummented communication channels on private phones by people not technically inclined. That Signal is an american company and subject to NSA scrutiny while the users a politicians of a foreign goverment only makes this worse.

So, national messengers, controlled by experts, that archive communication and run on trusted hardware, would be the best solution for the work of democratic goverments I would think.

Of course, the possibility of software quality and security experts in service of the goverment is probably just wishful thinking.

  > first job out of college 7 years ago
  > Amazing to see it's still going strong

Yup, sounds like a government project...

What was the media for updates? Send them a CD or a flashdisk and they plug it in? I assume the PVC backing etc they handle on their own?