My Experience with Signal

NOTE: I’m going to be talking about a cross-platform privacy app in the following post. I have very strong feelings related to government and ISP/Telecom surveillance, however that topic is far too large to address in this post (maybe some time in the future?). As will soon be obvious, I believe that privacy is a personal right but that protecting it is your responsibility and should be taken seriously.

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I’ve always had a certain interest in security, privacy, and encryption. Sadly, my brain doesn’t work in such a way that allows me to get involved in the intricacies of actual security development, so instead I sit on the sidelines and watch with bated breath for each new development in this grand international chess game of laws and hacks (or real life version of Person of Interest).

The 100

I am almost certainly late to the game here, but over Thanksgiving weekend I discovered the CW’s The 100 thanks to Netflix. I don’t wanna say, but I may or may not have binge watched the entire first season over the last few days (I did, but in fairness it was only 13 episodes).

I genuinely did not expect to like this show. I thought it would have poor production value and from the couple of trailers I saw I was expecting bad CG dinosaurs and a Good camp of teenage refugees doing battle against a Bad camp; where the Goodies were all good and the Baddies were all bad.

No such worry.

Not a dino to be seen (yet at least). All the Goodies have to make real life decisions which have them compromising their principles when they have to in order to survive or for the good of the camp. The Baddies are not bad, they are just doing what they think they have to, again in order to survive (with just a couple of exceptions, which were thankfully quickly sidelined).

Best of all? No character is safe. They have killed off SO. MANY. PEOPLE. Not that I’m blood thirsty, but this is a show called The 100, so you kind of expect there to be 100 kids (all under 18) to still be there at the end of each episode. Noooope. Not even close. And not redshirts either. Goldshirts are not safe at all.

This is good stuff, and I highly recommend it!