I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
LATEST: 🇺🇸 The White House says Trump is "unequivocal" that "Congress must pass the CLARITY Act so we can stay ahead of foreign competitors and lead the world in innovation."
🇨🇦 Canada spent years renaming streets, squares, universities, buildings and removing statues in the name of “reconciliation” and “reconsidering history.”
Yonge-Dundas Square → Sankofa Square.
Ryerson University → Toronto Metropolitan University.
Amherst Street → Rue Atateken.
Cornwallis Street → Nora Bernard Street.
Langevin Block → Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council.
Sir John A. Macdonald statues removed in Victoria, Regina, Kingston and Charlottetown.
Schools, parks and public buildings renamed across the country.
Then Trump renames Lake Ontario and suddenly Canada discovers:
“YOU CAN’T JUST ERASE HISTORY!”
Oh, NOW names matter? 😂🇨🇦
Apparently Canadian history is endlessly negotiable…
until an American picks up the Sharpie. 🇺🇸
Very welcome recent news from Signal: they are working on letting you register an account without a phone number.
https://t.co/3dTG4UD6cF
That said, an important counterpoint about what this would and would not accomplish.
The good #1: reducing dependence on phone numbers. Even aside from privacy benefits, reducing dependency on a highly oligopolistic system of chokepoints is good in itself.
The good #2: phone numbers are for many people not a good "root" of identity from an access control perspective. Phone numbers get sim swapped all the time.
The good #3: allowing phone-number-free accounts will make it harder for them in the future to discriminate against people by country - and so make it harder for governments to pressure them to block their own citizens.
Now, on privacy. Significantly better than status quo, so yes it is good #4, but...
In practice, in 2026, I believe that pseudonymity (a long-term persistent account that is not tied to your primary identity) is a dead concept. There are just too many channels by which we accidentally slowly leak data about who we are - timing of messages, the pattern of who we send messages to with what frequency, size, etc. And too many highly effective AI-based means (both using LLMs per-user, and LLMs helping every person and agency under the sun use math that we had all along) to uncover and piece together those hints.
As a trivial example, whatever server you interact with learns your IP address, but even if you hide *that* with a VPN or Tor, there are many other identity leakage vectors.
And so the only defensible form of privacy is *message-by-message unlinkability* - no one except sender and receiver knows the (sender, receiver) pair, ideally even not knowing who the sender or the receiver are.
A natural taxonomy of privacy is the following 2x2:
* Sitting duck: adversary knows "X did Y"
* Confidentiality: adversary knows "X did ???" [E2E encryption provides this]
* Anonymity: adversary knows "??? did Y" [aka message-by-message unlinkability]
* Ideal: adversary knows "??? did ???"
Signal has already had confidentiality for a long time. (Note: in other contexts, "confidentiality" sometimes means "someone knows X did Y, and we trust that someone to not reveal it", ie. not true privacy. Here, by confidentiality we mean hiding contents from third parties)
This adds pseudonymity: in the above schema, adversary knows "0x8b512c... did Y", where they don't initially know who 0x8b512c... is, but may figure that out over time. The ideal is getting to message-by-message unlinkability.
Actually accomplishing that gets into territory that is currently being explored by mixnet projects as well as newer messengers, eg. @session_app and @SimpleXChat.
Once we get deeper into this territory, I suspect the primary frontier will be spam and DoS protection. Right now, much of the internet blocks all Tor exit nodes - not because they personally hate privacy, but because that's where DoS attacks come from. So we need ways for people to prove their non-spammer status while maintaining message-by-message unlinkability. See here https://t.co/C3tX5tOYJo for one direction (which complements https://t.co/1Q2Hqg0DZg nicely).
So I hope that we appreciate the victory that is mainstreaming of end-to-end encryption, that we actually get Signal accounts without phone number dependency (it's a great thing even if it had zero privacy consequences), and then that we keep moving forward and pushing the frontier of data leakage minimization.