Signal

If you want to protect your conversations as much as possible, you should ideally avoid saving your chat histories in the cloud and use applications that don't collect metadata or rely on your phone number.

One example is Signal, which you may remember we ran an episode on a while back.

In short, balancing cybersecurity and privacy remains a challenge for now.

There you have it.

President Trump has now officially named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the permanent National Security Advisor, the first person to hold both titles since Henry Kissinger.

Rubio had been serving the role in an acting capacity after the former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz left last year, following the Signalgate scandal in which administration officials used the unclassified Signal messaging app to discuss secret military strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

An asylum seeker from Venezuela who was shot by ICE agents in Austin Sunday will not be deported yet.

An attorney for Wilbert Garces Perez has been trying to prevent him from being sent back to Venezuela.

President Trump has now officially named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the permanent National Security Advisor, the first person to hold both titles since Henry Kissinger.

Rubio had been serving the role in an acting capacity after the former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz left last year, following the Signalgate scandal in which administration officials used the unclassified Signal messaging app to discuss secret military strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

An asylum seeker from Venezuela who was shot by ICE agents in Austin Sunday will not be deported yet.

An attorney for Wilbert Garces Perez has been trying to prevent him from being sent back to Venezuela.

And finally, not strictly Bitcoin, but I thought it was pertinent to a lot of people that do listen to this.

As of the latest beta release for Signal Android, you can now register without a phone number by paying a one-time fee of about $3 to presumably to the Signal Foundation.

And yes, this is one of the kind of main things that gets leveled at Signal is that you need a phone number to set up.

Well, now you don't have to if you pay a one-time $3 fee.

Signal say that the payment uses the same zero-knowledge proof as its donation system.

So the purchase is not linked to your new account because obviously if you're paying with your bank card, then if there is no zero-knowledge proof there, then...

It would be trivial to link those two.

So it's like, we know that you have an account.

Which is more defensible than it sounds, and it's defensible precisely because app user data backup is a disaster area.

Signal won't let you export its database.

It's a deliberate design decision, and I understand the reasoning, but it means your Signal history lives and dies with the device.

WhatsApp only restores at first-time startup, so if you've already set the phone up, you've missed the window.

The window closes, and there's no reopening it.

Of course, we learned of that.

We learned of their deliberations because of the Atlantic and the Signal Chat logs that they published.

But then more recently, at first he told his advisers no.

He spoke to MBS.