Kay Ohtie

The straights are not okay

Mine ended 6 months after cold turkey on Zoloft. Doctors just… Didn’t know at all, when it happened.

I was thinking I still get them from time to time but in writing this post I realized I only get shivers, not the full zap.

I used to joke that the CEO of my former employer must subscribe to some magazine called “CEO Weekly” in which they must periodically mention, in a similar “no examples of usage, just KPIs” manner, webchat. She would always forget about it promptly and then random number of weeks later bug my boss again.

I told him if they want me to come up with how they can use webchat and be their solutions designer they need to double my salary. $60k USD was not enough for being a tier 3 systems admin, a fax and telephony specialist, and figuring out their use cases for them just to check a box that says “we have it!”

Signal have published several times when they receive a request for data and their response.

Due to the mechanisms they employ, all they can actually give is if there’s an account associated with a phone number and the last time it logged in, if even that last bit. There’s some fairly detailed articles diving into how this works so well under the hood from a cryptographic standpoint, but it basically amounts to even addresses of users being able to be secret to minimize shared metadata to a bare minimum.

Also the software is entirely open-source – app and server both – and are frequently audited on this. The server never has an opportunity to receive any plain-text data to store.

The weak spot is always just having access to your device.

I really can never tell if this was an actual plan with value or a case of “emperor’s new clothes” where it was just a random thing suggested or said once that Trump remembers and regurgitates every so often again.

I don’t even know if that’s a distinction with a difference or not anymore.