Right, I just use the term sometimes to say hiding things, even if it’s hidden via encrypting it.

Will have to delve into the papers for simplex later here, but in the end there needs to be some type of known identity to pin a communication to, otherwise you’ve already breached the confidentiality point of the security triad by not authenticating the recipient.

I would say no criminal uses public services to do their business, but then there was the whole Signal thing at the DOD…

It depends on how many layers of obfuscation you are looking to deal with. There always needs to be some publicly shared token to initiate a connection, even if that’s only the public key of a asymmetric key pair to a 3rd party auth system.

There are ways to do it, but part of the difficulty is there are so many ways to do it that coming to an agreed method is like herding cats.

Which means encrypted messaging without a backdoor would be illegal if this passes! That’s a slippery slope!

Metadata is not content, so no E2E would not be illegal. Metadata is things like who sent messages to who at what time, duration, volume of data, other externally parsable metrics like that.

It’s interesting that this is kicking up some controversy. Personally I’ve held similar thoughts since the time of AOL, that once it leaves your system it’s no longer in your control. You can ask people to delete it, and maybe they did, or maybe they deleted the one copy but not the cache version, or maybe just didn’t and lied about it. I’ve actually accidentally found stuff I thought was long lost when I decided to just mess around with some data recovery tools and pulled a bunch of pictures back from a drive I didn’t remember them ever being on.

One of my kids I saw take a picture of a snapchat with another phone. Asked what they where doing and it was explained that if you do a regular screenshot it notified the other person, so this was how they kept a copy secretly. So with that in mind, you never know who has copies of what that was posted.

Yeah, it could be meterage I guess, not sure if the non murica-verse uses a similar expression.

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/acer-spin-1-sp111-32n-c2x3

Specifically it’s one of these, or at least in the nearby product line. A mere 32GB of storage and 4 GB RAM so you can get away with some pretty lean specs. Used the XFCE version if I recall. Basically just give it a try and there’s a good chance it works

I have Mint on an old Acer 2 in 1 that is barely capable or installing Windows just for the size, so it’s possible but of course YMMV.